Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections 9780197538944, 9780197538937

Table of contents :
cover
Nowhere to Run
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research
3 Candidacy in Contexts
4 Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny
5 The Rest of the Pie: Partisanship and Race-​Gendered Opportunities in Predominantly White Districts
6 If Not Here, Then Where?: Constrained Opportunities for Immigrant Representation in Los Angeles County
7 “She Came out of Nowhere”: Elite Networks and Candidate Emergence in Los Angeles
8 Conclusion: The Future of Candidacy and Representation in American State Legislatures
Appendices
Notes
Index
Works Cited

Citation preview

Nowhere to Run

Nowhere to Run Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections C H R I S T IA N DYO G I P H I L L I P S

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933729 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​753894–​4 (pbk.) ISBN 978–​0–​19–​753893–​7 (hbk.) DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538937.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

For Letty, Mariedavie, and Ella My past, present, and future

Contents List of Figures  List of Tables  Acknowledgments 

ix xi xiii



1 Introduction 



2 Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research 

29



3 Candidacy in Contexts 

47



4 Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny 

69



5 The Rest of the Pie: Partisanship and Race-​Gendered Opportunities in Predominantly White Districts 

93



6 If Not Here, Then Where?: Constrained Opportunities for Immigrant Representation in Los Angeles County 

111



7 “She Came out of Nowhere”: Elite Networks and Candidate Emergence in Los Angeles 

139



8 Conclusion: The Future of Candidacy and Representation in American State Legislatures 

167

Appendices  Notes  Works Cited  Index 

1

185 207 227 247

Figures 1.1. Percent of All State Legislative General Election Wins, Even-​Numbered Years 1996–​2014

6

1.2. Percent of All State Legislative General Election Wins, Nonwhite Groups Only, Even-​Numbered Years 1996–​2014

7

3.1. ALS Responses: “Please Describe Your Decision to Run for the State Legislature for the First Time”

49

4.1. White Proportions of State Legislative Election District Populations, with Total Number of Candidacies by Quintile

72

4.2. Percent of Legislative Districts with Majority-​White Populations, by State

73

4.3. Local Polynomial Plot of Probability of Election and Racial Group Proportion of Population, Women and Men, by Race

79

4.4. Most Frequently Reported Occupational Industries of ALS Respondents, Percent

86

6.1. State Legislative Election Victories, Los Angeles County: 1996–​2016

118

6.2. State Legislative Election Victories, Los Angeles County: 1996–​2016 (White Men Excluded)

119

6.3. State Legislative Election Winners by Race-​Gendered Group and District Population, 1996–​2016

121

6.4. Latina/​o Proportion of District Population in State Legislative General Election Wins

124

7.1. Asian American Proportion of District Populations in Los Angeles County, 2016

143

7.2. Race and Gender of California Assembly Members Elected in Los Angeles County, 1996–​2016, by District

163

A1. The American Leadership Survey Questionnaire

186

B3. White Proportions of State Legislative Election District Populations, by Census-​Based Redistricting Period

197

B4. Predicted Probability of Winning State Legislative General Election on Co-​Racial Population

201

Tables 2.1. Historic and Projected Racial Makeup of the U.S. Population, Percentages (Pew Research Center, 2016; U.S. Census Bureau, 2018)

33

2.2. Top Ten Counties: Rate of Latina/​o Population Growth (Pew Research Center, 2016)

34

2.3. Asian American Populations by Size and Percent Change

35

2.4. Descriptive Statistics of All State Legislative General Election Victories in GRACE, 1996–​2015

41

2.5. Race and Gender of American Leadership Survey Respondents (2015)

42

2.6. Party Affiliation of ALS Respondents, Percent

43

3.1. Top Four Considerations when Deciding to Run, Percent

54

3.2. “What Was the Single Most Important Reason that You Ran?”

60

4.1. Mean Racial Population Proportions for Winning Candidates, Open Seats, 1996–​2015

71

4.2. Percent of State Legislative Districts with Majority-​White Populations post–​2010 Census, by State

73

4.3. Likelihood of Presence on General Election Ballot

76

4.4. State Legislative General Election Success Rates

77

4.5. Decision to Run: Percent of ALS Respondents Who Were Encouraged

81

4.6. Percent of Responses to: “What Was the Single Most Important Reason that You Ran?”

81

4.7. Discouragement by a Party Leader, Percent

82

4.8. Previous Officeholding and Political Organization Involvement, Percent

84

5.1. Frequency of State Legislative Election Candidacies, 1996–​2015

95

5.2. Number of State Legislative Election Candidacies by Party, 1996–​2015

95

5.3. Number of General Election Candidacies by White District Population Quintiles

96

5.4. Percent of Elections Won by Democrats, by Quintile

97

5.5. Number of Non-​Incumbent Winners in Qs 4 and 5, by Partisanship

98

5.6. Number of Non-​Incumbent Candidacies in Qs 4 and 5

99

5.7. Model of Likelihood a Republican or Independent Won

99

xii Tables 5.8. States with Most Candidacies by Non-​Incumbent, Republicans and Independents

100

5.9. Number of Non-​Incumbent Election Victories in Threshold Districts, 1996–​2015

103

5.10. Non-​Incumbent General Election Candidacies, Threshold Districts

104

5.11. Republican and Independent Non-​Incumbent Candidacies in Threshold Districts, by Most Frequent States

105

5.12. Democratic Non-​Incumbent Candidacies in Threshold Districts, by Most Frequent States

106

6.1. Number of State Legislative Election Wins, by Race-​Gender

122

7.1. Political Backgrounds of Latinos in the State Legislature, 1996–​2016

152

7.2. Political Backgrounds of Latinas in the State Legislature, 1996–​2016

153

A2. Types of Civic Activities of ALS Respondents, Percent

191

B2A. Number of State Legislative General Election Wins by Race-​Gendered Group 196 B.2B. Percent of All State Legislative General Elections Won by Race-​Gendered Group

196

B4. Probit Regression Model of Likelihood of Winning State Legislative General Election

199

B5. Likelihood a Republican or Independent Candidate Won General Election (Full Results)

202

C1. Open-​Seat Election Victories in Majority-​Minority Districts, 1996–​2014

203

D1. Primary and General Election Candidates in State Legislative Races, 2006–​2016, Percent

204

Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to the titas, ates, kumares, nanays, and lolas from whom I have learned most of what I know about women’s capacity to persist and lead. My grandmother, Letty Grey Dyogi, raised me with stories of childhood mischief amid wartime occupation and poverty. My mother, Mariedavie Dyogi Phillips, came to the United States as a young adult and served in combat zones in the U.S. Air Force, often as the only woman in her squadron. Living in the Philippines as a child, my first images of women in politics were protesters, militant nuns, and an embattled president. As an adult working in the labor movement, I was lucky to be surrounded by women of color who believed in organizing and their collective power. Zeny Garcia, Gloria Manlutac, and Jere Talley were worker leaders from whom I learned invaluable lessons about courage and conviction. I did not understand the power of righteousness until Jere turned to me on a day full of fearsome challenges and said, “I read last night in my Bible that the Lord promised: ‘No weapon formed against thee shall prosper.’ And I believe that.” These experiences formed the lenses I bring to my work as a scholar. I am thankful to my committee at Hampshire College: the late Kay Johnson, Brown Kennedy, and Lise Sanders, who taught me to trust my ideas for examining power. Later at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Nannerl O. Keohane again provided untold encouragement, by taking my plans to enter the academy seriously and reading the first draft of the ideas for this book, in a paper for her seminar on leadership. My time at UC Berkeley fostered many of the relationships that have been most important to advancing this project, and my beginnings as a professor. I am thankful for my dissertation committee: Taeku Lee, Rodney Hero, Gabe Lenz, and Lisa Garcìa Bedolla. Whenever I needed them, they generously showed up, each in different ways. As a woman of color, who studies other women of color, I learned in graduate school that we have to create the spaces and acceptance for our work even as we do it. The members of my committee always ensured I had the resources, tools, and support to do just that, and I am grateful for their advice and continuing mentorship.

xiv Acknowledgments My intellectual home at Berkeley was the Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop led by Irene Bloemraad and Cybelle Fox. They and my peers from other departments created a collaborative and welcoming space for developing scholarship and learning from each other. Along with Irene and Cybelle, Dani Carillo and Robin Savinar have read more drafts of my thoughts in process than anyone else, and I thank them for their patience and feedback. I worked with many research assistants at UC Berkeley, New American Leaders, and the University of Southern California in building the Gender, Race, and Communities in Elections (GRACE) dataset. Patrick Vossler has also played an invaluable role in finishing this project. I am so thankful for the organizations and institutions that supported these students’ work with me, and each researcher’s diligence and willingness to help bring this research to fruition. This work has also been supported by grants, and fellowships from the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, the Travers Fellowship, the New York Community Trust, the Center for Immigration Research Initiative at UC San Diego, and Soroptimists International. New American Leaders was also an important partner in the American Leadership Survey (ALS) and in allowing me to attend their annual conference to conduct interviews. I also benefited from presenting parts of this work at meetings of the Politics of Race Immigration and Ethnicity Colloquium and am so grateful to the colleagues and friends who keep that important network of scholars and collaborators coming together. My colleagues in the Political Science Department at the Ohio State University were generous with their time and assistance in navigating my new role as a professor. Most importantly, Wendy Smooth welcomed me as a collaborator and mentor and has continued to share encouragement and feedback ever since. At the University of Southern California, my colleagues have read drafts, shared resources, and helped me to carve out time and space to finish this book. I benefited immensely from a manuscript workshop co-​sponsored by the Department of Political Science, the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Center for International Studies and am grateful for their support. The comments and advice I received from Sophia Wallace, Corrine McConnaughy, Wendy Smooth, Marisa Abrajano, and Christian Grose at that workshop helped refine the arguments and narrative of this study in numerous ways. I am particularly indebted to Ange-​Marie Hancock

Acknowledgments  xv Alfaro and Jane Junn; having their feedback and guidance has improved this book immeasurably. The candidates, activists, donors, legislators, consultants, and other leaders who agreed to be interviewed for this book were unstinting in their frankness and generous with their insights. This book would not exist without them, and I thank them. I am also grateful to have worked with Angela Chnapko at Oxford; she has understood this project and supported it from our first conversation. She brought together a panel of anonymous reviewers whose feedback has strengthened this book considerably; they also have my gratitude. Jenny Ma has been part of this project since we were both at UC Berkeley, and she remained a steadying force and trusted collaborator. I cannot thank her enough for her careful work and friendship for the last seven years. More recently, Monique Maravilla came into my life when I needed space and unwavering encouragement in order to transition from graduate student to published professor, and she generously gave me both. The best investment of time I made during graduate school was in the regular meetings of our “old ladies club.” Rhea Myerscough, Denise van der Kamp, and Elsa Massoc pushed me to always ask for more, edited my work, and shared information that was otherwise hard to find. We sensibly added Danny Choi as an honorary member, and I cannot thank them all enough. Rhea has stayed my writing partner to this day, and I am indebted to her beyond measure. Words are insufficient to express my gratitude to Jonah and Ella. Jonah has created a life for our family that is oriented around helping us all become our best selves, and my career as a scholar. They have both rearranged their lives over and over so that I could remain singularly focused on writing this book. I am so happy and thankful for the little world that the three of us share. If, despite all of this support and assistance, any errors remain in this study, they are mine.

1 Introduction Everyone talked about demographic changes as if they were magical. As if somehow that meant that naturally government structure and the composition of those elected was magically just going to change. . . . And that hasn’t been the case. —​Georgia General Assembly Member Brenda Lopez Romero (Yu, 2016)

Brenda Lopez Romero’s election to the Georgia General Assembly in 2016 was heralded by the press as a harbinger of change in the American electorate and politics.1 Her pathway to that victory was marked by challenges and breakthroughs. Born in Mexico, Lopez Romero moved to Georgia to reunite with her father when she was five years old. She still recalls walking into a local diner with him as a child and being confronted by white men. The men asked Lopez Romero and her father if they had just crossed the river and told them to go back where they came from. Lopez Romero waded through over a dozen years of administrative backlogs to become a U.S. citizen just before entering law school. This likely surpassed the expectations of the high school guidance counselor, who, she recalls advised her that her bilingual skills might make her a good secretary. Later, while working in her own immigration services practice as an attorney, Lopez Romero volunteered on Democratic campaigns and thought about running for office someday. When that day arrived, she defeated an opponent in the Democratic primary, who had been endorsed by the incumbent and the governor, becoming the first Latina elected to the state legislature in Georgia’s history. By all accounts, Lopez Romero is exceptional. And in her view, that is a key problem in American electoral politics: “We shouldn’t still be talking about firsts. . . . It’s 2016 and we should be beyond that by now, but we aren’t”

Nowhere to Run. Christian Dyogi Phillips, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538937.003.0001

2  Nowhere to Run (Yu, 2016). Why has the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in elected office proved so persistent? Georgia’s General Assembly is hardly alone in this. Within the halls of nearly every American state legislature, there is scant descriptive evidence of the large-​scale population changes that have occurred since the late 1990s. White women and men combined won 90 percent of state legislative election victories in 1996 (Gender, Race, and Communities in Elections [GRACE]) and 83 percent in 2018 (Fraga, Juenke, & Shah, 2019). During the same period, the white share of the U.S. population declined from 72 to 60 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). Women (from all racial groups combined) won 25 percent of state legislative victories in 1996, and more than two decades later, they won 30 percent of state legislative victories in 2018 (Fraga, Juenke, & Shah, 2019). These patterns are amplified in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the session of Congress that convened in 2019, whites were nine times more likely than Asian Americans to be represented by someone from their same racial group in the House, and white men were even more likely to be represented by a white man than in the session of Congress that convened in 2017 (Bump, 2018). The stagnant character of the race and gender composition of elected officials runs counter to widely espoused ideals of democratic pluralism and political access. The paucity of descriptive diversity also has direct consequences for representation. Descriptive representation is, in its most narrow conception, Hannah Pitkin’s “mirror” of the polity (1967), where individuals from particular groups “stand in” as representatives for those with whom they share certain characteristics. This study is motivated by a view of descriptive representation that encompasses a more robust connection between “ideas and presence” (Phillips, 1998), particularly for members of marginalized groups. As Melissa Williams and others have argued, “even though the experiences and perspectives of marginalized group members are themselves diverse, the social positions of group members are sufficiently similar that there are good reasons to believe that members of marginalized groups, on average, are more likely to represent the concerns and interests of citizens from those groups” (Williams, 2000; Young, 1990; c.f. Strolovitch, 2007; Dovi, 2003). Moreover, empirical studies have shown that descriptive representation is a meaningful, and often immediate, signal to voters and elites alike of which groups have a say in political decision-​making (Atkeson & Carrillo, 2007; Barreto, 2007; Gay, 2001a; Reingold & Harrell, 2010; Rocha et al., 2010; Tate,

Introduction  3 2003). Indeed, a robust connection between descriptive and substantive representation has been observed for racial minorities and women at multiple levels of government (English, Pearson, & Strolovitch, 2018; Celis et al., 2008; Dovi, 2007; Hawkesworth, 2003; Hero & Tolbert, 1995; Mansbridge, 1999; Mendelberg, Karpowitz, & Goedert, 2013; Preuhs, 2006; Sapiro, 1981) (c.f. Cameron & Epstein, 1996; Lublin, 1997; Swain, 1993). Beyond enacted legislation, legislators from underrepresented communities also exhibit distinct policy positions, agendas, and approaches to the legislative process (Barrett, 1995; Bratton, Haynie, & Reingold, 2006; Minta, 2011; Preuhs, 2007; Reingold & Smith, 2012; Rocca, Sanchez, & Uscinski, 2008; Tate, 2003; Thomas & Welch, 1991). For political science, descriptive representation is also a means of evaluating a central theory of democratic governance—​the idea of the United States as a polity where diverse groups can compete for political influence. In this respect, the roots of underrepresentation are fairly straightforward. Many researchers have asserted that the primary shortfall driving underrepresentation occurs at the candidacy stage—​women and people of color are competitive candidates, but too few throw their hat into the ring (Lawless, 2015). Numerous studies have demonstrated that rates of success among candidates from different race and gender groups are fairly even, provided they are on the ballot in the first place (Branton, 2009; Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013; Darcy & Schramm, 1977; Juenke, 2014; Lawless, 2015; Shah, 2014) (c.f. Pearson & Mcghee, 2013). Extant studies of female and racial minority candidates tend to treat them as parallel, rather than overlapping (King, 1988; Smith & Stewart, 1983), social groups. This approach fails to account for the ways in which multiple dimensions of identity simultaneously shape pathways to candidacy, for all groups. As a result, the extent to which constraints on electoral opportunity drive underrepresentation has been obscured. Lopez Romero’s own account of her journey to elected office returns again and again to the concept of opportunity. On the night of her election to the state legislature, she said, “The reason I’m here is because people have opened doors for me and provided me with opportunities to become who I am” (Yeomans, 2016). She described being able to immigrate to the United States legally and safely as an opportunity (Vashi, 2019). She characterizes the growing mobilization of immigrant communities in her district as an opportunity (Yu, 2016). The opportunities she talks about vary widely, extending far beyond an open seat and good electoral timing. The theory and analysis in

4  Nowhere to Run this book also take a multifaceted view of electoral opportunities—​in some cases opportunities are individual seats or districts, and in others they are slots on a ballot or the realistic positioning necessary to become a candidate. Breakthrough candidates like Lopez Romero bring to light new dimensions of a seemingly classic American political narrative focused on opportunity. Her public narrative reflects the turns her life has taken as an attorney, a woman, a Latina, and an immigrant. Her experiences, and those of other candidates in this book, reveal how racialized and gendered institutions and processes simultaneously facilitate and constrain electoral opportunities. This book is about sharp differences in those opportunities across groups and how they contribute to persistent underrepresentation among elected officials.

Descriptive Persistence amid a Changing Electorate Descriptive representation’s utility as a powerful (Mansbridge, 1999; Dovi, 2007; Phillips, 1995; Tate, 2003; Young, 1990), if imperfect (c.f. Cameron & Epstein, 1996; Lublin, 1997; Swain, 1993), tool for enriching democratic incorporation has propelled a wealth of scholarship in political science. Two distinct literatures within that research area focus on why racial minorities and women are underrepresented in elected office. Studies focused on voter attitudes, or the public “demand” for women and minorities, as a primary factor in underrepresentation have returned mixed results (e.g., Huddy & Terkildsen, 1993; Philpot & Walton, 2007; Bejarano, 2013). While voter stereotypes and other issues related to the success of campaigns are clearly relevant, focusing only on that phase of elections overlooks a more central issue—​whether a descriptive representative is on the ballot in the first place. More recently, numerous studies have demonstrated that race and gender disparities in officeholding result primarily from significant differences in what types of people run for office in the first place (Branton, 2009; Carroll, 2009; Juenke, 2014; Lawless & Fox, 2005; Palmer & Simon, 2010; Sanbonmatsu, Carroll, & Walsh, 2010; Shah, 2014). The balance of empirical evidence shows that in order to understand patterns of descriptive representation, we must look to who gets on the ballot. The emphases in these literatures, however, on single dimensional identities—​race or gender—​have contributed to understandings of candidate development and emergence that tend to speak past each other.2

Introduction  5 Research on race and ethnic politics has repeatedly demonstrated the importance of majority-​minority districts in facilitating the descriptive representation of African Americans, Latina/​os, and Asian Americans (Barreto, Segura, & Woods, 2004; Branton, 2009; Gay, 2001b; Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016; Segura & Woods, 2006). During the same period, women and politics scholars have developed a number of tools for understanding the reasons why individual women, especially white women, choose to run for office less often than men; this includes self-​regard, personal relationships, and the potential consequences for people in women’s immediate circles (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013; Fox & Lawless, 2010b; Kanthak & Woon, 2015; Lawless & Fox, 2005). Although this scholarship is rich, it more often than not conceptualizes salient descriptive identities as both monolithic and unrelated. Lumping all women together, for example, suggests that women’s candidacies are equally likely to be affected, in similar magnitudes, by the same forces. In the same vein, collapsing an analysis down to a comparison of whites, Latina/​os, Asian Americans, and African Americans assumes that the processes that shape women’s and men’s candidacies are the same and lead to similar outcomes. Basic empirical evidence, and a long-​standing literature on women of color in politics, belies these assumptions. To be sure, because race and gender are socially and politically salient categories, there is value in these simple comparisons as a starting point. However, analyses of representation and candidacy that exclusively recognize only racialized or gendered processes obscure more than they reveal about the factors that shape who runs and who wins in the United States (D. King, 1988). Figure 1.1 illustrates the empirical necessity of moving beyond analytical frameworks that only reckon with one dimension of identity at a time. This figure is based on an original dataset that I constructed, encompassing demographic data for districts and candidates across 62,779 state legislative general elections spanning 1996-​2015 (GRACE). The figure reports the percent of all state legislative general election victories won by members of eight different groups during the period 1996–​2014. Close to 90 percent were won by white women and men combined (Figure 1.1). Within every racial group, women won elections less frequently than men (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). While Figures 1.1 and 1.2 encompass election data from 1996 to 2014, extensions of the GRACE dataset that run through 2018 exhibit the same patterns.3 The clear disparities across these two sets of social groups underscore the importance of using race and gender as central axes for studying

6  Nowhere to Run 80%

Percent of All State Legislative General Election Wins

70%

White Men

60%

50%

40%

30% White Women 20%

10%

All Others

0% 1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

2008

2010

2012

2014

Year

Figure 1.1.  Percent of All State Legislative General Election Wins, Even-​ Numbered Years 1996–​2014.

descriptive representation. Just as importantly, simultaneous differences in the outcomes between white and nonwhite women, and white and nonwhite men, and variation in the gaps between women and men within racial groups make an explicit case for the necessity of assessing descriptive representation through an intersectional lens. The key characteristics in this pair of figures are persistence and difference. Women’s win percentages are much lower than those of men, across all racial groups. However, the size of the gap between co-​racial men and women is within a range of 1–​2 percentage points for African Americans, Latina/​os, and Asian Americans, and roughly 40 points for whites. These gaps have been explored individually in the literature at several points in time, within

6%

Percent of All State Legislative General Election Wins

5%

4%

3%

2%

1%

0 1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

2008

2010

2012

2014

Year Race-gendered Group African American Men Asian American Women

African American Women Latinos Latinas

Asian American Men

Figure 1.2.  Percent of All State Legislative General Election Wins, Nonwhite Groups Only, Even-​Numbered Years 1996–​2014.

