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This study investigates the direction and extent to which religious belonging and regular church attendance are related to distinct political preferences among U.S. Latinos. The key question is whether Latino churchgoers are more committed than infrequent attenders to liberal policy views and the Democratic Party, or whether Latino religious commitments are related to conservative policy views and Republican Party support. Findings indicate that Latino Protestants are more likely to hold conservative views, while Latino Catholics—the vast majority of religious Latinos—are more likely to hold liberal views, or show no political differences, if they attend church regularly.

The rise of micro-targeting in American elections raises new questions about the effects of identity-based mobilization strategies. In this article, we bring together theories of expressive voting with literature on racial and ethnic identification to argue that prior studies, which have found either weak or null effects of identity messages targeting minority groups, have missed a crucial moderating variable—identity strength—that varies across both individuals and communities. Identity appeals can have powerful effects on turnout, but only when they target politicized identities to which individuals hold strong prior attachments. Using two innovative GOTV field experiments that rely on publicly available data as a proxy for identity strength, we show that the effects of both ethnic and national identity appeals among Latinos in California and Texas are conditional on the strength of those identities in different communities and among different Latino subgroups.

One of the central questions surrounding the 2008 presidential election is the role of race in shaping electoral choice among non‐Hispanic whites, and whether race played an equivalent role among Hispanics, whose willingness to vote for an African American candidate was raised as an uncertainty during the primary campaign. The authors argue that, beyond the usual association of racial sentiment with party preference, the effect of Obama's race on the 2008 election is significant, but substantially smaller among Latinos than among non‐Hispanic whites. Although Latino voters often express racial sentiments that are indistinguishable from whites, there was a significant disconnect between those racial sentiments and Latinos' vote choice and evaluations of candidate Obama. The authors explore the explanatory power of explicit, indirect, and implicit measures of racial sentiment and find that an indirect measurement—the Racial Resentment Index—retains the greatest predictive validity, notwithstanding its conceptual challenges.

How do perceptions of local immigrant populations influence immigration policy views? Building on findings that Americans may not accurately perceive population dynamics, we argue that objective measures do not fully capture the effects of local context on public opinion. Our research uses novel subjective experimental reminders about current levels of and recent changes in local immigrant populations to explore how these perceptions impact immigration policy views. In a survey experiment, we asked 2,400 Americans to consider current levels of or recent changes in their local immigrant population. Asking subjects to consider current levels of local immigrant populations modestly increases support for pro-immigrant policies, with particularly strong effects among non-White and Republicans. These effects may be driven by positive perceptions of immigrants and have implications for understanding the role of local community frames in shaping public opinion about immigration, particularly for groups who do not typically support permissive immigration policies.

Despite a sizable literature on racial priming, scholars have failed to account for the shifting nature of racial appeals. First, theories of racial priming have not yet been widely applied to increasingly common anti‐immigrant and anti‐Latino political appeals. Second, theories of racial priming have not adequately accounted for both an increasingly racialized political climate and increased tolerance for explicit anti‐minority appeals. In two survey experiments fielded both before Trump's rise and after his presidential victory, we find the Implicit‐Explicit (IE) model always fails for anti‐black appeals, sometimes fails for anti‐immigrant appeals, but consistently holds for anti‐Latino appeals. While we find the null effects of implicit versus explicit anti‐black and anti‐immigrant appeals are partly driven by tolerance for the explicit appeals, we also find evidence that white Americans are adept at recognizing the racial content of appeals featuring widely used, congruent issue‐group pairs. Our findings shed light on conditions under which the IE model does and does not hold in the current political era.