By the census of 2010, Latinos had surpassed 16.3% of the US population, or 50.5 million Americans. Significantly for political scientists, this Hispanic population now includes nearly 20 million eligible voters. Widely dispersed across the states, the Democratic-leaning Latino electorate sits strategically located in tightly balanced areas such as Colorado, Nevada, Montana, Nebraska, and Missouri—in addition to its traditional strongholds in the largest states—California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Illinois. Given this political reality, the relative scarcity of books about Latino politics has become a critical problem for political science. The significance of new Latino politics books arises to some extent from their relative scarcity, with fewer than 60 titles since 1970, compared to more than 8,000 titles for American politics more broadly. In Campaigning to the New American Electorate, Marisa A. Abrajano extends this research in a new direction, with a detailed analysis of political advertising to Latino voters.

Abrajano hypothesizes that the content of Spanish- and English-language ads differs because candidates have preconceptions about Latino voters' familiarity with politics and their susceptibility to group-based (i.e., ethnic) appeals. To test this hypothesis, she conducted a content analysis of TV advertising to Latino voters. Data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project allowed the author to identify campaigns in which at least one candidate broadcast a Spanish-language commercial, yielding a selective data set of 301 Spanish-language ads (broadcast 40,726 times) and 10,820 more in English (aired more than 1.46 million times), produced by presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial campaigns in 2000, 2002, and 2004. Briefly, her analysis found that compared to English-language ads, Spanish-language commercials were more likely to offer simple candidate introductions, feature at least one Latino in the ad, or reference Latino ethnic identity—but generally provided significantly less policy content than English-language advertising. In the presidential commercials, for example, nearly twice the percentage of English-language ads featured complex policy messages, as compared to the Spanish-language commercials.

To explain these advertising choices by candidates, Abrajano employed multivariate regressions (probit) to calculate the relative influence of candidate partisanship and ideology, as well as characteristics specific to their constituents. In the first model, candidate decisions regarding policy content were classified into four categories of policy complexity: complex policy statement, explained policy statement, simple policy statement, or candidate character/Latino affinity. A second model considered candidate decisions to specifically target ethnic and racial minorities. In this model, dependent variables included whether or not the ad was in Spanish, depicted a Latino individual, depicted an African American, and depicted an Asian American. Each model incorporated variables for Abrajano's own theory of information-based advertising and for alternative explanations, including district competitiveness, ideological distance of the candidate from median voter, district demographics, South/non-South region, and candidate partisanship. For the author's information-based advertising theory, familiarity with and knowledge of politics was estimated by the percentage of individuals in the district with a high school degree.

Abrajano's findings were consistent with expectations. For the policy-content model, congressional candidates in districts with an educated as well as sizable Latino population were more likely to advertise explained policy and complex policy messages in Spanish, de-emphasizing simple policy and character-based appeals. Overall, however, Spanish-speakers were exposed to more nonpolicy appeals than English speakers, “because candidates perceive that the Spanish-speaking community will be receptive to messages that refer to their immigrant background or to candidates' characters” (p. 82). Similarly, candidates at greater ideological distance from their median voters were more likely to broadcast policy appeals that were simple and had a normative focus, in order not to jeopardize support among (Latino) voters who may disagree with their policy views. Still, the impact of ideological distance remained less important in advertising decisions than the size of the target Latino population, as well as its level of political knowledge. For the ethnic and racial targeting model, candidate advertising choices were significantly correlated with the size of the Latino population—including the choice to feature African American and Asian American faces in the ad. While ideological composition, partisanship, and electoral competitiveness also shaped candidate propensity to utilize ads targeting minority voters, Abrajano found that these were less important than the primary factor, the ethnoracial composition of the constituency.

The final aspect of Abrajano's analysis was to consider whether this strategic targeting actually had an impact on Latino political behavior. Were Latino voters swayed by political advertising in Spanish? Were effects stronger for policy-rich or policy-poor appeals? Did different groups of Latino voters respond differently? It is in this aspect of the book that Abrajano makes the greatest theoretical contribution. In fact, she found, different political ads influenced Latino vote choice in different ways, and the primary determinant of the ads that were influential, and in what manner, appeared to be the degree to which Latino viewers were incorporated into American life. For Spanish-dominant (i.e., less fully acculturated) Latinos, political ads that tapped into ethnic identity seemed to be the most influential. For more fully incorporated Latinos, ethnic appeals did have some influence, but exposure to more informative policy ads, in English or Spanish, had a greater impact on these voters' decisions to vote and their choices of candidates. Over time, Abrajano suggests, this may mean that an increasingly acculturated Latino electorate will shift from evaluating candidates on the basis of cultural familiarity to closer analysis of policy positions and issue beliefs.

Like other recent work in the field (at least seven new Latino politics titles were published in 2010), Abrajano's book helps move discussion of America's fastest growing political community in a deeply theoretical direction, fully grounded in empirical evidence, while preserving the richly textured story of Latinos in politics. The author confirms fundamental points made by nearly all such work: Latino voters constitute a complex and dynamic new participant in American politics, and many of the conventional perspectives on minority political behavior, drawn largely from the African American experience, may not be particularly relevant. Yet, Abrajano reminds us, issue-poor, ethnicity-rich advertising strategies directed at Latinos are consistent with the long history of targeted ethnic campaigning in the United States. New marketing and communication technologies, combined with the widespread availability of Spanish-language television outlets, have made it possible to modernize this policy-barren tradition and apply it to the nation's newest and largest immigrant and minority electorate. Campaigning to the New American Electorate is an impressive first entry in what will surely become a staple subfield in Latino political studies, as more scholars employ sophisticated data analysis to assess the impact of candidate advertising strategies on the behavior of the Latino electorate.