8  Nowhere to Run each racial group. But what is striking about Figures 1.1 and 1.2 is their vertical and longitudinal consistency across groups. The second feature of note is the gulf between white women and men and women and men of color. This distinction provides a crucial caveat to analyzing descriptive representation through the lens of gender alone. Men of color’s presence in state legislatures is nowhere near that of white men, and the same can be said for women of color and white women. The model of electoral opportunity I offer in this book accounts for these variations and the ways in which individual-​level choices, group-​level processes, and broad political contexts interact with one another to shape representation on state legislative ballots.

Overview of the Argument and Findings In order to accurately account for significant differences in the electoral experiences of women and men within and across racial groups, the analyses in this study approach the persistence of under-​and (in the case of white men) overrepresentation, intersectionally. Intersectionality theory intervenes into political science debates over identity, groups, and political access by questioning the underlying formulation of identities as additive “components” that an individual may choose to subtract, add, highlight, or hide in their social interactions. In contrast, intersectionality theorists argue that group identities are mutually constituted, as are the social processes and power relationships to which they are connected (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1991; Hancock, 2007; McCall, 2005). This renders individuals’ identity-​ related experiences incapable of being separated into standalone pieces; for example, “this is what she experiences as an Asian American, and this is what she experiences as a woman” is an untenable and unrealistic understanding of how an Asian American woman navigates the social and political world. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 make clear that although race and gender are both salient dimensions of state legislative candidacies, processes related to these identities shape social structures and political power in different ways. The intersection of those forces positions “race-​gendered” groups such as Latinas and Asian American men in the electoral context in ways that are related, but distinct (Hawkesworth, 2003; Collins, 1990). I use the term “race-​gendered” as a modification of Mary Hawkesworth’s concept of “racing-​gendering,” which she describes as an attempt “to foreground the intricate interactions of racialization and gendering in the political production of distinctive groups

Introduction  9 of men and women. Racing-​gendering involves the production of difference, political asymmetries, and social hierarchies that simultaneously create the dominant and the subordinate (Hawkesworth, 2003).” For the purposes of this study, the term “race-​gendered” signals the ways in which race and gender simultaneously constrain and facilitate access to electoral opportunity for distinct groups of women and men. Empirical research on electoral politics that uses an intersectional framework is a growing area of scholarship. One particularly robust facet of this work has focused on voter evaluations of candidates (e.g., Gershon & Lavariega-​Monforti, 2019; Gershon, 2013; Philpot & Walton, 2007; Bejarano, 2013; Carey & Lizotte, 2019; Frasure-​Yokeley, 2018; Phillips, 2018, Doan & Haider-​Markel, 2010; English et al., 2018), while other studies of the emergence of female candidates from individual racial groups have also deepened and complicated disciplinary understandings of how identities shape representation (Smooth, 2006; Gay & Tate, 1998; Jaramillo, 2010; Montoya, Hardy-​Fanta, & Garcia, 2000; Cruz Takash, 1993). Comparative studies across racial groups in this vein have been less numerous (Swain & Lien, 2016; Shah, Scott, & Juenke, 2018;) and include the groundbreaking Gender and Multi-​Cultural Leadership study’s analysis of women and men of color in elected office (Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016). This infrequency stems in part from intersectionality’s embrace of the complexity of power relationships between groups; that complexity is an accurate reflection of how the real world functions but can be challenging to operationalize in an empirical research design focused on multiple groups, or large-​scale phenomena.4 However, at the same time, several questions about the roots of underrepresentation in a diverse polity demand an analysis that can contend with multiple dimensions of identity, context, and the dynamism of opportunity and constraint. Is there a “women’s pathway” (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013) to candidacy? Should we expect the emergence of candidates like Brenda Lopez Romero and other Latinas, and Asian American women, to conform to that pathway, be shaped by their status as racial minorities, or something else? Are concerns about personal relationships and family life relevant to understanding why Latino and Asian American men are underrepresented? Should we expect the growth of immigrant-​based communities to translate into greater representation on the ballot for Latinas, Latinos, Asian American women, and Asian American men? These questions’ dynamism and multidimensionality require data that encompasses different levels of electoral opportunity and constraint. To

10  Nowhere to Run meet those demands, I developed new data that facilitates study of the candidacies of Asian American women and men and Latinas and Latinos running for state legislative office across different levels of analysis. The Gender Race and Communities in Elections Dataset (GRACE) incorporates data on state legislative candidates’ race and gender identities, as well as district contextual data, for nearly every state legislative general election from 1996 to 2015—​roughly 62,000 observations.5 The American Leadership Survey (ALS) is a national study of sitting state legislators (N = 547) that I fielded in 2015, and it encompasses the largest national survey sample of Asian American and Latina/​o legislators discussing their candidacies to date. I also incorporate insights from 54 in-​ depth interviews that I conducted from 2015 to 2017 with candidates, potential candidates, legislators, donors, consultants, organization leaders, and other political elites across 12 states. Finally, a case study of Asian American and Latina/​o candidate emergence in Los Angeles County from 1996 to 2017 illuminates the race-​gendered character of informal institutions and networks within racialized communities that are often at the heart of candidate emergence processes. The picture that emerges from this data is clear: race and gender simultaneously constrain and facilitate electoral opportunities for Asian American women and men, Latinas, and Latinos. As a result, viewing the factors of candidate emergence through a single “axis” (Crenshaw, 1991) lens of either race, or gender, leads to overly narrow, and in some cases, inaccurate, understandings of the underlying mechanisms that shape who is on the ballot. Chief among these is a key assumption about the nature of electoral opportunity for racial minorities: the larger a particular population, the stronger the expectation that a member of that group will be on the ballot and/​or be elected. This idea holds a central place in debates over majority-​ minority districts and legislative redistricting processes and has been empirically affirmed along racial lines repeatedly, particularly for its relevance to African Americans (Branton, 2009; Gay, 2001b), and, more recently, Latina/​ os (Barreto et al., 2004; Juenke, 2014; Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016). The positive relationship between district population proportions and elected representation, however, is much more robust for men than women across every racial group. Among Asian Americans and Latina/​os, that gap is even wider at the candidacy stage. Asian American women and Latinas face geographic constraints tied to district racial composition that are distinct from each other and from those of co-​racial men.

Introduction  11 In the women and politics literature, scholars looking to move away from earlier frameworks of candidacy based on the experiences of men, have developed theories that focus on women’s individual-​level decision to run. An assumption that threads through much of this research is that there are considerations that shape (and hinder) women’s candidacies much more than men’s, such as a lack of ambition (Fox & Lawless, 2010b; Lawless & Fox, 2005) and a concern for candidacy’s impact on women’s immediate and intimate relationships (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013). The theory I present in this book approaches the decision to run in a different way, by widening the range of relevant factors to include group memberships that intersect with gender, and the influence of race-​gendered social institutions and systems. This change in scope reveals, through interviews and survey responses from legislators and candidates, that deficits of political ambition and self-​confidence are not the exclusive province of women when deciding to run. In comparison with white men, nearly every other race-​gender group has a less robust self-​image of themselves as potential officeholders. Moreover, although personal relationships and household arrangements are an important consideration among most individuals contemplating candidacy, they function in distinct ways across race-​gender groups. Among Latinas and Asian American women, a constellation of intimate-​level concerns constrains opportunities in ways that are sometimes similar, and sometimes specific, to their racial and ethnic communities. For Latinos and Asian American men, the same sets of arrangements and relationships are a key consideration, in part because they are often structured in a way that facilitates their capacity to take on electoral opportunities. These individual-​ level concerns are significant, but they reveal only a narrow slice of the factors that shape the decision to run among Asian Americans and Latina/​os. Self-​recognition of immigrant identity and membership in marginalized social groups provide a complex mix of group-​ based considerations that can simultaneously push an individual toward candidacy and pull them away. These considerations, and the tensions they give rise to, were particularly salient in interviews with Latinas and Asian American women. On the one hand, seeing yourself as embedded in an immigrant community or marginalized racial group serves as a motivational resource for potential candidates with high levels of group consciousness (Miller et al., 1981) and may help them withstand other challenges that stem from the struggle to be recognized, including outright discouragement from elites. On the other hand, the opportunity costs of running for office instead

12  Nowhere to Run of continuing advocacy work, or achieving a level of professional prestige that is legible in their community, can foster ambivalence among those same groups of potential candidates. The findings in this book suggest that many groups face an electoral opportunity landscape circumscribed by intersecting social hierarchies. In particular, two simultaneous, and interactive, processes shape the contours and differences in electoral opportunity across groups. At the national level, the array of majority-​white populations across most districts sharply limits the number of realistic opportunities for Latina/​os and Asian Americans of either gender to get on the ballot and interacts with partisan contexts in a way that narrows prospects further for women from those groups. At the local and group level, within districts and among Asian American and Latina/​o political elites and activists, that scarcity of viable opportunities exacerbates informal processes and institutions that tend to push Latinas and Asian American women further from the candidate pipeline. This integration of national-​and local-​level processes reveals that the pathways to getting on the ballot are few and far between for Latina/​os and Asian Americans, and especially fraught with prospects for exclusion for Latinas and Asian American women. Additionally, the results in this analysis clarify the answer to a question that has increasingly gained traction among scholars and pundits appraising prospects for Latina (Bejarano, 2013; Casellas, 2011; Fraga et al., 2006) and Asian American women candidates:6 Are these women of color electorally “advantaged?” The evidence suggests not. As Lopez Romero stated, in specific contexts and situations, Latinas and Asian American women encounter openings and opportunities where “doors are opened.” But they also face systemic and structural dynamics at the individual, group, and local levels that marginalize them as potential candidates and squeeze the availability of realistic electoral opportunities even further. Because they encounter a range of overlapping and intersecting constraints in both majority-​minority and majority-​white districts, Asian American women and Latinas are often effectively left with nowhere to run.

The Intersectional Model of Electoral Opportunity The race-​gendered processes uncovered in this book build on intersectional scholarship on the emergence of Black women (Smooth, 2006; Gay & Tate,

Introduction  13 1998), Latinas (Jaramillo, 2010; Montoya et al., 2000; Cruz Takash, 1993), and minority women and men (Shah et al., 2018; Hardy Fanta et al., 2016) as candidates. Bringing that work into conversation with new, in-​depth data on Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men, as well as large-​scale contextual information on populations and elections, allows for the development of a more expansive, empirically informed model of candidate emergence and the underlying mechanisms of descriptive representation. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity accounts for three simultaneous conditions that shape descriptive representation among candidates. First, the dominance of white male incumbents and predominantly white district populations limits the number of realistic electoral opportunities for race-​gendered groups other than white men. Second, the constraints on opportunity that groups face are informed by race-​gendered processes that are related, but distinct (Collins, 1990). Third, groups of potential candidates are embedded in multiple contexts whose salience is dynamic, and interactive. Four groups are central to this model: white men, white women, men of color (Latinos, Asian American, and African American men), and women of color (Latinas, Asian American, and African American women). This enumeration is not an assertion of uniformity in electoral experiences across minority racial groups or subgroups; rather, it reflects the discrete and persistent gap between white women and white men’s levels of officeholding, and those of the other groups in this study. The model’s identification of these four groups draws on Leslie McCall’s (McCall, 2005) argument for the “strategic” use of existing categories as publicly understood markers that help identify, but do not bound, points of intersection and analytical interest.7 All groups aspire to mainstream political influence—​in the current analysis, this influence is achieved via descriptive representation in elected offices. The pathway each group must traverse to become successful candidates and reach that point is not only a result of their own individual status and resources. It also reflects the ways in which race-​gendered group membership tends to constrain and facilitate access to viable electoral opportunities, and the relative sociopolitical positioning of groups. This model contends that candidates’ race and gender identities are a central factor in the number and geographic distribution of realistic electoral opportunities. At the same time, race-​gendered processes generate distinct privileges and disadvantages for members of different groups, which inform and influence their competitive positioning as potential candidates. One way to think of the intersectional model of electoral opportunity is to imagine a

14  Nowhere to Run state’s legislative chamber building as a place where a number of groups want to ensure that their members have some presence. Realistic electoral opportunities serve as doorways to gain entry to the building. However, membership in different race-​gendered groups influences the number of doors that individuals can access, and the likely state of the pathway leading up to it. The first feature of this model is that for women and men of color, the number of doorways is much more limited than in earlier models of group competition due to the dearth of realistic opportunities for them to compete electorally in the vast majority of districts (Browning, Marshall, & Tabb, 1984; Dahl, 1967; Dawson, 1995; Hero, 2010). For most candidates, their perception of an electoral opportunity’s viability is shaped in large part by the voters and residents they can see and count on to donate, volunteer, and turn out. In most state legislative districts in the United States, that constituency is predominantly white. Women and men who are not white rarely win in state legislative districts with a predominantly white majority population. Thus, the racial makeup of district populations is a constraint that strategic candidates of color of both genders account for when deciding where and when to run. In most districts white potential candidates do not face the same considerations as nonwhite candidates do of appealing to a majority of constituents with a racial background different from their own. Thus, white women and men are unfettered by race in their access to electoral opportunities. In contrast, women and men of color have some access to realistic opportunities, but it is sharply limited in practice. There are a small number of majority-​minority districts, and a handful of African Americans, Latina/​os, and Asian Americans who represent majority-​white districts. Importantly, while there is a clear difference in the way race shapes the geography of electoral opportunity for whites and nonwhites, race-​gendered patterns of partisanship further distinguish the number of doorways to which women and men within each racial group have realistic access. The second feature of the intersectional model is that each group’s social “position” (Bourdieu & Johnson, 1993; Kim, 1999; Young, 2011; Masuoka & Junn, 2013), relative to each other and the institutions and actors at the mainstream center of political influence, is distinct. Race and gender shape social structures, privileges, and oppression in ways that are connected (Collins, 1990), but different, and, as a result, these groups’ pathways to electoral opportunity are different in myriad ways as well. Those differences reflect the systemic and institutional power that groups hold, and they have qualitative impacts on the pathway to candidacy.

Introduction  15 To illustrate, white men are the historically dominant group in elected government and electoral politics. They are most of the incumbents and candidates, and their membership in dominant racial and gendered groups means that they do not have to overcome structural barriers in political and social life related to their identities as white men. These institutional advantages tend to uniquely position white men on a fairly direct and smooth pathway to electoral opportunity relative to other race-​gender groups. Although men of color also experience advantages related to their gender, such advantages do not operate in isolation from disadvantages related to their racial group membership. The distribution of predominantly white populations across districts limits the number of electoral opportunities realistically available to men of color. However, in the few majority-​minority districts where nonwhites are most likely to run, men of color’s membership in the dominant gender group translates into their being widely recognized as potential candidates.8 In majority-​white districts, men of color may also be legible as potential candidates, but their access to the benefits of a shared racial group in the electorate is reduced, and political elites’ incentives to support a racial minority candidate are likely diminished as well. By accounting for the ways in which privilege and disadvantage operate simultaneously, this race-​gendered approach allows for white men and men of color to experience gender-​related advantages that are connected, but different (King, 1975). The connective tissue between white women and white men’s positioning, and sociopolitical power, is their racial group membership.9 White women have access to the same doorways as white men, due to the abundance of districts with a co-​racial majority population. However, their pathway is quite different. One aspect of this difference is related to white women’s close residential proximity to white men. A frequently documented benefit available to incumbents (Ansolabehere & Snyder, 2002; Mayhew, 1975) is their capacity to dissuade competitors. Given that most districts are predominantly white, it is likely that the descriptive competition white male incumbents tend to dissuade is often white women. White women’s shared racial group membership with white men simultaneously advantages and disadvantages their positioning as potential candidates in majority-​white districts. White women also face a long catalog of challenges in becoming candidates that has been observed by women-​in-​politics scholars (Carroll, 1994; Fox & Lawless, 2010a; Crowder-​Meyer, 2013; Sanbonmatsu, 2006; Fulton & Maestas, 2006; Schneider & Bos, 2014; Thompson, 2015). The issues identified by this rich literature render white women’s pathways to electoral

16  Nowhere to Run opportunity less smooth and straightforward than that of white men (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013). As a group that faces marginalization related to both dimensions of their identities featured in this study, women of color are positioned in a manner that renders their access and pathways to electoral opportunities distinct from white men, white women, and men of color. Women of color face race-​ gendered constraints on electoral opportunity that are overlapping and interactive across the individual, group, and macro levels. The scarcity of “minority” seats is a constraint that women and men of color share, but that condition also exacerbates race-​gendered processes of “secondary marginalization” (Cohen, 1999; Strolovitch, 2006, 2007) among political elites, as men of color tend to dominate the informal groups and networks that plan and negotiate to maintain or win the one or two “Latino” or “Asian” or “Black” seats in a state or metropolitan area. Secondary marginalization describes processes within communities that are excluded from mainstream politics, whereby the political activities and leadership of members of a dominant subgroup render multiply disadvantaged subgroups politically invisible (Cohen, 1999). Women of color are often obscured in these networks and struggle to be recognized as viable candidates by political elites. As a consequence, their ability to leverage electoral resources that are concomitant with a sizable co-​racial population, and often necessary to make an opportunity realistic, tends to be less robust than that of men of color. Women of color are also likely to face overlapping, systemic factors at the group and individual level that can pull them away from candidacy in electoral politics. Scholarship on Latinas and Black and Asian American women in politics has documented race-​gendered differences in modes of political activism, and inequities in professional and economic achievement (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981; Hondagneu-​Sotelo, 1994; Gay & Tate, 1998; Hardy-​ Fanta, 1993; Jaramillo, 2010; Jones-​Correa & Leal, 1996; Montoya et al., 2000; Pardo, 1998; Cruz Takash, 1993; Sampaio, 2002; Lien, 2001; Phillips & Lee, 2018). At the individual level, personal relationships and domestic arrangements can have asymmetric impacts on the pathways to electoral opportunity for women and men of color (this asymmetry is also true for white women and white men but, again, operates in ways that are specific to each racial group). Race-​gendered social structures and expectations around domestic life can often facilitate the candidacies of men of color while imposing unique barriers and burdens on women of color.

Introduction  17 Among women of color with high levels of group consciousness, those issues may overlap with a sense of inefficacy and/​or distrust toward the political process linked to their membership in racialized groups (Dawson, 1995; Hajnal & Lee, 2011; Masuoka, 2007; Williams, 2000). These social group identities can also generate a complex mix of pressures and incentives for potential candidates. Along similar lines, a strong sense of connection to immigrant communities simultaneously enacted feelings of obligation and resistance to candidacy among Latinas and Asian American women I interviewed (these sentiments were not as consistently reported by Latinos and Asian American men). These intersecting factors illustrate the necessity of integrating constraints and resources across multiple levels into our understanding of the ways in which multiple marginalization positions women of color along candidacy pathways that are distinctly fraught with potential for exclusion, diversion, and derailment (Cohen, 1999; Crenshaw, 1991). The structural differences in each group’s pathways are not absolutist declarations of a fixed ranking of electoral opportunity, but they do recognize the institutionalized and intersectional power of white supremacy and patriarchy in American electoral politics. For example, a number of the Latinas and Asian American women I interviewed described what they saw as moments of relative advantage in their journey as candidates. One common anecdote in this vein involved sometimes consciously relying on varying stereotypes of Latinas and Asian American women as “non-​threatening” to diffuse conflicts with male elites and voters. Fully cognizant that they were viewed as “something else” in political spaces, these women recognized the need to operate strategically within structures and social institutions that disadvantaged them based on their race and gender group memberships. To paraphrase one Latina state legislator I interviewed, women of color often make the most of doors opened for them, in part because they know those doors do not open very often. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity captures the dynamism of candidate emergence processes as they operate within and across power-​ based structures and institutions. It also embraces complexity by accounting for a straightforward aspect of every potential candidates’ lived reality: their identities encompass multiple dimensions. The result is a framework for understanding the underlying processes driving descriptive representation that reflects the power of institutions, and context, and recognizes the diversity of political experiences in the American polity.

