Minorities Were Key Predictor of 2012 Vote in New Mexico

ity (population) in any given county,” Sanderoff said.

“If you eyeball it, in the counties that are 80 percent minority, Obama is getting 70 to 80 percent of the vote. In counties that are 30 percent minority, Obama is getting 30 percent of the vote. How much stronger can you get?”

The data illustrate Republican Mitt Romney’s struggle to compete in the presidential election while losing a majority of minority voters both nationally and in New Mexico. Obama went on to win the New Mexico vote by about 10 percentage points over Romney and the national popular vote by about 4 points.

University of New Mexico political science professor Gabriel Sanchez said the correlation between minority population and support for the Democratic candidate shouldn’t be a surprise, considering that members of minority populations frequently are registered Democrats.

“This is interesting but not all that surprising, given the high correlations between race and party identification,” Sanchez said.

At least four New Mexico counties were clear outliers to the correlation of minority population to Obama votes, the data show.

In Santa Fe and Taos counties, for example, Obama won higher percentages of the vote than the counties’ minority population percentage because white voters in those liberal counties were more likely to vote for Obama, Sanderoff said.

Los Alamos County also inordinately favored Obama despite a lower minority population because the county is home to a larger-than-average share of residents with Ph.D.s, thanks to the national lab, an education level at which voters lean Democratic, Sanderoff said.

“There are few counties that appear to be an outlier, but where they are, they can be explained away due to the uniqueness of Taos, Santa Fe and Los Alamos,” Sanderoff said.

An opposite trend was the case in Lea County, where Obama won just 24 percent of the vote despite a minority community representing more than 40 percent of the county population. The lower support for Obama in Lea County might have been caused by lower minority turnout or a stronger base of Romney support among the county’s conservative Hispanics, Sanderoff said.

But in most New Mexico counties in November, the strong correlation of minority voters to Obama’s winning percentages stood out.

The trend hasn’t always been so clear, Sanderoff said. In 2004, for example, about 40 percent of Hispanics in New Mexico voted for then President George W. Bush.

“Hispanics in recent New Mexico political history have been more likely to support the Democratic candidate, but what we’re seeing (in 2012) is a particularly strong trend,” Sanderoff said.