18  Nowhere to Run

Why Focus on Latina/​os and Asian American Women and Men? An important fulcrum of this book is its empirical focus on two immigrant-​ based communities: Asian Americans and Latina/​os. Immigration policies and immigrants themselves have been an integral part of American political and social hierarchies since the nation’s founding (Ngai, 1999). The pace of immigration has undergone a qualitative change in recent decades, and changes in the composition of the polity that are related to the expansion of these communities have been pressing issues for a number of election cycles. Immigrants, their families, and their wider communities are also clearly of interest to lawmakers in state legislatures, even in states where their proportion of the population is in the single digits. Yet, while immigrant communities are salient enough to merit legislative time and resources across most states and seemingly endless attention by presidential and federal candidates for office, their underrepresentation in elected office is often explained away as rooted in their small population size in individual states, or short tenure in the United States. These apparent contradictions belie an underlying tension in electoral politics, and in political science’s understanding of the mechanisms driving descriptive representation. The presence of immigrants and their families is significant enough to demand official attention, but immigrant community members’ own experiences and perspectives are arguably less valued, either as informative cases for academic theorizing, or as representatives of the views and needs of Americans. The approach of this book is to treat the experiences and presence of the two largest immigrant-​based communities as equally informative for developing theories of descriptive representation as those of other race-​ gendered groups. Moreover, I situate Asian American women and men, and Latinas and Latinos, within the broader context of electoral realities that they and other groups face. The growth of racialized immigrant groups is not only altering the composition of the electorate and its potential demands for representation; it is also generating new processes of democratic incorporation. By utilizing an intersectional approach to contextualize and compare the experiences of Latinas and Asian American women with each other and other race-​gendered groups, Nowhere to Run builds on an extensive literature focused on women of color in politics. To illustrate, many of the key

Introduction  19 concepts that I draw from in developing the model of electoral opportunity were initially formed to explain aspects of Black women’s political lives; race-​gendering (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 1990; Hawkesworth, 2003) and secondary marginalization (Cohen, 1999) are chief among them. In the empirical analysis chapters, Latinas and Asian American women’s frequent conceptualizations of themselves as “insider outsiders” (Collins, 1990) relative to political elites reflects similar positioning of African American women candidates documented by Brown, Hawkesworth, Smooth, and others (Brown, 2014b; Hawkesworth, 2003; Smooth, 2006). Throughout the literature on African American women in politics, a theoretical focus on positionality has pushed back on disciplinary tendencies that effectively “erase” Black women (such as when scholarship is oriented around either gender or race) (C. King, 1975; Jordan-​Zachery, 2006; Smooth, 2006; Collins, 1990; Hawkesworth, 2003; Philpot & Walton, 2007; Stokes-​Brown & Dolan, 2010; Orey, Smooth Adams, & Clark, 2006) and forged new intellectual space for understanding intragroup politics and the diversity of Black political experiences (Brown, 2014b; Darcy & Hadley, 1988; Gay & Tate, 1998; Tate, 2003). These emphases on positionality, intragroup diversity, simultaneity, and power are crucial theoretical underpinnings of the electoral opportunity model in this book. However, as Mae C. King pointed out in 1975 (as have others since), when we account for the differences in how sexism and racism structure discrimination, it becomes clear that Black women’s political experiences are not directly comparable to those of Black men or white women, or by extension, Asian American women or Latinas (King, 1975). Histories of “slavery, racial oppression and sex discrimination make black women’s position distinct” (King, 1975), just as histories of immigration and exclusion, racial oppression, and sex discrimination make the sociopolitical positioning of Latinas and Asian American women unique (Glenn, 2002; Volpp, 2005; García Bedolla, 2005; Beltràn, 2010). While this book is not focused on African American women, being a woman of color in a white male-​dominated set of institutions is a shared, if distinct, experience for Asian American women, Latinas, and Black women. These three groups all participate in politics as outsiders to two dominant groups—​whites and men. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that while the bulk of the literature on women of color in politics focuses on women and men within one particular racial group, there are many theoretical and empirical insights across studies that clearly resonate with each other.

20  Nowhere to Run Given these complex relationships among women of color themselves and the literatures focused on Black women, Asian American women, and Latinas, it is useful to pause here and specify how this study situates the experiences of Black women. The theory I advance draws from intersectional scholarship focused on Black women, Latinas, and Asian American women. It is intended to be broad enough to capture how race-​gendered processes and institutions constrain and facilitate opportunity and representation, simultaneously at multiple levels of analysis. That is why the theory is oriented around four groups: white men, white women, women of color, and men of color. Groups of women included under the category “women of color” have some relationships to political institutions and experiences that are shared, and others that are not. This theory does not prescribe how race-​gendered processes related to candidate emergence unfold within racial groups, precisely because I expect those dynamics to be different among African Americans, Latina/​os, and Asian Americans. The empirical analysis of Latina/​os and Asian Americans in this book demonstrates more specifically how overlapping identities structure opportunity within those groups. When results for Black women and men and white women and men are included alongside those of Latina/​os and Asian Americans, it is because I believe they provide essential information for understanding the political context of that particular analysis. Often, the results for Black women (and Black men) that I present in this manner reconfirm or complement extant findings in the literature on Black women in politics. I make note of those connection in the footnotes, while focusing the analysis in the text on results for Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men. Scholars of Latinas in politics have also countered the persistence of “the invisible Latina” in mainstream political science scholarship (Montoya et al., 2000). Much of that work has advanced the importance of accounting for multiple types of activism in feminist analyses of politics. By treating community organizing and non-​electoral civic work as “real politics,” Mary Pardo, Carol Hardy-​Fanta, Anna Sampaio, and others expand the boundaries for political leadership to include geographies where Latinas are at the center (Hardy-​Fanta, 1993; Pardo, 1998; Walker & García-​Castañon, 2017; Sampaio, 2004). My analysis of Latina candidates and potential candidates’ community-​ based constructions of politics and advocacy in this book echoes and elaborates on similar dynamics among Latina political activists advanced by these scholars.

Introduction  21 Studies of Latinas in electoral politics have often focused either on richly detailed case studies of elected officials in a particular area of the United States (Cruz Takash, 1993; Fraga et al., 2003; Jaramillo, 2008; García et al., 2008), or voter perceptions of Latinas as candidates (Bejarano, 2013; Cargile, 2016). While none focuses entirely on candidate emergence, these literatures suggest that Latinas’ pathways to officeholding are distinct from Latinos’: Latina candidates may be viewed differently by white voters than Latinos (Bejarano, 2013), and they face exclusion and burdensome expectations relative to co-​ racial men (Cruz Takash, 1993; Jaramillo, 2008; García et al., 2008; Montoya et al., 2000). Turning to scholarship focused on Asian American women in politics, most early studies focused on voter behavior and have been carried out by Pei-​Te Lien and her coauthors (Lien, 1994, 1998, 2001; c.f. Phillips & Lee, 2018; Yih, 2016; Sriram, 2016). More recently, Lien and Filler examined the pathways to officeholding by Asian American elected officials serving in 2014, arguing that there are gendered differences in the occupational and civic trajectories of Asian American women and men (Filler & Lien, 2016). Instead of being the subject of single–​racial group studies, it has more often been the case that Asian American women as candidates and elected officials have been included in larger, comparative studies and volumes (Swain & Lien, 2016; Brown & Gershon, 2016; García Bedolla, Tate, & Wong, 2005; Sanbonmatsu, 2013; Scola, 2006; Shah, Scott, & Juenke, 2018). Among these, the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Study (Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016, 2006) has been the most comprehensive, widely examining the contours of women of color’s candidacies and service in elected office. Hardy-​Fanta and colleagues include a relatively small number of state legislators in their nationwide sample of elected officials of color (respondents in their data are predominantly local-​level officials), but the results and analysis I present in Chapter 3 of this book affirm their suggestion that the decision to run for office should be considered through a lens that is wider than individual-​level ambition and account for differences in the way women and men of color relate their own political trajectories to those of their communities (Hardy-​ Fanta et al., 2016). These literatures have made a forceful case for the distinct positionalities of women of color, but those understandings have not yet been fully incorporated into theories of candidate emergence and competition for representation. Additionally, Latinas and Asian American women are members of immigrant communities, but there have been few efforts to clarify how that

22  Nowhere to Run dimension of identity intersects with others in shaping their opportunities for representation on the ballot or in office. By situating Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men within multiple contexts, and comparatively analyzing how the processes that shape electoral opportunity for these groups are race-​gendered, this book makes three key empirical and theoretical contributions to the literature on women of color in politics. First, the GRACE dataset facilitates an analysis of the prospects for descriptive representation that women of color face that is unprecedented in terms of scale and inclusivity. This is particularly true for Asian American and Latina/​o candidates. The integration of national data spanning nearly two decades with interviews and surveys in Nowhere to Run complements the many richly textured, qualitative studies of smaller groups of women-​of-​ color activists and elected officials that have propelled this literature. Second, this study offers an explicit account of the ways in which simultaneous pressures within communities and, more broadly, in electoral politics shape the possibilities for women of color’s political leadership and representation—​including specific attention to the domination of white men and white-​majority districts in the landscape of electoral opportunities. These contributions are rooted in the intersectional research design of this study, and discussed more extensively in Chapter 2. The third contribution is facilitated by the choice to center this analysis on Asian American women and men, and Latinas and Latinos—​all members of racialized immigrant-​based communities. Throughout the interviews for this book, candidates and legislators, particularly women, framed themselves as members of American racial minority groups that are also deeply connected to a diverse array of immigrant-​specific experiences. Nativity, immigrant generation, and membership in an immigrant-​based community are all distinct concepts and dimensions of identity—​and they are not interchangeable with race. In this book, the “bundle of processes” (Lee, 2008b) related to immigration and immigrant political incorporation serves as a framework for understanding widespread changes in American democratic processes. To this end, immigration is a political and social phenomenon that helps drive the changing roles that race and gender play in electoral politics, because of the simple fact that it is changing the composition of the polity—​and therefore the mix of groups and individuals competing for opportunities for representation—​ in ways that political scientists have yet to fully grapple with. Moreover,

Introduction  23 “immigrant’ is a dimension of identity that is distinct from race, but that intersects with race in unique ways across groups. Just as I refrain from treating race or gender as stand-​alone, “on or off ” component variables, I also do not use nativity or immigrant generations in this analysis as isolated quantitative variables that flatten or stand in for the experiences of diverse communities. Nor do I assume that Latina/​o or Asian American identities are constituted as racial identities in the same ways as African American or white, because they are not connected to the institutions of American slavery and immigration and naturalization policies in the same way (Kim, 1999; Masuoka & Junn, 2013). Instead, I treat the ways that membership in an immigrant community intersects with candidates’ race and gender identities to shape their opportunities as “an open empirical question” (Hancock, 2007). For some respondents I interviewed, membership in an immigrant community is tied to the racialization of immigration as an issue; they feel connected to and motivated by the concerns of immigrants because they share a racial group that is treated broadly as outsiders (Masuoka & Junn, 2013). For others, their identity as an immigrant is tied to the material and political challenges of immigrant incorporation, or a sense of obligation to the United States as a place of socioeconomic opportunity or political liberty. The multiplicity of these and other reasons are part of why an intersectional analysis of immigrant community members is necessary—​the constitutive elements of that identity are very different across race-​gendered groups. Immigrant as a dimension of identity can be meaningful, without a forced expectation of uniformity of experience (Beltràn, 2010). Among respondents I interviewed, immigrant identities were most often mentioned in conversations about individual-​level motivations and sense of attachment to a group or community. “Immigrant” as a characteristic of a specific electoral opportunity or network of elites was mentioned much less frequently, and when it was discussed, it was often tied into the racial contours of a particular district. In other words, Latina, Latino, and Asian American women and men I spoke to were cognizant that districts with large Asian American or Latina/​o populations likely contain voters from immigrant communities, but conversations about where certain candidates could be viable, or broader systems and elite networks that shape who has access to electoral opportunities, were largely oriented around race and gender. The analysis in the following chapters also reflects these emphases. Deploying these treatments of immigrant identity in a study focused on Asian Americans and Latina/​os contributes to a more holistic understanding of the roles that identities play in the candidacies and representation of

24  Nowhere to Run women of color. Focusing on these two groups allows analytical space for immigrant identities to be multifaceted and intersectional, instead of being flattened into or conflated with racial identity. As such, Nowhere to Run brings much needed data and analysis of the emergence of Asian American women and Latinas to the body of scholarship on women of color in politics, while also arguing that their experiences reshape the salient identities for which this literature must account.

Plan of the Book This book demonstrates the intersectional model’s explanatory power by analyzing the emergence of Asian American women, Asian American men, Latinas, and Latinos as candidates for state legislative office. It also offers the first opportunity to assess long-​standing assumptions about how racial group populations are connected to opportunities for representation, among women and men, within and across the four largest racial groups in the United States, over a significant time frame. The intersectional model’s capacity to make sense of a wide array of electoral processes and outcomes allows the distinct political trajectories of Asian American women and men and Latinas and Latinos to become new sources of analytical leverage in understanding how multiple dimensions of identity shape electoral opportunity. The multilevel and multi-​method analysis that unfolds in this book sheds light on the race-​gendered constraints on electoral opportunity Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men face, as they attempt to gain mainstream political influence through descriptive representation. The evidence throughout demonstrates that relationships, phenomena and structures that political scientists and elites have typically treated as either racialized, or gendered, are, in fact, shaped by multiple dimensions of identity simultaneously. By clarifying the mechanisms that drive candidacy, we can better understand how to strengthen the institutions and processes that are designed to connect a rapidly changing electorate to those who govern.

Chapter Outline Intersectional empirical studies of American politics that utilize cross-​ group comparison with large-​scale data must confront distinct analytical

Introduction  25 challenges, from the stages of developing research questions to data gathering and analysis (Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016; Strolovitch, 2006, 2007; Strolovitch, Wong, & Proctor, 2017; Wong, 2006). As such, this book seeks to continue developing the methodological tools for research in this vein. For readers interested in this emerging approach, Chapter 2 specifies how the research design of this book operationalizes intersectionality theory through its data collection and analytical approach. This includes an expanded discussion of how using this framework to analyze Asian American women and men, and Latinas and Latinos, facilitates new understandings of the relationship between race-​gendered political processes and electoral opportunity within their communities, and more generally across other groups. Chapter 3 shifts and expands the lenses extant scholarship has often relied on to explain why potential candidates decide to run or not, by moving away from a primary focus on individual-​and intimate-​level concerns, to an interactive set of considerations that engage individual, household, group, and macro contexts. As Masuoka and Junn (2013) aptly put it, “agency at the individual level is constrained by relative group position.” The results and analysis in Chapter 3 affirm the utility of that approach for understanding the decision to run for office, and they add the important proviso that agency at the individual level is also facilitated by relative group position as well. Additionally, I rely on a feminist conceptualization of self-​ recognition (Collins, 1990; Pardo, 1998; Espiritu, 1999; Glenn, 2002; Deveaux, 1994) to argue that a strong sense of immigrant identity plays a complex and previously underappreciated role in advancing the likelihood of candidacy among Asian Americans and Latina/​os, even as it may also enact considerations that undermine the strategic appeal of running for office. Majority-​minority districts have figured centrally in debates over underrepresentation of racial minority groups. Chapter 4 takes this discussion in a new direction by focusing on how the small number of majority-​minority districts limits the realistic array of electoral opportunities for Asian American and Latina/​o women and men. The chapter also shows that up to now, the utility of majority-​minority districts in advancing descriptive diversity in elected office has been mischaracterized. The classic expectation of a positive relationship between a racial group’s size and its likelihood of having a descriptive representative on the ballot or in office is much more robust for men than women. To explain why, Chapter 4 uses interview data to demonstrate that within these rare districts widely perceived as nonwhite candidates’ primary opportunity for representation, the politics of

26  Nowhere to Run recognition among political elites tend to disadvantage Asian American women and Latinas, relative to co-​racial men. As a result, they are less likely than co-​racial men to be in a position to reap the electoral benefits often associated with a majority-​minority district population. Chapter 5 underscores a key theme of this study: that understanding how one group’s opportunities are constrained requires simultaneously accounting for how those opportunities are facilitated for others. Over three-​quarters of all state legislative elections occur in districts in which whites comprise 80 percent or more of the population, and yet those types of districts have rarely figured in studies of minority representation. This chapter encompasses the first comprehensive analysis of the prospects for representation of Latina/​os and Asian American women and men in predominantly white districts across the United States. I show that past performance suggests that these prospects are presently dim. Chapter 5 also provides an account of how partisanship interacts with race-​gendered processes to create particular limits on the electoral opportunities of Asian American women and Latinas. The final section of the chapter addresses the phenomenon of the “crossover” candidate, often characterized by pundits and some scholars (Bejarano, 2013; Casellas, 2011) as a Latina or Asian American woman running in a plurality or predominantly white district, on the basis of her presumed appeal to white voters. While districts on the threshold of majority-​minority status hold some theoretical promise for expanding descriptive representation along those lines, electoral outcomes from the past two decades of state legislative elections suggest that caution is warranted. Chapters 6 and 7 use a case study of Los Angeles County as an extreme case to test the intersectional model’s explanatory power as well as provide specific illustrations of the informal political institutions and networks that many respondents across the country identified as a key element in candidate emergence. Los Angeles County is defined by large immigrant populations, strong coalitions of racial minorities who are Democrats, large labor unions active in electoral politics, and a highly effective Latina/​o political infrastructure focused on candidate development and support. Yet here, as in the rest of the country, white men’s choices about where and when to run appear relatively unconstrained while women and men from other racial groups are engaged in a seemingly never-​ending game of musical chairs around a small number of select seats. Informal political institutions dominated by men of color that purportedly vet and support Latina/​o candidates often actively

Introduction  27 exclude Latinas, and Asian American women face intersecting barriers to becoming candidates and an absence of pan-​ethnic organizational support. While Los Angeles has often been described as a political power center for immigrant communities, the reality is that race and gender define which groups within those communities have realistic opportunities to access that power. Nowhere to Run’s concluding chapter briefly reviews the book’s key findings, underscoring that the constraints and resources that determine electoral opportunities intersect and are distinct for women and men, within and across racial groups. It also offers a forward-​looking approach to analyzing candidacy and representation that corresponds with the emerging American population of the 21st century. Although rooted in long-​standing institutions (formal and informal), the conditions and expectations that shape electoral opportunities for Asian American women and men and Latinas and Latinos are “conventional, but not innate (Harris, 2000).” I close the book by outlining two key areas where, if conventional practices were to change, prospects for candidacy and descriptive representation would likely improve: risk-​assessment methods used by parties and other organizations engaged in candidate development and an explicit focus on underrepresented subgroups by elites and organizations engaged in candidate development.

Conclusion Lopez Romero’s success in Georgia in 2016 is a testament to both the challenges and possibilities that confront American communities seeking representation. As immigration-​driven population changes continue apace, the descriptive gap between the governed and those who govern grows more acute and threatens the democratic legitimacy of policymaking processes in legislatures. These changes also push against the theoretical limits of candidate emergence and descriptive representation frameworks that rely on single dimensional categories of analysis. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity is centered on simple concepts that are complex in their ramifications for understanding democratic processes—​that individuals are simultaneously members of more than one social group, and their political leadership is shaped by processes and institutions large and small. The integration of multiple dimensions of identity, and levels of salient social

28  Nowhere to Run contexts, allows the model to recognize the necessity of addressing underrepresentation, by simultaneously accounting for overrepresentation. The institutions at the heart of this study represent key challenges in the American democratic project: racially lopsided districts, race-​gendered and exclusionary political networks, and limited organizational capacity to support new candidates in new places. These issues, however, are neither fixed in stone nor “natural.” They also do not reflect some unspoken, mass will of the voters that demands the overrepresentation of white men. Indeed, among voters who are underrepresented in elected office, the candidacy and public service of a member of their own social group can facilitate an important boost to their participation and trust in democratic institutions.10 This book identifies the mechanisms that currently prevent voters from having those descriptive choices, in the hope that their transformation will move the composition of ballots, and legislatures, closer to that of the population.

2 Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research George Cortez1 is a longtime observer of Latina/​o politics and has extensive background knowledge of the institutions and key actors in his city. When I interviewed him, he was generous with his insights and opinions, and excited to talk politics. However, when our conversation turned to differences in the numbers of Latina and Latino elected officials in the region, we struggled to understand each other. He explained that the numbers of Latina elected officials were small, relative to those of Latinos, because while a “Latino” seat could be maintained, the same could not be said for a “female” seat. I asked him to clarify what he meant: Cortez: I just think, in general regarding women [ . . . ] there are no such thing as female districts. And there’s no such thing as female sustained representation. Interviewer: You think that works across the board? Cortez: Across the board. White. Whatever. I would make the argument that there are certain districts that there is an 80–​90% chance that when that incumbent leaves, for whatever reason . . . that a, quote, ethnic, will win that seat. . . . That same observation doesn’t work for women, obviously. And therefore, because there’s no pattern of sustainability, you’re going to get, by definition, great variations in women elected officials. So, women—​female representation cannot build on top [of] female representation like Blacks, Latinos, or Asians. Whereas . . . in state legislatures, you’ll just see Latino political representation continue to grow, and grow, and grow, and grow. Interviewer: And you don’t see these women who are running as part of that Latino growth? Cortez: They’re part of the Latino growth because they’re Latino, not because they’re Latina.

Nowhere to Run. Christian Dyogi Phillips, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538937.003.0002

30  Nowhere to Run My conversation with Cortez crystallizes the necessity of an intersectional approach to understanding long-​standing patterns of descriptive representation in state legislatures. In this line of questioning, I was trying to understand why the growth of Latino political representation was seemingly being driven by the elections of Latinos—​and not Latinas—​in the same seats over and over. Cortez recognizes that racial politics (my emphasis) have a certain organization and structure that is very different from women’s politics, which is not as discretely or concretely organized. For him, this translates into Latinos (men) embodying Latina/​o racial representation, whereas Latinas are something else. Latinas are an ancillary component of racial group representation in his mind, because they are women. In Cortez’s narrative, Latinos are part of the growth of racial group representation when they are elected, but their presence is characterized as a dynamic rooted in racial politics, not gender politics. Yet Latinas’ absences from those same processes are characterized as a dynamic rooted in gender politics, not racial politics. This compartmentalization of the dimensions of Latinas’ and Latinos’ identities into additive elements is not uncommon among academics and political elites. For many, there is “women’s politics,” and there is “ethnic politics.” By definition, that approach pushes the experiences of women of color, including Latinas and Asian American women, to the political and analytical margins. As later chapters will show, this marginalization has undermined the accuracy of extant theories for why underrepresentation, of many groups, persists. The research design in this book extends the array of tools available for empirically analyzing diverse groups in American politics, and how broad phenomena like population change and institutional constraint can have heterogeneous effects across groups in a polity. These tools are intended to not only improve the accuracy of disciplinary understandings of representation, but also to strengthen strategies for studying the political dynamism of immigration-​based shifts in the composition of the United States.

Operationalizing Intersectionality Theory in Empirical Research Descriptive representation is salient to scholars, pundits, elites, and everyday voters for a host of reasons. Chief among them is that for many observers, it serves as an indicator (albeit an incomplete one) of which groups

Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research  31 have political power. Intersectionality theory also centers concerns about groups and power, by clarifying how power animates and structures the relationships between groups (Baca Zinn & Thornton Dill, 1996; Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 1990; Cohen, 1999). As a result, intersectional approaches offer an intervention into our understanding of how groups achieve descriptive representation: it is not only the product of processes generated by the group being represented. Instead, descriptive representation results from the interaction between each group’s political processes with those of others, within particular contexts. In other words, intersectionality theory contends that the descriptive representation of Latinas, for example, is not only rooted in the ambition and strategy of Latina candidates and the mobilization and support of Latina voters, but it is also driven by the sociopolitical positioning of Latinas relative to other groups. Intersectionality theory also offers advantages over other frameworks because it is formulated to contend with the social and political complexity that accompanies changes in the descriptive composition of the United States. Latinas and Latinos, and Asian American women and men, as immigrant-​ based communities, are groups whose “belonging” (Masuoka & Junn, 2013) as citizens and political actors is often highly conditioned. Yet, they and other immigrant groups have been an integral part of this country, and its racial politics, since the founding (Ngai, 1999). The challenges to incorporation and political representation that these groups currently experience are different, but not divorced from each other. They are connected by institutional contexts and social hierarchies that have historically valued white, native-​born men above other groups (Kim, 1999). Because systems of oppression and social hierarchy are overlapping and simultaneous—​white supremacy and patriarchy are two examples—​ experiences of privilege and marginalization can also be simultaneous (Baca Zinn & Thornton Dill, 1996; Collins, 1990). Asian American men and women, for example, may experience political disadvantages related to their membership in a nonwhite racial group. Those disadvantages are related, but distinct, because Asian American men are also members of a dominant gender group, and Asian American women are members of a marginalized gender group. These differences have implications for the way power is exercised within the Asian American community among subgroups and shape the power that Asian American women and Asian American men have as socially specific groups navigating the broader political landscape. By using an intersectional research design, this study’s analysis of descriptive

32  Nowhere to Run representation clarifies but does not flatten the identity-​linked processes driven by those connections and differences. As an empirical enterprise, large-​scale, intersectional, comparative analyses are a developing area of scholarship (English, Pearson, & Strolovitch, 2018; Strolovitch, 2006; Swain & Lien, 2016; Shah, Scott, & Juenke, 2018; Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016). Ongoing debates over empirical operationalization of this approach include questions of whether looking at multiple groups is in keeping with the historic substantive focus of intersectionality on Black women or serves to reify categories of difference that diminish the texture and granularity of experience that intersectionality was developed to bring to light (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013; Jordan-​Zachery, 2013; McCall, 2005; Simien, 2007). Indeed, much of the intersectional empirical work on representation in American politics has emphasized attention to the diversity of experiences within salient groups and taken the form of close studies of Latina (Garcìa et al., 2008; Jaramillo, 2010; Takash, 1993) or African American (King, 1975; Hawkesworth, 2003; Brown, 2014a; Githens & Prestage, 1977; Hawkesworth, 2003; Smooth, 2006; Jordan-​ Zachery, 2006) candidates or elected officials. At the same time, Cho et al. (2013), McCall (2005), Hancock (2007), and others have identified intersectional research practices and paradigms that respect causal complexity and also allow for the comparison of multiple groups in the same study. The empirical approach of this book proceeds in that vein, by employing methodologies that are intersectional in their “analytic sensibility” (Cho et al., 2013)—​simultaneity, context, dynamism, and constant attention to asymmetries of power between groups undergird the data collection and analysis. Including multiple race-​ gendered groups is also theoretically suited to electoral competitions’ often zero-​sum structure (as in single member districts, or ballots with a limited number of spaces for candidates, for example). As Latinas, Latinos, Asian American women, and Asian American men become a larger part of the electorate, they are changing the array of groups seeking seats at the table.

The Expansion of Immigrant America As Asian American and Latina/​o population growth reshapes the racial makeup of communities, and women’s participation in higher education

Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research  33 and paid labor alter the economic and social landscape, the pool of potential groups in the polity pursuing descriptive representation is being reconfigured along multiple dimensions. These changes go beyond a simple numerical expansion; they also entail a significant recomposition. The United States’ transition to a majority-​ nonwhite population has been well underway since the Hart-​Cellar Immigration Act of 1965 (Table 2.1),2 and demographic projections indicate that first-​and second-​generation immigrants will continue to play a central role in that transformation. By 2065, one in three Americans will either be an immigrant themselves, or have at least one parent who is an immigrant (Cohn, 2015). As immigrant-​based communities continue to grow, their ethnic and racial makeup is also shifting. Immigrants arriving from Asian countries began to outpace those from Latin America in recent years, and Asian immigrants are expected to be a larger share of the foreign-​born population living in the United States than Latina/​os within the next five decades (Cohn, 2015). The number of immigrants from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, and other African states has doubled since 2000, and the number of immigrants from the Caribbean has increased by one-​third (Anderson, 2015). These changes are not confined to areas of the country that may have previously been considered “traditional” immigrant gateways, such as large cities on the coasts. New Mexico and Hawaii are in some ways unique political jurisdictions, in that they are home to majority-​minority populations that are largely composed of a single racial minority group (Latina/​os and Asian Americans, respectively). But they are far from the only locales where Asian Table 2.1.  Historic and Projected Racial Makeup of the U.S. Population, Percentages (Pew Research Center, 2016; U.S. Census Bureau, 2018) Year

African American

Asian American

Latina/​o

Other Races White

1995 2005 2015 2025 2035 2045 2055 2060

12 12 12 13 13 13 13 14

3 5 6 6 7 8 9 9

11 15 18 19 21 24 26 26

2 2 2 3 2 4 4 3

72 66 62 58 54 50 46 44

34  Nowhere to Run Americans and Latina/​os are politically visible, or salient to discussions of descriptive representation. There is little overlap between states that have historically been home to the largest Latina/​o populations—​California, Illinois, Florida, and Texas—​and the states where the highest rates of Latina/​o population growth have recently occurred (Table 2.2). From 1990 to 2000, the states with the fastest growing Latina/​o populations by county were Alabama, Illinois, Tennessee, South Carolina, Missouri, Kentucky, and Georgia. However, from 2000 to 2014, the highest rates of growth had shifted to counties in Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Mississippi, and Georgia. Similarly, Asian American communities have experienced the fastest rates of growth outside of the states where the largest populations reside (California, Hawaii, New York, Illinois, and Washington) (Table 2.3). Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the United States. Much of that growth is occurring in Southern states on the Atlantic coast, and in the mountain West. The national geographic dispersion and ongoing growth of both groups carry potentially significant political implications for descriptive representation in state legislatures. Among other factors, many cities and districts that have historically been home to predominantly African American and/​ or white populations now encompass significant and growing immigrant-​ based communities. During this same period, American women have made educational and professional gains that are among the most significant in the world. Women’s Table 2.2.  Top Ten Counties: Rate of Latina/​o Population Growth (Pew Research Center, 2016) 1900–​2000

2000–​2010

Franklin County, Alabama Cass County, Illinois Hamblen County, Tennessee Gilmer County, Georgia Jasper County, South Carolina McDonald County, Missouri Shelby County, Kentucky DeKalb County, Alabama Bedford County, Tennessee Gordon County, Georgia

Stewart County, Georgia Beadle County, South Dakota Telfair County, Georgia Adams County, Mississippi Williams County, North Dakota Trempealeau County, Wisconsin Luzerne County, Pennsylvania Nantucket County, Massachusetts Stark County, North Dakota Frederick County, Virginia

Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research  35 Table 2.3.  Asian American Populations by Size and Percent Change Largest Asian American County Populations (American Community Survey 2011–​2015, 5-​Year Estimates)

States with Largest Changes in Asian American Population Size, 2000–​2010 (2010 Census)

Los Angeles County, California Honolulu County, Hawaii Santa Clara County, California Orange County, California Queens County, New York Alameda County, California San Diego County, California Cook County, Illinois King County, Washington Kings County, New York

Nevada Arizona Utah North Carolina Idaho Delaware Georgia Virginia South Carolina Maryland

share of the paid labor force has risen steadily in advanced economies over the past three decades (Grigoli, Koczan, & Topalova, 2018), a trend that has been mirrored in the United States. The proportion of women in the U.S. labor force with a college degree tripled between 1970 and 2016 (Women in the Labor Force: A Databook, 2017), and the United States ranked first in the world in educational attainment in the World Economic Forums’ 2017 Global Gender Gap Index. These factors are often tied to women’s political empowerment and growth in elected representation in the comparative context (Inglehart & Norris, 2003; Iversen & Rosenbluth, 2010; Krook & Norris, 2014) and in studies of female candidates in the United States (Lawless & Fox, 2005; Squire, Jewell, & Moncrief, 2001). Yet, in measures of women’s political power, the United States often diverges from the rest of the world. The United States ranked 73rd in the Global Gender Gap measure of women’s political empowerment, and 104th in parliamentary-​level officeholding in 2018 (Women in National Parliaments Database October 2018, 2018), behind countries with a panoply of political systems and levels of economic development. When we account for these concurrent trends, the analytic peril of treating women and immigrant communities as parallel groups in social science scholarship becomes quite clear. The two fastest growing groups of women in the United States are Asian American women and Latinas. In the coming decades, the term “American women” will encompass more people of color

36  Nowhere to Run than whites. Moreover, the scale of these shifts in the population casts the static nature of descriptive representation in state legislatures into sharp relief and lays bare the unresolved challenges to democratic incorporation that the American public faces in the 21st century.

Race-​Gendering Descriptive Representation What makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term “intersectionality,” nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations. Rather, what makes an analysis intersectional . . . is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing . . . emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is. (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013)

While Latina/​o and Asian American women and men are living and working in a diverse array of communities across the country, one place where they are notably absent is on the ballot. Descriptive underrepresentation is rooted in a dearth of candidates from these groups running for office (Lawless & Fox, 2005; Shah, 2009; Juenke, 2014). There are significant hurdles to studying why individual persons, or groups of people, do not participate in this particular political activity. One person’s decision to run for office arguably engages with multiple levels of actors and institutions with more intensity than other activities, such as voting or showing up at a protest. A strategic candidate (Maestas, 2006) considers not only how running and serving will shape their personal and professional life, but also (as I show in the next chapter) how it may impact socially salient groups they are members of, as well as the support or opposition they may face from other political actors. They also weigh whether running for a particular seat or office is a viable endeavor that is worth their time and resources, or whether there may be other venues for achieving their personal and political goals. In these ways and many others, the presence or absence of candidates from a particular group on the ballot is the result of constraints and opportunities occurring at the individual, group, local, state, and national levels.

Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research  37 Working across levels of analysis is common in empirical intersectionality scholarship (Cohen, 1999; Collins, 1990; Pardo, 1998; Glenn, 2002; Hardy-​ Fanta et al., 2016). This is due in part to the explicit concern in this literature for “expanding where we go looking” (Cohen, 1999) to understand how power is deployed in different ways at multiple points in society, including within institutions, across groups, and in micro-​interactions (Glenn, 2002) between individuals. In a related fashion, the study of descriptive representation and the presence or absence of candidates from the ballot in this book necessitates multi-​method and multilevel analyses and data. The remainder of this section outlines the contours of three original data collections that span these multiple levels—​national, state, group/​local, and individual—​and that are analyzed in “conversation” with each other in the chapters that follow. Much more detail on the data collection processes for each new dataset is available in the appendices. Before discussing each specific dataset, it is important to note how, across this data, I confronted the limits and opportunities of developing this study within a framework of eight group categories: African American women, African American men, Asian American women, Asian American men, Latinas, Latinos, white women, and white men. On the one hand, my use of these eight race-​gendered categories, as opposed to a set of four racial categories and two gender categories only, recognizes the distinct experiences of women and men within and across racial groups. On the other hand, these choices of inclusion also necessitate exclusion (Young, 1990). This book treats gender as binary, largely because in drawing from my earlier experiences in politics and in early interviews and research, nearly all of the candidates and potential candidates I met or spoke with expressed their genders as women or men. As a result, a limitation of this study is that it is itself confined to insights about individuals who conform to binary gender expressions. These observations also facilitated my decision to refer to individuals who have acknowledged ancestry in Latin America as Latina or Latino.3 In formulating these categories, I am conscious of arguments by Chandra Mohanty, Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, Cristina Beltràn, and other feminist theorists that “the very act . . . of naming an identity” (Young, 1994) is itself an action of creation. As Beltràn puts it, “Latino is a verb” (Beltràn, 2010). This idea of group identity creation through naming is particularly important in a study that is national in scope and focused on racial groups that are ethnically heterogenous, and that bear regional and local distinctions in their naming conventions, identifications, and memberships. At the same time,

38  Nowhere to Run throughout interviews in diverse localities, the salience of four racial categories, African American, white, Asian American, and Latina/​o, was clear again and again among political elites discussing opportunities for representation. Additionally, I felt it was important to engage with racial categories that are most salient in national political discourses about representation. Acknowledging these limits, I use these eight race-​gendered categories in the following ways. African American women and African American men include women and men who are publicly identified as Black, or African American.4 Asian American women and Asian American men include women and men who are publicly identified as having Asian ancestry. Though they are often tied together in politics, these categories do not include individuals who have Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or indigenous ancestry, but not Asian ancestry. Given the particular salience of racial and immigrant identities in this study, inclusion of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations would require a distinct set of analyses that are beyond the scope of this study. Similar considerations also informed my decision not to include Native American, American Indian, and Indigenous North American populations as standalone groups in the research design.5 Latinas and Latinos include women and men (respectively) who publicly identify as having ancestry in Latin America.6 White women and white men operating as political elites during the period this study covers rarely spoke about their racial identities in public. Thus, my approach to coding candidates and elites in these groups was distinct from others. For the Gender, Race, and Communities in Elections (GRACE) dataset in particular, any winning candidate who was not identified as belonging to a nonwhite group was coded as white. Given the rigor of the coding processes I conducted for Asian American women and men and Latina/​os, and African American women and men (conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies) and Native women and men (conducted by the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators), this approach minimized identification errors among groups (white women and white men) whose much larger sizes reduced the likelihood of identification errors significantly altering statistical outcomes. For the two qualitative datasets, white women and white men who are discussed either identified themselves or were publicly identified, as such. Turning to the original datasets I built for this study, I begin with the GRACE dataset. One reason that analyses of descriptive representation in popular and academic debates have tended to focus on an “either gender, or

Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research  39 race” approach is that the data required to consistently analyze more than one or two race or gender subgroup populations across a wide swath of political jurisdictions has been unavailable. I built the GRACE to remedy that shortfall for state legislative offices in 49 states.7 The GRACE encompasses data on winning candidates’ race and gender for nearly every state legislative general election in the United States between 1996 and 2015 (N = 62,779). It also includes data on every Asian American and Latina/​o general election candidate, regardless of their success or failure. As noted earlier, this time span covers a period of rapid change in the racial composition and dispersion of the American population. It begins 30 years after the Hart-​Cellar Immigration Act and includes communities with long-​standing immigrant populations, as well as areas considered “new destinations” (Iceland, 2009; Massey, 2008) for immigrants. Importantly, the starting date of this dataset also coincides with a turning point in the United States Supreme Court’s jurisprudence regarding the role of race in gerrymandering. The Court’s first test of the application of “strict scrutiny” following Shaw v. Reno (Shaw v. Reno 509 US 630 1993) was adjudicated in Miller v. Johnson (Miller v. Johnson 515 US 900 1995) in 2015 and signaled to lawmakers and courts around the country that explicit racial considerations in the drawing of district boundaries were less likely to survive judicial review. This dataset’s focus on state legislative office presents both challenges and opportunities for expanding beyond binary analyses of descriptive representation and candidate emergence. The key opportunity is that state legislative offices are quite numerous, present in every state, and occupy a middle ground in terms of electoral politics. Winning election to the state legislature often requires greater resources and access to elites than a typical school board or local city council seat but also encompasses a far larger proportion of newcomers to politics than congressional or statewide office. Additionally, issues and policy related to immigrant women and men are clearly salient to most state legislative bodies, regardless of their presence in the direct constituent population; the National Council of State Legislatures has reported that hundreds of pieces of legislation related to immigrants and immigration are introduced in state legislatures in a typical year, across all but a small handful of states (including 2011, when 1,607 bills were introduced) (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2016). The challenges lie in the scope and complexity of generating a national study of thousands of distinct legislative seats and candidates, over time. The district

40  Nowhere to Run demographic data illustrates this point most clearly. The GRACE spans three different rounds of census-​based redistricting. After each round, the borders of any one district may or may not change substantially. There are 99 legislative chambers in total, and each state has a distinct system of naming conventions for labeling districts. The U.S. Census Bureau asked states to submit their state legislative district boundary information for the first time following the 2000 census. While a number of states complied, two of the states with the largest immigrant-​based communities—​California and Texas—​did not.8 For the 2010 census, all states complied. Thus, I collected the GRACE demographic data—​income, education levels, unemployment rates, and proportions of Asian Americans, African Americans, Latina/​os, and whites—​from three separate sources.9 Since each state, and in many cases, each legislative chamber, has a unique timeline for implementing new district boundaries following the census, I matched data from those three sources to individual election returns data collected by Klarner et al. (2016), while also accounting for statutory requirements, and innumerable legal challenges, along the way.10 The district data provides an essential context for interpreting the other side of the dataset—​race and gender identifications for every winning candidate (as well as for all Asian American and Latina/​o general election candidates). Consistent, rigorously collected data on the race and gender of candidates across states and racial groups for more than one or two election cycles has not previously been available, in part, because it requires extensive time and expertise to develop. I utilized a multiple-​round race coding process that begins with lists generated by nonprofit and civic organizations, which are then cross-​checked and augmented with research via the Internet and direct communication with candidates and their staff. I used a similarly extensive protocol to identify women and men in the dataset. Further details on the process of identifying and coding candidates in the GRACE are available in the appendices. The scope of the GRACE dataset allows, for the first time, a national view of the vicissitudes of descriptive representation for women and men across the eight largest race-​gendered groups, over a significant time period (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The pooled raw percentages of election victories achieved by members of each race and gender group are an equally unambiguous illustration of the imbalance in descriptive representation in the American states. Table 2.4 reports candidate-​level data based on 62,779 individual election victories and ballot-​level data across 57,813 unique general elections (GRACE).

Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research  41 Table 2.4.  Descriptive Statistics of All State Legislative General Election Victories in GRACE, 1996–​2015 Election Winner Characteristics, Percent

Election Characteristics

Women

Men

Total

African American Asian American Latina/​o White Total

3 0.5 1.2 22.6 27.3

5 1 2.7 67.2 75.9

8 1.5 3.9 89.8

Upper Chamber Open Seat Multi-​Member District Income (10K) Unemployment

21.1 20.6 8.9 51.6 3.9

Republican or Independent

11.1

40.7

51.9

Percent College Education

34

Democrat Vote Share

48.3

Incumbent Challenger

18.9 7.1

54.9 19

Means

73.8 26.2

In order to study group-​and individual-​level dynamics and institutions related to candidate emergence, I fielded a national survey of sitting state legislators, the American Leadership Survey (ALS), during the first five months of 2015. An explicit goal of the survey was to collect enough responses from African American, Asian American, Latina/​o, and white women and men to allow for simultaneous comparison across all eight race-​gender groups.11 Previous large-​scale surveys focused on candidate emergence have included few Asian American and Latina/​o state legislators in particular, thus precluding intersectional analyses informed by their experiences (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013; Crowder-​ Meyer & Smith, 2015).12 In order to overcome this limitation, the ALS included three sampling frames: first, all sitting state legislators (N = 7,388); second, all Asian American and Latina/​o state legislators (N = 421); and third, a systematic sample stratified by legislative chamber, of legislators from all other racial groups in proportion to the number of Asian Americans and Latina/​os in that chamber (N = 1,231).13 Earlier research has documented increasing challenges in obtaining responses to national surveys from elected officials (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013). With this in mind, three different modes of data collection were

42  Nowhere to Run deployed across the three sampling frames in the ALS. All sitting state legislators in early 2015 received several email invitations to take an online survey administered via Qualtrics. Paper surveys were also mailed to members of the stratified sample and all Asian American and Latina/​o legislators. A survey research firm, Braun and Associates, also placed calls to Asian American and Latina/​o legislators. The number of responses from Asian American and Latina/​o legislators is the largest to date in any study focused on state legislative candidate emergence (Table 2.5). Even so, the overall response rate for the survey was 7.3 percent. The response rates among Asian Americans and Latina/​os are 33 and 25 percent, respectively. Given this, in the empirical analyses in later chapters, survey data is treated as suggestive rather than conclusive, and used in concert with other data to illustrate key concepts and arguments, and in comparing race-​gender groups on individual questions and across survey questions, the responses are weighted.14 African American, Asian American, and Latina/​o legislators sitting in 2015 tended to be Democrats much more often than not (GRACE). Thus, efforts to oversample Asian American women and men and Latina/​os yielded an overall proportion of Democrats among ALS respondents (64 percent) that was larger than the actual share of Democrats in state legislatures nationally Table 2.5.  Race and Gender of American Leadership Survey Respondents (2015) Number of Respondents African American Men African American Women Asian American Men Asian American Women Latinos Latinas White Men White Women Total

Percent of Respondents

Percent of Legislators (2015)

20

3.7

4.4

12

2.2

3.1

29

5.3

1.1

12

2.2

0.5

52 20 261 138 544

9.6 3.7 48 25.4 100

3.0 1.5 63.3 21.8 100

Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research  43 (45 percent) (Table 2.6). The majority of Republican respondents were white men (55 percent of 259 white male respondents).15 The ALS survey questionnaire focuses on legislators’ experiences during their first run for the state legislature. One of the potential limitations of this survey data is that it captures the experiences of a very select group—​ winners. The survey’s focus on winners allows us to see the challenges and opportunities that were most salient to potential candidates who were successful, but it also makes it difficult to discern the outlines of where political institutions fit into the process, as well as a clear sense of the individual considerations of potential candidates who ultimately opt not to run. Two other qualitative datasets augment the survey’s information about candidate’s emergence decisions along these lines. The other two datasets are based on in-​depth, semi-​structured interviews with a range of political elites and activists: consultants, donors, party and organization officials, potential candidates, losing candidates, and successful candidates as well. One set of interviews was conducted from 2015 to 2018 and spans two dozen respondents across 12 states. The other is part of a case study focused on Asian American and Latina/​o candidate emergence in Los Angeles County that was conducted in 2017. For both sets of interviews, I relied on my own contacts from earlier research and campaign work initially and asked successive respondents to identify key actors and knowledgeable elites that I should contact next. I then contacted those identified actors and elites for interviews, largely over the phone for the national set of interviews, and in person in Los Angeles.

Table 2.6.  Party Affiliation of ALS Respondents, Percent

African American Men African American Women Asian American Men Asian American Women Latinos Latinas White Men White Women

Democrats

Republicans

Independents

90 100 79.3 100 80.4 100 42.5 72.2

10 0 20.7 0 19.6 0 54.4 26.3

0 0 0 0 0 0 3.1 1.5

44  Nowhere to Run A final component of the new data generated for this study is a case study of the emergence of Latina/​o and Asian American candidates in Los Angeles County. One way to understand how individual respondents’ insights fit into the broader political context and institutions is to look closely at a single metropolitan area, and I leverage Los Angeles County as a specific setting in order to render a more granular portrait of race-​gendered differences in pathways to officeholding, and provide a challenging test of the intersectional opportunity model. The county is home to the largest immigrant-​based communities in the United States, and it is one of the few metropolitan areas in the country where Asian Americans and Latina/​os have developed significant electoral political power. The case study combines qualitative interview data with new data on primary and general state legislative elections from 1996 to 2016. The multilevel and multi-​method analysis that this data facilitates is focused on understanding how women and men from immigrant communities navigate and shape electoral institutions that are both long-​standing and newly emerging. By approaching candidate emergence as a multidimensional phenomenon and set of political processes, this study uses the experiences of these emerging political communities to provide a more expansive view of the representation challenges facing the polity.

Conclusion The empirical strategies and data outlined in this chapter are intended to help clarify the complex, and often dynamic, issues of identity, representation, and group membership that George Cortez and I sometimes struggled with in our conversation. These approaches are not intended to flatten, or essentialize, the experiences of Asian American women, Asian American men, Latinas, Latinos, or members of other race-​gendered groups. Instead, by embracing the notion that there is not a singular, definitive candidate emergence pathway across all members of a racial group, or across all women or men, this study urges consideration of the internal diversity of underrepresented groups. That recognition of sameness and difference (Crenshaw, 1989) can elucidate how Latinas fit, or do not, into Cortez’s conception of Latina/​o representation, and politics more broadly. In many respects, my conversation with Cortez was structurally similar to other interviews. By way of explaining why and how Latina/​os had been elected or not in his local area, he moved back and forth from interpersonal

Empirical Strategies for Intersectional Research  45 dynamics among elites, to the small and finite number of realistic district opportunities, to individual considerations about personal finances, and back again to the strengths and weaknesses of informal networks oriented around electoral politics. This integration of macro-​and individual-​or local-​level concerns was a feature of many of the interviews I conducted; informants did not see these processes as siloed or disconnected from each other. To the contrary, their narratives underscored the multilevel and interactive nature of candidate emergence. The chapters that follow proceed in the same manner. In the next chapter, I begin traversing these levels with individual candidates’ own views of their decision to run for the state legislature. These individual narratives reveal group-​level patterns of recognition, constraint, and disruption in the candidate emergence process.

3 Candidacy in Contexts The first time I met Delegate Daniela Rojas was near the end of what she bluntly told me had been a “long fucking day.” She woke her kids early that morning so that she could talk to them and say goodbye, made calls as she drove to a breakfast appointment, and had back-​to-​back meetings with constituents, staff, and other delegates until early evening. At that point, she made a FaceTime call from the car to say goodnight to her children and coordinate schedules with her husband, stopped at a fundraiser for a friend, and then headed to the dinner where we met. It was an event geared toward preparing other Latinas to run for office. After a day like that, why would anyone encourage other people to take up this life? Delegate Rojas’ personal life and her family’s life are deeply important to her. Given that, it is perhaps unsurprising that the central explanations in political science for the relative deficit of women’s candidacies for office, in comparison with men, often revolve around attitudes focused on individual-​ and household-​level concerns, such as a lack of ambition for serving in office (Lawless & Fox, 2005) and concern over how the decision to run would affect people in your intimate circle (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013). Yet, these individual-​level concerns paint an overly narrow portrait of the factors that shape whether or not Asian American women and Latinas see a state legislative seat as a good opportunity for themselves. Candidate emergence is the product of processes that are simultaneously tied to membership in larger social identity groups and concerns about individuals’ immediate and intimate relationships. The relative weights of these processes on the decision to become a candidate across different race-​gender groups are an “open empirical question” (Hancock, 2007). Different factors push potential candidates toward taking on an electoral opportunity in certain situations and institutions, and they pull them back, in others. While being a leader in an organization for immigrant women’s rights may, for example, develop a person’s networks of donors and political gatekeepers, it may also constrain their availability to run for office if they feel that nonprofit

Nowhere to Run. Christian Dyogi Phillips, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538937.003.0003

48  Nowhere to Run leadership accomplishes a greater range of their personal and political goals than officeholding might. For a number of candidates, group-​and macro-​level factors are deeply integrated with individual-​level concerns and play a central role in the candidate emergence process. They exhibit group consciousness (Miller et al., 1981) stemming from their identities as minority women and immigrants, and they view their candidacies as tied to broader communities and institutions. Their narratives about running for office often underscore a sense of being embedded in a specific social and political context. Hardy-​Fanta and coauthors (2016) found similar patterns among the state legislators included in their study of officeholders of color, and they described respondents’ “public” and “self focused” motivations as “interconnected.” Asian American women and Latina candidates raised these issues when sharing complicated feelings of obligation to their wider community, struggles with arranging their lives to accommodate both candidacy and social expectations, and their perception that they were constantly breaking into systems that are not made for people of their race and their gender. Personal hesitations about running and other individual-​level considerations also mattered to these women. But they viewed them as inextricably tied to larger, interactive constraints on opportunity and access rooted in their races and gender.1

Widening the Lens on Candidate Emergence: Decentering Ambition as a Gendered Trait Much of the recent scholarship on American women’s underrepresentation as candidates has been animated by Lawless and Fox’s claim that women are less ambitious or less inclined to independently view themselves as candidates and officeholders than men (Lawless & Fox, 2005; Holman & Schneider, 2018; Palmer & Simon, 2003; Bernhard et al., 2019). However, a number of scholars of candidate emergence have also argued that “ambition theory may not be an adequate framework for understanding how individuals decide to run for office” (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013, quoted in Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016; see also Fulton et al., 2006; Carroll, 2009; Brown, 2014a; Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016; Bernhard et al., 2019). Additionally, with notable exceptions (Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016, chief among them) samples of Latina/​os and Asian American women and men in the extant research on this

Candidacy in Contexts  49 question were often sparse or nonexistent. The American Leadership Survey (ALS) includes questions that permit examination of whether women generally exhibit less independent desire to hold office than all men, including a sample of Asian American women and men and Latina/​os that is larger than previous national studies of state legislators. The results indicate that thinking of running on your own is not an exclusively gendered trait and point toward the need to analyze candidate emergence within a more expansive, and intersectional, framework. One straightforward indicator of ambition for elected office is whether or not individuals readily envision themselves running and serving. The ALS replicates a question originally developed by Moncrief et al. (2001) (and later by Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013) that attempts to discern what percentage of candidates thought of running on their own, and what proportion had never thought of themselves running for office until someone else suggested it (Figure 3.1). Survey respondents were asked to select among three choices to describe their decision to run for the state legislature for the first time: “It was entirely my idea to run, ” “I had already thought seriously about running when someone else suggested it,” and “I had not thought seriously about running until someone else suggested it.” The combined percentage of respondents who selected either of the first two choices (reported in the two darkest shaded areas of each group’s bar in Figure 3.1) indicates how frequently each group reported that the idea to run was self-​generated.2

African American Women (N=12)

Race-gendered Group

African American Men (N = 20) Asian American Women (N = 12) Asian American Men (N = 29) Latinas (N = 20) Latinos (N = 52) White Women (N = 136) White Men (N = 263) 0%

25%

50% Decision to Run

75%

100%

Decision to Run It was entirely my idea to run. I had already thought seriously about running when someone else suggested it. I had not thought seriously about running until someone suggested it.

Figure 3.1.  ALS Responses: “Please Describe Your Decision to Run for the State Legislature for the First Time.”

50  Nowhere to Run There is no consistent gender difference in reporting that the idea to run was self-​generated. Asian American women are the only group of women who considered running on their own less frequently than all groups of men. Latinas and Asian American men look fairly similar in their response rates across all three choices. Comparatively, Latinos had the highest rates of self-​ generated desire to run among the four race-​gender groups at the center of this study (but lower rates than African American women and white men). Within each racial group, the differences between women and men are also not consistent in either size or direction. These descriptive patterns suggest that gender, by itself, is not a clear indicator of the likelihood of “seeing yourself ” as a potential candidate or elected official. Including data on women and men from four racial groups further clarifies how race and gender differentiate levels of self-​generated desire to run. White men report independently seeing themselves in office significantly more frequently than any other group. While white women reported that they had not thought of running on their own more often than white men, they have a great deal of company in that regard; every group reported that they did not think of running until someone else suggested it (the lightest shaded portions on the left end of each group’s bar in Figure 3.1) more often than white men, including Latinos, Asian American men, and African American men. If this analysis were primarily based on the responses of white women and men only, it would misleadingly appear that gender alone is a key variable in reporting latent political ambition. However, in a more expansive analysis, white men’s outsized levels of ambition suggest more about their unique position in electoral politics than they do about the factors shaping women’s candidacies.3 Moving away from relying solely on binary comparisons that illustrate how different women are from co-​racial men—​which implicitly assumes men are the baseline, but only within their racial groups—​allows the data to reveal that levels of ambition for officeholding may be insufficiently delineated by gender alone. This finding is an opportunity to reconsider the primacy of ambition’s role in candidate emergence, and the utility of treating it as an isolated variable. Instead, decentering the role of individual-​level factors like ambition in candidate emergence creates theoretical space for the important contexts and institutional and structural concerns raised by many of the Asian American women and men and Latina/​os I interviewed. For members of groups who have widespread access to realistic electoral opportunities, seeing yourself in

Candidacy in Contexts  51 office may seem to be a sufficient condition to mobilize individuals toward candidacy. Among groups whose political opportunities are more explicitly constrained by intersecting social hierarchies, that is less likely to be the case. “Seeing yourself ” in office is also a reflective behavior (Phillips, 1998; Tate, 2003). White men are the modal type of descriptive representative in state legislatures and politics more broadly, and potential candidates from that group regularly see people who share their demographic characteristics in office. For Latinas, Latinos, Asian American women and men, and other marginalized groups, who also widely perceive that white men are the modal type of representative, that reflective affirmation is missing in many geographies and elected bodies. This view of yourself as viable and legitimate as a candidate and elected official can be powerful, but when it comes to the factors that shape who gets on the ballot, for many candidates it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Fitting into Real Life: Constraints, Resources, and Disruption When I asked respondents why other people they knew, who might be viable candidates, were not running, several Latinas and Asian American women talked about the notion that women need to be asked to run in order to increase their presence on the ballot. Research-​based findings showing that women are encouraged to run less often than men (Sanbonmatsu, Carroll, & Walsh, 2010; Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013; Lawless & Fox, 2004) have often been taken up by advocacy groups and training programs as offering a straightforward solution to underrepresentation. For example, the list of action items on the website of a national training program for female candidates states: “Ask a woman to run: Play a role in solving gender inequality simply by asking a woman of action in your life to consider a run for office (Sheshouldrun.org, 2020). Several respondents said they saw a limited payoff for this widely popular idea:4 This whole notion of having to ask a woman seven times to run. That was never my case, but I get it. But we need to be smarter than them . . . Not everyone is cut out for this . . . we have to be realistic and make sure that we’re looking for the right woman to do this. I mean, someone . . . who is not gonna be offended by some trashy article in the newspaper, someone

52  Nowhere to Run who’s gonna be able to take the hits and sustain the hits of a nasty campaign, someone who’s gonna have the support of her spouse or her significant other that’s going to be okay with you dragging them all through the spotlight even though they didn’t sign up for this. This is all stuff that men don’t have to take into consideration. . . . They probably have someone perfect at home taking care of all the stuff that needs to be taken care of. Women have so much more to work through . . . you have to have the support and the network that’s gonna help you stay there because you can’t do it by yourself.

The Latina political elite who made these comments was underscoring two points about the potential limits of asking women to run as a way to “solve gender inequality.” First, she was concerned about whether a candidate who had to be asked to run seven times is actually viable. The issues she raises related to this point are precisely the concerns that have been documented in earlier studies of women’s reported hesitations to get on the ballot—​being subjected to “nasty” campaigning, public scrutiny of your family, and how it might all affect the people you care about (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013; Kanthak & Woon, 2015; Fulton et al., 2006). Carroll & Sanbonmatsu’s (2013) emphasis on this constellation of issues is an important step in the right direction of expanding the analytical scope of salient concerns in candidate emergence. However, this candidate’s second point raises a distinct set of issues and offers a nuanced extension of Carroll and Sanbonmatsu’s notion that the web of relationships surrounding potential candidates tends to weigh more heavily in women’s decisions than men’s. The respondent points out that the relationships that are most important to candidates are tied to social structures that provide asymmetrical support to men and women. In her telling, personal relationships and the way they structure candidate’s lives are equally relevant to understanding men and women’s candidacy. She observes that for men, those relationships tend to be a resource, while for women, they tend to act as a constraint. In her view, stressing the importance of asking women to run misses this larger point.

Constraints and Structural Disruption The ways in which personal relationships and arrangements shape candidacy are socially specific. And, their relevance to candidate emergence

Candidacy in Contexts  53 defies single-​dimensional categorization. To illustrate, ALS respondents were asked to identify the top four considerations that pushed them toward, or pulled them away, from affirmatively deciding to run for the state legislature. The four most frequently selected choices by each group are listed in Table 3.1. Responsibilities and priorities related to domestic arrangements and immediate personal relationships were included in the most frequent choices for all groups. There is some variation in the concentration of these intimate and domestic concerns across groups, but that variation is not neatly explained based on gender alone. Among the groups at the heart of this study, for example, Asian American women, Asian American men, and Latinos all identified their spouse’s support and domestic commitments as among their top concerns. The mix of top considerations reported by Latinas looks decidedly different and places a stronger emphasis on representation, which is in line with expectations from earlier scholarship on Latina candidates and officeholders (Garcìa et al., 2008; Jaramillo, 2008; Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016). At first, this result, that men often reported concern about domestic arrangements and intimate relationships to a similar or even higher degree than some women, was a surprise given the extant literature’s emphasis on women’s intimate relationships in their decisions to run. One possible explanation may be related to Hardy-​Fanta’s finding that women of color state legislators in their dataset were married at lower rates than men of color (2016). That may help explain rates of Spouse Approval being high for Latinos, but not making the top four considerations for Latinas. I would caution, however, that Latinas and Asian American women that I interviewed had meaningful family relationships that weighed heavily on their decisions, outside of heterosexual, traditional family units. A number of women were unmarried but had dependents, or caretaking responsibilities for people other than their own children. Furthermore, as I conducted more interviews with Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men about the decision to run, the dynamism of this factor in candidate emergence became increasingly salient. On the one hand, nearly all potential candidates have a personal life that matters to them. On the other hand, Asian American men and Latinos in this study tend to be in economic and social positions such that their personal relationships and domestic arrangements are either a neutral concern or a positive resource in determining their readiness to take up strategic electoral opportunities and become candidates.5 For Latinas and Asian

54  Nowhere to Run Table 3.1.  Top Four Considerations when Deciding to Run, Percent African American Women

African American Men

Asian American Women

Asian American Men

Strong Voice (91)

Job Time (75)

Policy (72) Campaign Money (46) Job Time/​ Shared Race (36) N = 11

Strong Voice (50) Spouse Approval (45) Shared Race (45)

Spouse Approval (91) Strong Voice (64) Family Time (55)

Spouse Approval (64) Job Time (61) Family Money (57)

Campaign Money (46) N = 12

Campaign Money (46) N = 29

Latinas Strong Voice (67)

White Women Job Time (63)

White Men Job Time (66)

Job Time (62)

Latinos Spouse Approval (64) Job Time (52)

Shared Race (52) Policy (38) N = 20

Family Money (40) Strong Voice (40) N = 52

Spouse Approval (61) Strong Voice (56) Policy (54) N = 114

Spouse Approval (65) Strong Voice (52) Policy (48) N = 259

N = 20

Note: The following are the considerations for respondents to choose from in response to the survey question “Which of the following considerations were most important to you when you were deciding whether to run? Choose up to four. •  Having sufficient financial resources to conduct a campaign. •  Approval of my spouse or partner. •  Ensuring that I have time to meet my family commitments. •  Having sufficient financial resources to support my family. •  •  •  •  • 

Having an occupation that would allow me the time and flexibility to run for office. Having a shared racial, ethnic, or cultural background with many of my constituents. Making sure that people like me have a strong voice in government. Being able to address a key public policy issue. Other _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​”

American women, domestic arrangements and intimate relationships were more likely to be characterized as a constraint on their availability to become candidates. One Latina candidate related a recent conversation about the way a “glossy ad family life” can function differently for women and men. She was frank that navigating a home, husband, and children as a public official and candidate was challenging and likely made other women think twice about

Candidacy in Contexts  55 running. Her assessment of how that same domestic situation benefited men was a sharp contrast: He just happens to have a wife that’s okay with him not being home four days out of the week and taking care of all the shit for him. That’s the only difference. That’s it. He gets to have a family. Who knows if it’s perfect? We don’t know that. We don’t know if she’s happy. Who knows and who cares?

Her description taps into a wider body of research on the domestic arrangements of household labor among married heterosexual couples. There is extensive evidence that women do much more domestic work than men (Bianchi et al., 2000; Pew Research Center, 2015), even when they work outside the home at similar rates. Thus, when men run, the time required to campaign and serve may rarely require as much of a shift in the structure of their home lives—​personal and family systems are likely already in place for their wives to take on the majority of the burden of domestic life. Men may be concerned about their spouse’s approval for many reasons, including that a spouse may be required to take up an even larger share of domestic responsibilities (both financial and care-​based) in order for men to run and serve. For women who run, however, being available to run and serve often requires upheaval of current systems surrounding domestic life that are already in place. In interviews with Asian American women and Latina candidates, they often emphasized the number of essential jobs women already held before running for office. One Asian American woman legislator described the push and pull she felt from her family life: I mean, the many roles that particularly women wear. You’re a parent, you’re a caregiver, my mother lives with us. I’m a professional —, so you have your own career going on. Trying to squeeze in being a legislator, it really weighs in heavily. It is all encompassing, you either are in it 100% or you shouldn’t be in it. I made sacrifices and missed some times with my kids, but I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t have a whole support system step in.

This respondent’s husband drastically changed the roles he played in their domestic life in order to facilitate the flexibility she needed to run and serve. Many other legislators, with less “traditional” household composition, also assemble non traditional support systems in order to serve. A Latina legislator

56  Nowhere to Run who is unmarried and has small children described extensive measures she took to create two care systems for her children, both in the capital and far away in their home district. When she decided to run, she faced enormous pressure to keep her children in the home district while she served. But when she spoke to her children about the possibility of serving in the legislature, and her being away from them for long stretches, they resisted. So, she agreed that they could live with her in the capital when the legislature was in session, but school was not. She said that from then on, every day was “all hands on deck; who’s taking the kids?” They were cared for and shuttled around by a coterie of grandparents, aunts, uncles, comadres, and staffers. While many Latinas and Asian American women described their domestic lives in terms of disruption (and reconfiguration), none of them expressed any surprise at the lengths to which they had to go. They expected running and serving as public officials, and as women with traditional family roles, to be very hard. Several shared stories of the perils and pratfalls of campaigning while heavily pregnant. Still others talked about the particular challenges that mothers face as candidates and public officials as part of a long list of typical things in a day that are tough. As one candidate reflected on a particularly stressful time in her campaign, her struggles as a mother were folded in alongside the work of being a public figure: “I’ve been serving on . . . busting my ass, pardon my French, taking shots from the unions, and standing up for my constituents, breastfeeding in . . . meetings, and trying to figure out my babysitting situations when all hell breaks loose . . .” A number of Latina and Asian American women legislators I interviewed spoke of intimate relationships and domestic arrangements as a type of prospective constraint on candidacy. One Latina candidate said that what was hard about deciding whether to run was the way that becoming a candidate “puts a mirror up to yourself . . . I wasn’t married, and had no children, so I had to think about putting that on the back burner, because my baby is going to be my district.” This also came up when I asked interview respondents whether there were Asian Americans or Latina/​os whom they thought should be running for office, but who were not, and why. Several said that they did know Asian American women or Latinas who would be viable and successful, but among the reasons they were not running was a concern about delaying or changing plans related to their intimate relationships. They recalled potential candidates worrying that they might not find a male partner willing to live with a woman in public life; others were concerned that they might have

Candidacy in Contexts  57 to put off running until they could present a specific domestic image to the public of themselves as wives. More than once, I was told about women who were thinking about running for an office but were scared to tell their boyfriend or fiancé. Both Latinas and Asian American women often intertwined descriptions of these pressures and social expectations with remarks about what they saw as a particular intensity around gender roles in their own ethnic and racial communities. This included statements to the effect of “well, you know that is how we were taught women should act in the Korean community” or “Mexican women are supposed to do this.” Importantly, these female respondents were also cognizant of the expectations of men in their communities, making statements such as “this is how Latinos have to establish themselves” and “Asian men have to be the provider.” The enactment of these roles, and the household infrastructure and relationships tied to them, was rarely described as only being “about” women or men, and it was much more often understood as integral to racial and ethnic identity as well. Thus, the sense of potential disruption and constraint that Latinas and Asian American women tied to their relationships encompassed their positioning within their intimate circle, as well as their status as women within their racial or ethnic group.

Silence and Gratitude When I interviewed Latino and Asian American men, the tone of discussion about their personal lives and relationships was quite different. A number of men said that they were “grateful” to have a wife, or fiancé or partner, who supported the long hours of campaigning or served as ad hoc staff in moments of crisis. Several also said that they consulted with women they were intimately involved with or close to when deciding whether to run for a particular office. For the most part, however, the men I interviewed were silent about their domestic arrangements and intimate relationships when it came to describing the key factors that shaped their decision to run.6 Given the data at hand, this silence makes some intuitive sense. Traditional gender roles and expectations serve as a structural and material resource in shaping heterosexual Latino and Asian American men’s access to electoral opportunities. Expectations that women will serve as primary caregivers to children and the home facilitate a degree of freedom for men to arrange their

58  Nowhere to Run lives around officeholding, or have the flexibility to take up an electoral opportunity when it arises. This creates a qualitative difference in the amount of “space” that Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men must typically make in their lives, in order for the option of running for a particular seat to be on the table. For Latinos and Asian American men, their personal lives and relationships are important to them, but fitting in campaigning and serving did not often require them to be upended to the same extent. Thus, in our interviews about the major concerns that pushed them toward or pulled them away from running, it is perhaps unsurprising that these relationships and arrangements did not rise to the level of importance that other factors did, such as being connected to other co-​ethnic men in politics or being in the right district at the right time. Finally, there is another set of resources that bear directly on the preceding discussion of race-​gender differences: personal and family wealth. In the general population, Asian American women and Latinas, like other women of color, earn less on average than co-​racial men, and in some cases, men from other racial groups (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). While most candidates and potential candidates I interviewed talked about their personal finances in ways that suggested they were able to meet basic needs, it is reasonable to assume that race and gender disparities in earnings and wealth may partly shape which groups think seriously about public office more often.7 For example, in describing the personal toll that campaigning had taken on an Asian American male candidate for the legislature, one consultant described how agonizing it was for the candidate to take out a second mortgage on his house to fund the campaign. The financial risk surely weighed heavily on the candidate and his family, but generating that financial boost in order to keep the campaign going required that he own significant assets to begin with. Candidates spoke about their existing financial resources mostly in terms of being able to maintain their careers while meeting the demands of public life, and in differing claims on the money they had. The availability of existing financial resources, and how they are deployed to support candidacy, is connected to the race-​gendered structures that shape relationships and households. For example, the domestic upheavals I described earlier among Latina and Asian American women candidates with children were often managed by transferring unpaid caretaking labor to others. This was more frequently the case among legislators who come from less lucrative professions such as K–​12 education or nonprofit work.

Candidacy in Contexts  59 Female candidates and legislators who maintain professions in corporate leadership or as attorneys often described a more clear ability to “buy their way out” of domestic labor. That capacity does not eliminate the potential for social censure but may be especially important to Asian American women and Latinas (relative to Asian American men and Latinos, respectively), who are likely to shoulder a larger share of domestic responsibilities, even in the highest tiers of income earners (Bianchi et al., 2012). Asian American women and Latinas reported a set of demands on their assets and wealth tied to domestic arrangements that men from these racial groups did not bring up in interviews. This distinction in spending needs highlights one way in which traditional gender roles and personal relationships can facilitate the candidacies of Asian American men and Latinos and constrain the candidacies of Asian American women and Latinas. The latter repeatedly raised issues that illuminate the dynamic effects that relationships and domestic arrangements can have on becoming a candidate. In one set of cases, many raised concerns about fulfilling social expectations rooted in gender, race, and community. In another, Latina and Asian American women legislators with dependents frequently discussed disrupting and rearranging their domestic lives when they won office, because they were the logistical centers of their households. These concerns were distinct from whether the respondents wanted to serve or thought they were qualified—​for them race-​gendered divisions of domestic labor and social roles were an explicit factor in whether they saw an electoral opportunity as something their lives could materially accommodate.

“It’s Not Just Me out There:” Self-​Recognition, Obligation, and Ambivalence As the last section underscored, potential candidates for elected office have full lives. Choosing to run involves trading off time and resources from other pursuits that may be more immediately lucrative and encroach less on personal pursuits. The results thus far prompt returning to a question from the beginning of this chapter: why would anyone encourage another person to take on this life? Among a number of the Latina and Asian American women I interviewed, their own recognition of their status as members of socially salient groups—​immigrants, Latinas, women of color, for example—​was a persuasive push toward candidacy (Latinos and Asian American men

60  Nowhere to Run sometimes raised their belonging to similar groups during our conversations, but rarely as a central part of their decision to run for office.) When interview respondents viewed themselves as tied to a socially marginalized group, their discussion of the candidate decision-​making process also tended to shift from one that was solely or primarily based on an individual-​level assessment of opportunity—​how would running and serving affect me, my family, my job, my prestige—​to an assessment where the expectations and internal dynamics of a broader community weighed heavily. These distinctions in what motivates members of different groups to run are clear in survey data that asked respondents to identify the single most important reason they ran for the state legislature, other than having an ability to affect policy. Other than influencing policy, wanting to represent others is arguably the most socially desirable response when asking elected officials why they ran for office. This question offers two response choices regarding representation. One choice says “I wanted to represent communities that have not traditionally had a strong voice in government” and cues historically marginalized groups. The other choice, “I wanted to make sure that people like me have a real say in government,” cues the respondent’s own identity and group membership (Table 3.2). The most concentrated response frequencies overall for this question are among groups of respondents who identified representation of historically underrepresented communities as the primary motivation for running—​ including nearly half of Latinas. Regardless of whether respondents in these groups consider themselves included in the “historically underrepresented,” the lopsided rates of this choice suggest that politically marginalized Table 3.2.  “What Was the Single Most Important Reason that You Ran?

African American Women African American Men Asian American Women Asian American Men Latinas Latinos White Women White Men

“Represent: Historically Marginalized”

“Represent: People Like Me”

45 50 17 14 40 24 19 17

18 15 25 11 25 20 19 24

Candidacy in Contexts  61 groups are particularly salient in the decision to run for Latinas. Across all respondents, there is not a clear-​cut or consistent gender difference across racial groups, or racial difference across women or men. Asian American men are polar opposites of Latinas; nearly two-​thirds of Latinas selected a representation-​linked response, while Asian American men chose those responses far less frequently than any other group. Latinos and Asian American women were somewhat in the middle of these frequencies.

Self-​Recognition as a Member of the Immigrant Community Responses to this motivation question also tap into patterns of self-​ recognition that reappeared frequently in interviews. Self-​recognition is a critical thread that runs through feminist scholars’ analyses of Black, Latina, and Asian American women’s political activism and theorizing (Brown, 2014b; Collins, 1990; Pardo, 1998; Espiritu, 1997; Glenn, 2002). This concept includes defining yourself as an autonomous individual (and not merely a collection of stereotypes based on your gender and race) as well as recognizing that your personhood is informed by how you are connected and proximate to other people (Collins, 1990; De Veaux, 1994). As one Latina candidate put it, “it’s not just me out there, even when it is just me out there.” Among a number of respondents, immigrant communities were often the wider group that they had in mind when deciding to run. They recognized their current roles in society and the economy as in large part a product of immigration. Some expressed a feeling of being connected to others in an immigrant community who had not achieved the same level of social or economic incorporation as themselves. Several Latinas and Asian American women, for example, spoke at length about the economic and social challenges they or their parents faced as new arrivals in the United States. One Latina candidate talked about how the accident of her arriving last among her siblings in the United States had meant that all the family-​level mistakes of navigating public schools with limited English skills had already been made. She said that the cost of those mistakes for her brother “really screwed him up” for the rest of his life. These stories were often told as a way of explaining how they were the ones “who made it out,” and by extension, that they were obligated to others who did not go to college or have the resources to be civically active outside of their home.

62  Nowhere to Run Another theme relating motivation to run to self-​recognition as a member of a wider immigrant community was a sense of debt to the United States. After listing her worries about public speaking, and deficit of knowledge about the policymaking process, one Asian American woman shared that the key things that pushed her to run were the opportunity to represent her community and her sense of personal indebtedness to the United States: I came to this country as an immigrant. This country afforded me so many enormous opportunities for my siblings, myself, my dad and my mom. And I can’t think of any better way to pay that back than public service.

In interviewing Asian American women and men, Latinas and Latinos, I found that Asian American women and Latinas tended to talk about their candidacy decisions in the context of these group concerns much more consistently than Asian American men and Latinos. This was true not only for dimensions of their identities tied to immigrant communities, but also as members of racial minority groups and as women. These findings extend extant scholarship on elected officials of color who see themselves as representing the interests of group members outside of their direct constituency (Minta, 2011; Tate, 2003; Cruz Takash, 1993; Sierra, 2010) as well as research arguing that Latinas tend to conceptualize their political activism as serving the needs of a larger community (Hardy-​Fanta, 1993; Pardo, 1998; Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016). Consciousness of their own marginalized group membership can help potential candidates perceive a specific benefit for their communities that may be achieved by running, winning, and/​or serving. In this formulation, the salience of membership in a marginalized group, or multiple marginalized groups, exerts a positive force on a potential candidate’s capacity to act on an electoral opportunity, even as other structural and social forces related to membership in that same group or groups may push in the opposite direction. Respondents’ characterizations of their immigrant background as a motivating factor in interviews was distinctly race-​gendered. Asian American women emphasized their feelings of indebtedness to the United States and tended to characterize Asian Americans as a group that struggled but had ultimately benefited from immigration policies. Latinas tended to talk more in terms of seeking justice as a member of a racialized immigrant community. Latinos often raised immigration issues as a policy matter but rarely

Candidacy in Contexts  63 brought up immigrant identities when talking about their decision to become candidates. When Asian American men did raise group membership, they very rarely talked about immigrant identity as a motivation. Instead, as the next section shows, immigrant identity was most salient for them as a constraint on candidacy. While recognition of the self as part of a community can be a motivational resource, it can also enact a sense of obligation to fulfill particular expectations of success, or deep ambivalence about pursuing public office instead of other professional and political avenues.8

Obligation, Guilt, and the Complexity of Group Consciousness While many Asian American women and Latinas I interviewed said they felt a “responsibility” to run because of their community ties, a number also used “guilt” to describe the way they navigated social expectations rooted in their status as immigrants or members of their ethnic groups. Like any strongly held emotion or attitude, a strong sense of group membership often engaged a complex set of considerations for potential candidates. As mentioned earlier, several Latinas had concerns about the way that candidacy would disrupt plans for marriage, childbearing, and caretaking roles. They outlined social costs for disregarding or reorganizing these roles in order to run and serve in the legislature. Other Latina and Asian American women respondents also related the necessity of making people “comfortable” with their public roles in their own communities. One respondent described this process this way: Even though we’re doing all this stuff during the day, they still see us with our families at the park, and we’re keeping it together . . . [and] they’re sort of like, “Oh, yeah, she’s a politician, but she’s not that bad because . . . her kids still play soccer with my kids, and she still makes it to the soccer games, and we still see her at church—​not every Sunday, but every other Sunday.”

This heightened awareness of community expectations also extended into the professional realm for a number of interview respondents. Asian American women and men, and Latinas and Latinos, related concerns about living up to the expectations of their communities and families by achieving specific markers of professional and financial success. Along the same lines, several of these markers were related to working in professions that were considered

64  Nowhere to Run respectable by their respective ethnic communities or “worth” the sacrifices their parents had made in immigrating to the United States. To illustrate, during the course of interviews, Asian American women and men sometimes made explicit statements to the effect of “well, you know, running for office isn’t part of our culture.” When I followed up and asked exactly what that meant, respondents described the idea of running for office as pushing against widely held expectations for success in their communities. It wasn’t something that came naturally to me as an Asian American, running for office . . . it’s just not in our, or at least in the way I was raised. In our values, or in what our community kind of appreciates. They want to see you work hard, care about your family, you know provide a living, provide job security, which this job doesn’t have . . . you can get fired pretty frequently. You know Asian Americans are very merit based: you work hard, you do well, you study, you should reap the rewards of that. That’s not necessarily how politics works sometimes and that’s challenging for folks in our community, my family to understand. It’s not ingrained in the nature of how we were raised, to make that leap.

According to this respondent and others, the “culture” is one that celebrates a specific set of personal and professional achievements and avoids risks that may derail multigenerational efforts to build the resources leading up to them. Being a lawyer, doctor, or engineer is relatively low risk in these terms. These professions represent steady financial gain and make explicit use of advanced education. Running for office may put those trained professions on the back-​burner and may be perceived as encroaching on the social and economic roles Asian American men or women feel expected to fulfill. Echoes of related ideas were also present in statements from Latinas and Latinos who had achieved advanced educations or held prestigious professional positions where they were frequently cognizant that there were very few Latinas or Latinos. One Latina respondent who was raised in a working-​ class immigrant neighborhood said that one notion she had to confront in running to represent her childhood district was how hard she and her family had worked to ensure she “made it out. Success is seen as leaving and never coming back from a community like this.” These narratives point to the distinct pressures that membership in immigrant communities may confer on potential candidates, and they suggest a more holistic understanding of occupational “prestige” as a factor

Candidacy in Contexts  65 in candidate emergence (Githens & Prestage, 1977; King, 1975; Darcy & Hadley, 1988 Moncrief et al., 1991). Awareness of their communities’ expectations and struggles are with potential candidates as they work through their education and careers. It makes sense that that awareness also follows them into the decision to run for office. Statements from respondents in this study support Hardy-​Fanta and coauthors’ (2016) contention that occupational achievements as they relate to candidacy are “dynamic . . . and rooted in group efforts within a contested political arena rather than in the individual alone.” For some groups connected to immigrant communities, conventional markers of professional success and prestige may cut both ways, simultaneously providing material resources that facilitate candidacy, and causing hesitation in a person who views their achievements as deeply tied to obligations and efforts within their wider community.

Ambivalence and Electoral Politics as a Venue for Group Empowerment Potential candidates for whom group identities as immigrants, women, or racial minorities are particularly salient face a complex push and pull in weighing whether to get on the ballot. Several Latina and Asian American women respondents, for example, described a deep sense of ambivalence about running for elected office, because they were already working to advance their communities’ interests through activism, advocacy, or nonprofit work. Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men have distinct political practices and modes of activism, orientations toward formal political institutions, and access to mediating institutions (Gay & Tate, 1998; Hardy-​ Fanta, 19933; Jaramillo, 2010; Jones-​Correa & Leal, 1996; Montoya, Hardy-​ Fanta, & Garcia, 2000; Pardo, 1998; Cruz Takash, 1993). These differences can inform whether or not an individual sees electoral politics as an appropriate, or effective, venue for their political leadership. In practice, this can also mean that women in these groups may often view running for office as a typically male, or self-​centered, approach to serving the community. To illustrate, when I asked respondents why they thought some women who should be running were not, several stated that the women they had in mind were “too busy” running nonprofit groups or legal clinics. Among female respondents who became candidates after working in these sectors

66  Nowhere to Run themselves, many shared that they ultimately decided that becoming a candidate was a way to extend their work as advocates. Their sense was that if they came from a community they saw as largely voiceless in policymaking, and they had a legitimate opportunity to speak up as candidates, they would be unable to “face the others” if they declined. However, they also expressed that while trying to decide whether to run, their feelings went back and forth repeatedly as they considered the shift from community-​based work and activism to laboring inside a system that had often frustrated their efforts. This ambivalence played a direct role in the extent to which electoral politics seemed practically worthwhile, in light of their political goals for themselves and their communities.

Conclusion Individual-​level considerations like ambition and family relationships can inform whether potential candidates decide to run, but they tell an incomplete story of the central factors that shape candidate emergence. The results in this chapter show that a more expansive, intersectional framework is necessary to identify the complex underpinnings that determine who is on the ballot, where, and when. A limited vision of oneself as a potential candidate is not a uniformly, or universally, important element in explaining variations in candidate emergence. As Carroll and Sanbonmatsu (2013) and Hardy-​ Fanta et al. (2016) point out, there is more than one pathway to become a candidate. This chapter refines and extends those claims for Latina/​os and Asian American women and men. The household and personal structures that support intimate relationships are relevant to understanding the emergence of both women and men from these groups. These are dynamic factors in candidate development processes and can serve as both resource and constraint for potential candidates. However, these tendencies are not randomly distributed, as the constraints tend to fall much more frequently on Latinas and Asian American women. In assessing similar dynamics in their own study, Hardy-​Fanta et al. (2016) described a “mixed” and “confusing portrait” of advantage and disadvantage at the intersection of race and gender. I argue that these dynamics are complex, but not fixed, and become more clear when we account for a multiplicity of contexts. A key thread running through this analysis is that individuals deciding to run for office are not doing so in a vacuum. Each person

Candidacy in Contexts  67 is socially and politically positioned in a context full of social institutions and relationships, and that positioning is determined by intimate-​, group-​, and more macro-​level considerations. Within these contexts, many candidates I interviewed recognized themselves as members of socially salient communities, but that self-​recognition played very different roles in shaping candidacy across groups. Among Asian American men, for example, discussions of their identities as immigrants or Asian Americans were about meeting expectations of their families or community. Latinas, in contrast, spoke about the challenges of meeting intersectional expectations as women, immigrants, and racial minorities and shared that those expectations not only shaped their decision to run for a particular seat, but in some cases also bent the arc of their professional and personal lives away from being able to run for office. For those Latinas, seeing themselves as responsible for representing the broader communities they identify with served as both a resource and a challenge for navigating political structures and social institutions that are designed around the candidacies of (typically white) men. Advantages and disadvantages are sustained by informal institutions and deeply ingrained social expectations, but individuals do act in ways that demonstrate their agency. And, as with other aspects of political activity, the choices and arrangements a potential candidate sees as beneficial in one context may look very different in another. In much of the race and ethnic politics literature, a single dimension of the context has often been central to understanding candidate emergence for men and women of color: the racial composition of a district. Assessments of how “strategic” an electoral opportunity is have largely been treated with a uniform assumption across groups—​the more densely populated with people of color a district is, the better an opportunity it is for a man or woman of color to run and win. This chapter’s demonstration of the ways in which a potential candidacy can be constrained or facilitated by different aspects of an individuals’ life undermines the expectation that a single variable, like racial composition, will have the same effects across groups. The challenges, structures, and advantages that shape a person’s pathway to officeholding are distinct, even for women and men from the same racial group or cross-racial groups of men or women. A reconceptualization of the “power” of larger minority populations in advancing candidacy, which recognizes intersectional realities, is long overdue.

4 Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny Many candidates and political elites I interviewed were blunt about how the racial composition of a district shapes electoral opportunity. The idea that a significant co-​racial or nonwhite population is crucial for Latina/​o and Asian American success was powerful. Some emphasized voter turnout. As one respondent put it, “it’s just numbers. And we [Latinos] have the numbers.” Other respondents focused more on the resources and networks that are often tied to those types of districts. One donor explained that Asian American candidates need “that base, that core” of an Asian American community to convince organizations and donors that they are good investments. These narratives were common throughout interviews and mirror the “strength in numbers” framework that political scientists have often deployed to analyze the candidacies and representation of Black and, more recently, Latina/​o and Asian American communities (Branton, 2009; Juenke, 2014; Shah, 2014). However, this focus on the political potential of a single dimension of identity—​race—​misses a key caveat to the assumed relationship between populations and the types of people they elect: I show in this chapter that larger co-​racial proportions of the district population are much more robustly tied to the candidacy and election of Latinos and Asian American men than Latinas and Asian American women.1 The race-​gendered nature of this result is the product of simultaneous and interactive processes. Districts encompassing a significant nonwhite population are a rare opportunity for Latina/​o and Asian American communities in electoral politics. That status raises the stakes among Latina/​o and Asian American political elites in those types of districts, generating race-​gendered pressures that have been unaccounted for in the literature on majority-​ minority districts. In districts that may be widely considered “a Latino seat” or a “minority seat,” Latinas and Asian American women often navigate precarious social positioning relative to elite men and struggle to be recognized as potential candidates. At the same time, the distinctly race-​gendered structure of relationships and self-​recognition outlined in Chapter 3 informs potential candidates’ own views of their capacity to fit elected office into their Nowhere to Run. Christian Dyogi Phillips, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538937.003.0004

70  Nowhere to Run lives. As a result, Latinas and Asian American women face overlapping and intersecting constraints on opportunity—​in the very districts that are widely seen as the best hope for increasing the diversity of candidates and representatives.

Geographic Opportunity Is Foregrounded by Race Discussions of the geography of realistic electoral opportunity among political elites are often foregrounded by the racial composition of districts. The presence, or relative dearth, of communities that share potential candidates’ races and ethnicities sends important signals about the contours of competition in a given district—​the likely partisanship of voters,2 prospects for turnout during elections, resources necessary to mobilize certain groups, media market engagement, and so on. Scholarship on minority voting behavior has often provided empirical validation for elites’ prospective inclinations in this vein (Barreto, Segura, & Woods, 2004; Bobo & Gilliam, 1990; Gay, 2001a; Wong, 2008). Most Latina/​ o and Asian American candidates were frank during interviews about their assumption that a substantial minority or co-​racial population was a necessary condition for a district that they considered a viable opportunity. One Asian American candidate said, “I knew I wouldn’t get elected if I lived there [a majority-​white district without a significant Asian American population], so I didn’t think about running until I had moved.” In another interview, a Latina candidate pointed out that having a large Latina/​ o community in the district meant not only potential votes, but also campaign volunteers from among the informal networks of Latinas she thought would connect personally to her.3 The net balance of these signals has often been the assumption that districts which have a significant or majority–​ racial minority population are a better bet for candidates of color, regardless of gender, relative to majority-​white districts.4 That assumption is supported by the Gender, Race, and Communities on Elections (GRACE) data on the mean proportions of district populations that share winning candidates’ race, and the mean nonwhite population proportions (Table 4.1). Theoretically, since members of any of the race-​ gendered groups in this study live in all 50 states, it is technically possible that descriptive representatives from any of those groups could become candidates and win in a wide array of districts across the country. In practice,

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  71 Table 4.1.  Mean Racial Population Proportions for Winning Candidates, Open Seats, 1996–​2015

African American Women African American Men Asian American Women Asian American Men Latinas Latinos White Women White Men

Co-​Racial Population Percent

Nonwhite Population Percent

54.3 53.6 31.5 35.1 48.5 50.2 79.8 80.8

67.9 66.5 48.7 50.5 61.8 61.2 17.3 16.4

however, even casual observers of politics may discern that some districts tend to foster the election of certain types of candidates over others, above and beyond partisanship. Within each racial group, women and men tend to win in districts that are quite similar in their racial composition. Across racial groups, women and men tend to win elections in which they share a racial background with a significant proportion of the district (Table 4.1). Over the course of two decades of elections, just over 2 percent of all open state legislative election victories by any nonwhite candidates occurred in majority-​white districts (GRACE). This consistency underscores the critical role that district racial composition plays in candidacy decisions for Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men. As a result, the way racial populations are arrayed across district boundaries directly affects the geography of electoral opportunity for these candidates. That geography is marked by limitation and constraint for nonwhites.

Predominantly White Districts Dominate State Legislative Elections The predominance of white-​majority populations across districts is a central feature of the landscape of electoral opportunities for Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men thinking of becoming candidates. In most state legislative districts, most of the time, white populations are the

72  Nowhere to Run 65,648

Total Number of State Legislative Candidacies 1996–2015 (In thousands)

60

50

40

30

25,830

20

8,482

10

9,989

4,443 0 Q1

Q2 Q3 Q4 White Proportion of District Population by Quintile

Q5

Figure 4.1.  White Proportions of State Legislative Election District Populations, with Total Number of Candidacies by Quintile.

overwhelming majority of district residents. The histogram in Figure 4.1 illustrates the distribution of white district population proportions in all of the state legislative general elections from 1996 to 2015, and the number of total candidacies in each quintile is at the top of each bar. If we treat each candidacy as an individual electoral opportunity, this figure shows that three-​quarters of all electoral opportunities occurred in predominantly white districts (Quintiles 4 and 5, with white population proportions that are 60 percent or more).5 The median white proportion of the population for all state legislative district elections was 83 percent. Figure 4.1 uses data pooled from elections spanning three different iterations of state legislative district lines, but cross-​sectional histograms from each decennial iteration of redistricting show similar patterns (appendices). The general skew of Figure 4.1 is widespread in states across the country, and similarly pronounced in present-​ day configurations of districts. Following the implementation of newly drawn districts after the 2010 census, the median white proportion of state legislative districts is now 73 percent. In all but a handful of states, more than 60 percent of all state legislative districts encompass a majority-​white population (Table 4.2).

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  73 Table 4.2.  Percent of State Legislative Districts with Majority-​White Populations post–​2010 Census, by State Idaho Maine New Hampshire Vermont West Virginia Iowa Oregon Wyoming North Dakota Nebraska Kentucky Utah

100 100 100 100 100 99 99 99 98 96 95 95

South Dakota Montana Minnesota Washington Wisconsin Indiana Kansas

93 94 93 92 91 90 90

Oklahoma Missouri Pennsylvania Ohio Massachusetts

89 89 88 88 88

Michigan Arkansas Tennessee Colorado Rhode Island Alaska Virginia Delaware Connecticut North Carolina Alabama New Jersey New York

86 85 85 85 83 82 76 80 79 77 74 65 66

South Carolina Florida Illinois Arizona Georgia Mississippi Nevada Maryland Texas

72 69 68 63 63 67 57 59 51

New Mexico California Hawaii

33 33 3

Figure 4.2 presents a more spatially oriented rendering of how white populations are arrayed across districts. It maps out the proportion of state legislative districts, in each state, that currently include majority-​white populations. There are three states in which less than half of the districts are

0–50

51–75

76–100

Percent of Legislative Districts with Majority White Populations

Figure 4.2.  Percent of Legislative Districts with Majority-​White Populations, by State.

74  Nowhere to Run majority white—​California, Hawaii, and New Mexico. In every other state, opportunities to run in districts that do not encompass a majority-​white population are relatively sparse. This is especially the case in the 19 states with the lightest shading—​90 percent or more of the districts in those states include majority-​white populations. That particular subset of states encompasses nearly 40 percent of the total number of state legislative seats in the nation (2,841 assembly and senate seats).6 The overwhelming number of majority-​white and predominantly white districts constrains the realistic field of electoral opportunities for Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men. District racial composition matters for all groups in this study, but the scope of districts meeting candidates’ frequent perceptions of the conditions that make winning more likely—​a large co-​racial population—​is heavily skewed toward white women and men. In most districts, in most states, white potential candidates do not have to consider appealing to a majority of constituents from a different racial background. The opposite is the case for Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men (and African American women and men). As a consequence of this skew, white women and men are relatively unfettered by race in their access to electoral opportunities at the state legislative level. Indeed, the presence of a significant proportion of the district population that shares your race appears to be a less relevant criterion for understanding where white men are viable candidates than it is for understanding others, precisely because they are overwhelmingly successful across a wide range of district types. In contrast, the range of electoral opportunities for strategic candidates who are Latinos, Latinas, and Asian American women and men are much more constrained. As Figure 4.2 demonstrates, there are wide swaths of the United States in which the candidacies of Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men are highly unlikely, in part because the racial composition of most districts makes running for office a strategically tenuous choice.

Different Strengths in Numbers: Race-​Gendered Relationships Between Populations and Electoral Opportunities Within those few districts where Latina/​o and Asian American candidates tend to get on the ballot, the narrow and often rocky pathways to candidacy

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  75 outlined in Chapter 3 suggest that electoral opportunities may not transpire in the same way for women and men, within and across racial groups. In other words, the district populations that would be talked about among political elites as “a solid Latino seat” or even a “minority district” are in reality more likely to be a Latino seat, rather than a seat that is equally likely to be held by a Latino or Latina. The same may be the case among Asian American women and men. To evaluate these potential differences, I estimate separate probit regression models of the likelihood that an Asian American woman, Asian American man, Latino, or Latina is a general election candidate, on increases in the proportion of the district population that shares their same race (Table 4.3). The dependent variable is binary, and equals 1 if a member of the group in question is on the general election ballot, and 0 if they are not. The unit of analysis is the election, and the model utilizes pooled data on winning candidates from 56,354 state legislative general elections from 1996 to 2015, with standard errors clustered by year.7 The main independent variables of interest are each racial group’s proportions of the district population, specific to each individual election. White proportion of the district population is the reference category and is omitted from the models. The other independent variables account for contextual factors that have figured prominently in the literature on women and racial minorities’ descriptive representation, such as unemployment, education rates and partisanship in the district, professionalization of the state legislature, presence of term limits, and measures of how contested the seat in question was.8 Several scholars have argued that multi-​member districts are a structural condition that improves women’s chances of representation in elected office (Darcy et al., 1985; King, 2002; Sanbonmatsu, 2006), so I also include a dummy variable for multi-​member districts in the model. The results in Table 4.3 undermine the assumption that a district with a significant or majority-​minority population is equally likely to facilitate the candidacy of a woman or man from a minority racial group. Increasingly large co-​racial population proportions are more robustly related to the presence of Latino and Asian American men on the ballot than co-​racial women. A phenomenon that has long been considered exclusively within a racialized context in political science—​explaining where candidates from different racial groups run and win—​is likely shaped simultaneously by race and gender. While other independent variables included in the models are significant, none approach the magnitude of coefficients for co-​racial

Table 4.3.  Likelihood of Presence on General Election Ballot Asian American Women

African American Population Percent Asian American Population Percent Latina/​o Population Percent Term Limits Legislative Professionalism District Republican Strength Open Seat Multi-​Member District Candidates per Seat Income College Education Unemployment Constant N * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001

Asian American Men

Latinas

Latinos

β/​se

β/​se

β/​se

β/​se

–​0.09

–​0.12

–​0.08

–​0.416***

(0.21) 4.205***

(0.12) 5.971***

(0.13) 0.737***

(0.07) –​0.097

(0.20) 0.311** (0.11) –​0.113** (0.04) 0.379* (0.16) –​0.101 (0.09) 0.136*** (0.03) 0.512*** (0.08) 0.037 (0.02) 0.010*** 0.00 –​0.632* (0.29) 0.030** (0.01) –​3.651*** (0.17) 56,354

(0.17) 0.258* (0.11) 0.016 (0.05) 0.254* (0.12) –​0.022 (0.06) 0.064 (0.06) 0.098** (0.04) 0.126*** (0.01) 0.006*** 0.00 –​1.025*** (0.22) 0.014** (0.01) –​3.119*** (0.07) 56,354

(0.21) 3.112*** (0.06) 0.173*** (0.03) 0.144 (0.11) –​0.265*** (0.05) 0.064** (0.02) 0.323*** (0.06) 0.110*** (0.01) 0.002 0.00 0.055 (0.15) –​0.006* 0.00 –​3.220*** (0.04) 56,354

(0.12) 4.136*** (0.06) 0.054* (0.02) 0.109 (0.06) –​0.224*** (0.05) 0.04 (0.03) –​0.076 (0.04) 0.152*** (0.01) 0.001* 0.00 0.399*** (0.10) –​0.009** 0.00 –​2.976*** (0.06) 56,354

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  77 populations. Alternative modeling specifications for the ballot presence models are discussed in the appendices and yield very similar results. When a similar model is estimated of the likelihood that an Asian American woman or man, or Latina or Latino, wins the election, conditional on their presence on the ballot in the first place, similar relationships between winning and co-​racial population proportions emerge (full results in the appendices). There are a number of reasons to assume that the race-​gendered characteristics of these candidate presence results are tightly linked to differences in ultimate electoral success. Women-​in-​politics scholars have repeatedly argued that “when women run, women win” just as often as similarly situated men (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013; Darcy & Schramm, 1977; Lawless & Fox, 2005; c.f. Pearson & Mcghee, 2013). Scholarship on candidates of color has also demonstrated that African American and Latino candidates are as successful as white candidates, conditional on their presence on the ballot (Branton, 2009; Juenke, 2014; Shah, 2014) Data on candidate success in the GRACE indicates that these patterns also hold true among Latina/​os and Asian American women and men. Rates of those candidates’ success, as well as those of all women and men across all general elections from 1996 to 2015, are reported in Table 4.4.

Table 4.4.  State Legislative General Election Success Rates All Candidacies

No. Candidacies No. Wins Success Rate

Latinos

Latinas

Asian Asian All Men All American American Women Men Women

2,545 1,585 62.3

998 687 68.8

879 584 66.4

364 258 70.9

Asian American Men 428 149 34.8

Asian All Men All American Women Women 174 50,967 14,473 78 11,955 4,469 44.8 23.5 30.9

Non-​Incumbent Candidacies Only Latinos Latinas No. Candidacies No. Wins Success Rate

1367 442 32.3

495 206 41.6

87,290 27,102 46,444 16,335 53.2 60.3

78  Nowhere to Run Asian American women and Latinas have higher raw rates of success than co-​racial male candidates. Notably, looking only at non-​incumbent candidacies, the gender gap between success rates for Latina/​os and Asian Americans is larger than that among all candidates regardless of race or gender (this difference is statistically significant at the p < 0.001 level). This, in concert with models in the appendices of likelihood of election, suggests that the race-​gender differences in the relationship between co-​racial population proportion and likelihood of success are rooted in an earlier phase of the electoral process, as potential candidates decide where and when to run for office. To better understand the implications of the lopsided relationship between population proportions and candidacy for ultimate representation, Figure 4.3 uses all 18 years of GRACE data to plot local polynomial regressions of the average likelihood of electing a member of a race-​gendered group on the average proportion of the district that shares their race. The solid lines show the probabilities for men; the dashed lines, for women. Shading around each line indicates 95 percent confidence intervals. This illustration allows us to see how the different relationships between candidacy and population proportion may extend into differences in candidate success, for different types of districts. By placing the Asian American women and men, and Latinas’ and Latinos’, plots alongside those of African American and white women and men, we can also see how distinct, or similar, the relationships are to groups beyond the scope of this study.9 For example, the maximum probability of election for Asian American and white women hovers around .25, and both groups of women are estimated to have that probability when the co-​racial population reaches roughly 50 percent. However, Asian Americans are 50 percent of the population or greater in a miniscule number of districts, and the opposite is the case for majority-​white districts.10 Rug plots at the bottom of each graph (Figure 4.3) depict the frequency of wins by any member of that racial group, for different district population proportions. Each hatch mark in the rug plot indicates that a member of the given racial group won in a district with that co-​racial proportion of the population; more dense portions of the plot indicate that members of that group win more often in that type of district. By restricting the hatch marks to only depict districts wherein a descriptive representative won, we can see that the scope of district populations where white women and men

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  79 African American

Asian American

1.00

0.75

0.50

Probability of Election Win

0.25

0.00 Latina/o

1.00

White

0.75

0.50

0.25

0.00 0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00 0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

Average Population Proportion for Each Racial Group Gender Man

Woman

Figure 4.3.  Local Polynomial Plot of Probability of Election and Racial Group Proportion of Population, Women and Men, by Race.

have been successful is much wider than for other racial groups. These hatch marks lend necessary context to what we learn from the candidacy models. In the districts that are often treated as most crucial to advancing the candidacy and representation of Latina/​os and Asian Americans, the relationships between co-​racial proportion and likelihood of success are widely different for co-​racial women and men.11

80  Nowhere to Run

The Politics of Recognition Texas. Florida. California. Virginia. New York. Hawaii. Arizona. These states, among others, are often at the forefront of political organizing within immigrant communities, in part because they encompass the types of districts that many political elites, organization leaders, consultants, donors, and candidates look to as realistic seats for Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men. However, these are also some of the areas where a gulf stretches between these women and men’s plots in Figure 4.3. Those lopsided results stem from differences in the ways that Latinas and Latinos, and Asian American women and men, are externally recognized, or not, as potential candidates. Survey and interview respondents reported race-​gendered inequities in the candidate emergence process that range from explicit exclusion and dissuasion to more subtle and institutional invisibility. These inequities are a powerful illustration of variations in the importance and availability of external recognition for different groups of potential candidates. Differences between the recognition experiences of Asian American men and Latinas are particularly demonstrative in this regard. Recall that Asian American men’s and Latinas’ responses to the question in Chapter 3 about self-​generated desire to run resembled each other more than they do other members of their racial or gender groups. They also reported that they thought of running and were “encouraged” in that idea at roughly the same rates (Table 4.5).12 Despite these similarities, Latinas’ and Asian American men’s reported experiences of recognition in the candidate emergence process tend to diverge. For example, responses to a survey question asking respondents to identify the single most important reason they ran underscore these differences (Table 4.6). The choice “I was asked” places recognition between a recruiter and the respondent at the center of their motivation to run. This choice was the most frequently chosen reason for running among Asian American men. Zero Latina respondents selected this option. Asian American women and Latinos were somewhat in the middle of these two groups. In light of Latinas’ high rates of choosing representation-​related reasons for running, it may make some sense that they lent less weight to being asked to run than other groups. However, other responses from this survey and interviews suggest another possibility: that Latinas are not being asked to run at the same rates as Asian American men, Asian American women, and

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  81 Table 4.5.  Decision to Run: Percent of ALS Respondents Who Were Encouraged “I had already thought of running when someone else suggested it” African American Women (11) African American Men (20) Asian American Women (12) Asian American Men (28) Latinas (20) Latinos (51) White Women (115) White Men (240) N reported in parentheses.

45 10 17 25 30 51 32 38

Table 4.6.  Percent of Responses to: “What Was the Single Most Important Reason that You Ran?” “I was asked” African American Women (11) African American Men (20) Asian American Women (12) Asian American Men (28) Latinas (20) Latinos (51) White Women (115) White Men (240) N reported in parentheses.

18 10 17 21 0 12 24 11

Latinos. To illustrate, Latinas report being discouraged from running by a leader of their party most frequently (Table 4.7). In contrast, Asian American men report being discouraged from pursuing candidacy very rarely. While these results from the American Leadership Survey (ALS) by themselves are suggestive, they also mirror in part earlier findings that women and men of color are less likely to be recruited by parties (Moncrief, Squire, & Jewell, 2001; Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016) and that women of color who are Democrats are more likely to face discouragement from party leaders than men of color who are Democrats (Sanbonmatsu, Carroll, & Walsh, 2010).

82  Nowhere to Run Table 4.7.  Discouragement by a Party Leader, Percent Percent African American Women (12) African American Men (20) Asian American Women (12) Asian American Men (29) Latinas (20) Latinos (52) White Women (134) White Men (259) N reported in parentheses.

18 25 9 4 30 10 8 8

The consequences of being encouraged, or discouraged, are not determined in isolation, nor are they uniform across groups. Among groups that “fit” the profile of the modal candidate in their state or region, encouragement may matter less to the decision to run because those group members see themselves reflected in office, traditional social structures give them relative flexibility, and political networks are oriented around their professions and interests. For others who are less well represented, encouragement may matter more because it conveys that those candidates will be externally recognized by elites and potentially have access to certain resources and benefits during the campaign to help overcome other constraints. There are other possibilities suggested by the data thus far as well. For example, Latinas who want to run but are not recognized by local party leaders as potential candidates may decide to get on the ballot anyway and face opposition and discouragement from co-​partisans who recruited other candidates. Asian American men’s candidacies may be much more tied to being asked, because they may not have envisioned themselves running for office as much as other groups of men but were in a social position to pursue that option when they were recruited. The contrasts between Asian American men and Latinas underscore that these differences are the product of racialized and gendered processes, which are distinctive among groups. While Latina’s and Asian American women’s candidacies are less tied to population proportions than co-​racial men’s, their infrequent presence on the ballot in otherwise “opportunistic” districts may be related, but for different reasons (Collins, 1990). The same may be true

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  83 when comparing groups of men, or women and men, within the same racial group. Asian American women reported that being asked was important nearly as frequently as Asian American men, but that does not imply that race-​gendered processes were any less relevant to their external recognition by elites than they are for Latinas. Instead, it is the case that the way gender shapes recognition is different for and specific to Asian American women and Latinas, as well as for Asian American men and Latinos. These related, but different, dynamics become increasingly clear in interview respondents’ reports of how their political and professional leadership translates into recognition as potential candidates.

Race-​Gendered Differences in Recognition of Political and Professional Qualifications Latinas and Asian American women often talked about having their political experience, expertise, and commitment discounted and overlooked by elites engaged in candidate recruitment. In districts where there is a significant or majority co-​racial population, that lack of recognition sometimes meant that their political work and activism were harder to parlay into candidacy opportunities. For example, political activism and officeholding are potent illustrations of differences potential candidates face in generating visibility and recognition. Previous officeholding is a classic indicator in political science of candidate quality, and a number of studies focused on this measure have concluded that women tend to enter electoral politics or higher officeholding more “highly qualified” than men (García Bedolla, Tate, & Wong, 2005; Lawless & Fox, 2005; Lawless & Pearson, 2008).13 Nearly half (46 percent) of all ALS respondents held a previous elective office or were involved in campaigns and party activities (47 percent) before running for the state legislature for the first time (Table 4.8). Mean levels of previous officeholding or political activity are not different to a significant degree across groups, with one exception. Asian American men are quite distinct in this dimension; their lower level of involvement in political organizations is statistically significant from the overall mean at .05 percent. The roughly equal proportions of women and men, within and across racial groups (with the exception of Asian American men), reporting significant previous political experience before running are somewhat

84  Nowhere to Run Table 4.8.  Previous Officeholding and Political Organization Involvement, Percent

African American Men (20) African American Women (12) Asian American Men (29) Asian American Women (12) Latinos (52) Latinas (20) White Men (261) White Women (138) N reported in parentheses.

Held Previous Office

Involved in Political Activities

40 50 48 50 52 40 45 50

55 42 35 50 58 50 48 43

contradictory to expectations around qualifications that have been generated in earlier research. However, if we allow for the same experiences to have different implications and meanings across distinct groups, this finding helps to extend our previous understandings of the role political experience plays in candidate emergence. Members of different groups may, as earlier studies have argued, give less “weight” to their own qualifications for office (Maestas et al., 2006). However, this is not solely a function of personal insecurity about their ability to perform as legislators. Several Asian American women and Latinas repeatedly emphasized that they knew they had to do more and “be more” than their male co-​ethnics in order to be seen as competitive for candidacy. This need to be “smarter than the men and more qualified than non-​minorities” (Cruz Takash, 1993) was a key to being recognized, but respondents also knew it was far from a guarantee. Moreover, political experience yields qualitatively different levels of external recognition, depending on roles undertaken, and the way those efforts are viewed based on a potential candidates’ social identity group memberships. For example, many Asian American women and men and Latina/​o interview respondents said that they gained important experience working on electoral campaigns for other candidates and issues before running themselves. One Asian American woman stated that “I knew how to do everything to help other people win, and I wanted to finally use that for myself.”

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  85 Several Asian American women and Latinas I interviewed remarked that their heavy campaign work contributed to their sense that elites did not view them as potential candidates in the same way as co-​racial men. These women saw themselves as ever present and essential to campaigns, but they perceived that this physical visibility and significant investment of time did little to encourage elites to consider them as potential candidates. Latinas and Asian American women described this dynamic with a tone that was often frustrated and resigned—​their experiences led them not to expect that they would be treated the same as men in terms of having their political work recognized, but that did not mean they were happy about it. In contrast, several Asian American men and Latinos ticked off the qualifications they knew they needed to be competitive in a more matter-​of-​ fact manner. It was typical for a Latino or Asian American man I interviewed to say something to the effect that “I knew I needed to work for Elites X, Y, and Z and do this type of campaign in order to be in the mix of contenders for a future legislative seat, and so I did,” or “I knew this person and they asked me, and I said yes.” Latino and Asian American men often reported their qualifications and connections with a tone that implied that they felt that those features entitled them to be taken seriously as a potential candidate. And many of them were. The challenges Latinas and Asian American women reported in having their experience recognized may be driven in part by unconscious biases that occur in recruitment processes. Individuals who do not fit the demographic profile of the political elites engaged in candidate recruitment are less likely to be viewed as viable candidates (Niven, 1998). Latinas and Asian American women may also be subject to what Niven (1998) calls a “distributive bias,” because they have less of a track record of electoral success as groups and may appear to be less of a sure bet in an election. However, this bias may also be informed by race-​gendered stereotypes. For example, several Latina candidates described being encouraged and sought after as “Latinas” for political positions related to education and school boards, only to be told they were not “a good fit” when they expressed interest in seeking legislative or executive office. They viewed these changes in recruitment dynamics as directly related to stereotypes related to their race and gender identities. Recognition can also be shaped more explicitly, by physical visibility. Political elites engaged in candidate development tend to recruit from their own professional and civic networks, and networks that have previously yielded candidates (Krook & Norris, 2014). Thus, having a professional

86  Nowhere to Run connection to key gatekeepers and donors, or a prominent profile in the types of firms or organizations that tend to funnel candidates into public office, are likely to make a person or group more visible in recruitment networks. In this way, an individual’s work and social life may facilitate structural differences in the likelihood of recognition. Roughly half of state legislators who responded to the ALS work within a small cluster of industry types outside of politics, but those clusters look different across groups (Figure 4.4).14 For example, Latinas work in a narrower array of fields than legislators from most other groups and are most heavily concentrated in nonprofit work. Asian American women are concentrated in the law, nonprofit work, and government. Asian American men are dispersed somewhat more widely across industries and tend to work in the law and tech fields most often. Latinos are also less concentrated in industry groups and reported working most often in tech and education. While professional Type of Industry

Law

Asian American Men

10

14

21

10

7

Latinos

17

6

10

12

8

8

White Men

12

15

15

7

12

All

17

13

13

9

8

20

10

3 10

1

7

7

2

2

5

8

5

9

8

6

6

5

3

ary

10

ilit

10

ing

10

10

/M

15

5

ent

20

5

13

cem

African American Men

3

ure

13

5

eer

9

gin

13

En

24

White Women

ch/

15

e

5

8

ult

25

3

ric

10

Ag

5

20

e

19

car

5

anc

16

Latinas

alth

22

3

ent

8

yee

17

8

He

sur

r In

te o

nm

ver

Go

ork

plo

Em

8

Asian American Women

for

sta

Te

al E

ess

Law

al W

ey/

orn

oci

t/S

Att

n

8

tio

ner

Ow

uca

Ed

ess

sin

sin

rofi

Bu

n-P

En

Re

No Bu 58

African American Women

1

14 8

15

10

4

4

5

3

Figure 4.4.  Most Frequently Reported Occupational Industries of ALS Respondents, Percent.

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  87 occupations figured prominently in earlier work on female candidate emergence (Burrell, 1994; Lawless & Fox, 2004; c.f. Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016),15 two categories that were frequent among ALS respondents but have not been previously identified as key “feeder” industries are tech/​engineering and nonprofit and other related social work. One implication of differences in these distributions is that potential Latina candidates, for example, may be less visible via professional networks to gatekeepers and donors than other groups. Given where elites engaged in recruiting tend to go looking, potential candidates who are attorneys or educators, or who work for the government, may have overlap within their political networks with political elites who are also in those industries. That overlap is less likely for leaders of nonprofits, which is one area where Latina legislators have been highly concentrated. Because of these structural differences, Latina potential candidates may have been visible to African American and white women who are officeholders, but less so to Latino and white men. Moreover, profession-​based organizations are among the top four types of civic activities that legislators reported spending the most time on before running for the state legislature (see appendices). For candidates who work in professions that facilitate recognition, being active in profession-​ based associations may amplify that benefit. It is worth nothing that the recognition that is derived from professional visibility may not apply equally to all groups. David Niven’s study of party leader perceptions of candidate quality suggests that a woman who works in a job traditionally ascribed to men in politics, such as being an attorney, may cause party leaders to consider her less appealing as a candidate than a male attorney (Niven, 1998; see also Fulton, 2013). Thus, while Asian American women and men are similarly concentrated in work in the law, the degree to which Asian American women are recognized as potential candidates through professional networks may be more limited.16

The Consequences of Not Being Recognized Thus far, data on political experience and professional backgrounds suggests that while candidates across all groups may have similar levels of political experience, their social positioning as a result of these activities may facilitate varying degrees of external visibility to other political elites. As a result,

88  Nowhere to Run Latinas appear to have been discouraged in pursuit of candidacy, directly and indirectly. In sharp contrast, Asian American men reported lower levels of involvement in political organizations before running for the state legislature than all other groups. They also number among the groups reporting that they thought of running on their own least frequently. Yet, despite a relative lack of experience in political organizations and government work, and relatively infrequent self-​perception of themselves as candidates, Asian American men are apparently viewed by others as potential officeholders fairly often. They were not discouraged by party leaders from running at an appreciable rate, and more than two-​thirds were encouraged by others to run. Being recognized by other political elites as a potential candidate carries material consequences for the likelihood of running for a particular seat or district. According to interview respondents, recognition can carry the promise of access to donors, experienced campaign staff, and inside knowledge of how to navigate complicated political coalitions. These factors position a person to be ready to run when the right seat or the right district opens up. In their absence, running for office may not seem like the most efficient use of time for a successful person with a full professional and personal life. In this way, a lack of recognition can take thoughts of running off the table for potential candidates, even in districts that, from the outside, look like a great opportunity. Additionally, limited recognition can also mean that when members of some groups decide to throw their hat in the ring, the pathway to staying on the ballot and persisting through the campaign is distinctively treacherous.

“We Had to Figure Out How to Let a Man Down”: Navigating Elite Networks in Majority-​Minority Districts Across many states, interview respondents emphasized how high the stakes were in every election for either Latina/​os or Asian Americans, because there are so few realistic seats that are viewed as winnable for members of those racial groups. In response to that sense of constantly “defending” seats or trying to “claim” a seat, political elites have erected networks in a number of urban areas that are largely targeted toward majority-​minority districts or districts with a significant minority population. In some states, respondents described networks that they viewed as small and fairly ad hoc, or happenstance. Others related networks in other areas that were long-​standing and

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  89 wide reaching. Regardless of their character in this regard, the networks focused on winning majority-​minority or significant minority districts were often described as largely oriented around men. For example, one Latino candidate related how he ended up in his current seat, after a series of friends and people he happened to know from political and civic work had had an ongoing set of conversations about what should happen in the next election cycle for seats currently held by Latinos. At the end, I asked him whether anyone in this chain of discussions had raised the names of any Latinas who might run, and he looked a bit surprised, and abashed, and said no, that things had unfolded in this way just because they were all friends. A Latina respondent described the gendered character of elite networks in more explicit terms: It’s this notion that we haven’t created the pipeline for women because the men have done that. The men have chosen their successor. And that’s how they come into power is because by the time the woman decides to run, the incumbent man has already figured out—​there’s at least a 10 or 20 year history of them grooming all these men.

Networks of political elites that are dominated by men have been widely discussed in the women in politics literature and the literature on political “gatekeeping” (Chisholm, 1970; Sanbonmatsu, 2006; Crowder-​Meyer, 2013; Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016). However, the magnitude and impact of that gender-​based exclusivity is distinct across racial groups, and exacerbated by the scarcity of viable districts available to Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men.17 To illustrate, a number of Asian American women and Latinas representing districts with large minority populations across the country described being told to “wait their turn” to run in different ways. One Asian American woman talked about how she spent the better part of two decades shifting her civic activities and professional profile in order to be a stronger candidate someday for the district she lived in. When the seat opened up she said: “This is the opportunity. I’m going to go for it. I said people need to have a choice. So, I stepped forward and then the calls started coming in. . . . It was like you really should wait your turn. I’m like I’ve been waiting. . . . I’ve been doing the work.” These comments about being told to wait their turn highlight the contradictions and rocky terrain Latinas and Asian American women

90  Nowhere to Run navigate in districts with a large minority population. They often perceive a need to be better and more prepared than men to seem qualified (Cruz Takash, 1993) and yet are often rebuffed or unacknowledged for those efforts. Another related pattern of responses talked about a “double-​edged” sword of ambition in these competitive districts, whereby women are unrecognized by elites and assumed to be unambitious yet are also criticized when they express interest in running and being developed as a potential candidate. A Latina candidate’s statement to this effect summarizes what I often heard from women talking about their own experiences, as well as the manner in which several male respondents talked about female candidates who had been open about wanting to run someday: The difference between a man putting out his lifetime goals out in public . . . it’s very different for a woman to do the same thing, and it’s because from the get-​go, from the minute you put it out there, you are demonized. You are this horrible person, this horrible ambitious woman who only thinks about herself. I will let you know when I’m ready to let you know, but I feel that it works against me. Every time I’ve put out anything . . . there was an automatic sort of like, “Oh, there she goes. She’s at that event because she wants to make that and that connection because she’s running for this, and this, and that.” And I don’t like it. It’s unfair, but I think that’s exactly what happens to women who put too much out there where we’re automatically—​it becomes this we’re gonna do anything and everything to just tear her down.

Finally, many Asian American women and Latinas I interviewed said that because of the male skew of political networks, they had to perform an additional form of social and political labor, in their handling of situations where co-​racial men had already formed expectations around a seat (that the respondent was planning to contest). These stories were characterized by respondents’ cognizance that the men they saw as adversaries were also their allies in terms of racial solidarity and co-​ethnic political organizing. They also recognized that co-​racial men often thought of themselves as the excluded party, relative to white male political and fundraising circles, and accounted for that in their interactions with them around contested candidacies. One female respondent summarized this labor: “we had to figure out how to let a man down,” with his dignity and self-​respect intact. Both Asian

Demographics Are (Men’s) Destiny  91 American women and Latinas related a number of instances when they had to make particular, and often convoluted, efforts to avoid making a man with expectations of support feel degraded by a woman from his own racial group running against him. An Asian American woman candidate told me this was not only to preserve her relationship with the male candidate, but also to avoid gaining a reputation among other Asian American men active in politics for being “the kind of woman” who makes men feel bad. These narratives of navigating and negotiating male-​dominated elite networks highlight how the scarcity of viable districts can exacerbate precarious dynamics related to recognition, social roles and group consciousness that tend to push Latinas and Asian American women away from the candidate pipeline. In the rare districts that are considered competitive for a Latina/​o or Asian American candidate, there are many talented, successful leaders who could be viable. Among them, Latinas and Asian American women face complicated and limiting dynamics at the individual, group, and local level that squeeze the availability of electoral opportunities even further. These overlapping and intersecting constraints frequently produce conditions wherein Latinas and Asian American women have, practically speaking, nowhere to run.

Conclusion Candidates, consultants, organization leaders, donors, and other elites I interviewed all spoke about the prospects for Latina/​o and Asian American elected representation with the same underlying assumption: that districts with large or majority-​minority populations were the primary and surest bet seats that candidates from those communities would look to for opportunities. However, the availability of those types of districts is sharply limited by the dominance of predominantly white districts across nearly every state. This scarcity creates an important interpretive context for the finding that the relationship between a racial group’s proportion of the population and the likelihood a member of that group becomes a candidate and wins is much more robust for Latino and Asian American men than for Latinas and Asian American women. Interview and survey data reveals the connections between these two results, demonstrating the ways in which the scarcity of realistic opportunities exacerbates dynamics that tend to push Latinas and Asian American women further from candidacy in majority-​minority districts and

92  Nowhere to Run districts with a significant minority population. The conclusion that unfolds from this evidence is stark: failing to incorporate distinctions between women’s and men’s candidacies has led to understandings of the power of majority-​minority or minority “opportunity” districts that have been overly narrow at best, and simply inaccurate in a number of cases. While they may not be similarly multiplicative or constituted, there are also electoral constraints facing Latino and Asian American men. Some are shared with co-​racial women, including the large proportion of electoral opportunities successfully taken up by white men. White men face districts with significant co-​racial populations more often than Latina/​os and Asian Americans of any gender, they typically enjoy more access to electoral resources than white women (Lawless, 2015), and they have had the most frequent success of any race-​gendered group in majority-​minority districts (see appendices). To be clear, most Latinas and Asian American women candidates viewed the presence of a significant minority community, particularly of their own race, as very important, particularly given their representation goals. But given the scarcity of options, those same districts also figure centrally in the electoral opportunities for Latinos and Asian American men, whose social and political positioning tends to be more advantageous than that of co-​racial women for generating recognition and resources for a potential candidacy. On balance, these analyses point to a very narrow and precarious set of electoral opportunities for Latinas and Asian American women. This flies in the face of a notion that has gained some traction among academics, political elites, and activists that these specific groups of women have the greatest array of electoral opportunities, including districts encompassing a large white population proportion, because they appeal to a wider range of voters than co-​racial men. The structural challenges Latinas and Asian American women face related to recognition and resources, as well as evidence showing the importance of co-​racial communities in their candidacy decisions, suggest that the “crossover promise” for these two groups may be quite limited. More broadly, the next chapter demonstrates that when we consider how partisanship interacts with potential candidates’ race and gender identities, in the context of predominantly white districts, Latinas and Asian American women seem less likely to significantly advance their ranks on the ballot in those types of districts. Instead, I show that if any group has shown the potential to carve out new opportunities and emerge as “crossover” candidates, it is Latinos running as Republicans and Independents.

5 The Rest of the Pie Partisanship and Race-​Gendered Opportunities in Predominantly White Districts

For Latinas and Asian American women contemplating candidacy in a predominantly minority district, the pathway to getting on the ballot is often precarious, and many other potential candidates eyeing the same seat may enjoy structural advantages that they do not. Where, then, should women from these communities look to for electoral opportunities, when faced with these constraints in the districts where co-​racial men have most often been successful? Elites and academics have repeatedly discussed the potential “advantage” (Bejarano, 2013; Casellas, 2011) Latinas and Asian American women may have as potential “crossover” candidates. The assumption animating this discussion is that Latinas and Asian American women might be able to attract more support (than co-​racial men) from white voters. Following that logic, Latinas’ and Asian American women’s candidacies may be less robustly related to larger co-​racial populations (Table 4.3) because the presence of co-​ racial or minority populations is not as crucial a condition for their electoral success. The implication of these logics is that Latina and Asian American women have a wider range of options relative to co-​racial men in terms of where they may find viable opportunities to run for office. If that is true, then we would expect that the patterns of ballot presence and ultimate success of Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men in predominantly white districts would look somewhat different from those in predominantly minority districts. The analysis in this chapter shows that that is not the case. Instead, candidacy data from tens of thousands of open-​seat elections in predominantly white districts suggests that partisanship interacts with the race-​gendered positioning of Latinas and Asian American women in a way that sustains the gap between their access to electoral opportunities and that of co-​racial men. The geography of Latinos’ candidacies outside predominantly minority districts, as compared with that of other groups, illustrates the ways in which Nowhere to Run. Christian Dyogi Phillips, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538937.003.0005

94  Nowhere to Run race and gender interact with partisanship in shaping, and constraining, electoral opportunity. While most Latina/​o and Asian American candidacies are occurring in majority-​minority districts, those types of races are a tiny fraction of the overall range of electoral opportunities across the states. In the modal type of district, where whites make up 80 percent or more of the population, Latinos running as Republicans and Independents look most like what one might call “crossover” candidates. This is also the case in the “threshold” districts that hover between majority-​white and majority-​ minority populations (which are much smaller in number than predominantly white districts). These findings undermine the notion that Latinas and Asian American women have a more expansive array of electoral opportunities due to their membership in multiple marginalized groups.

Leveraging Scale and Partisanship to Outline the Contours of Opportunity The Gender, Race, and Communities in Elections (GRACE) data on Latina/​ o and Asian American general election candidacies provides a wider lens for analyzing the electoral presence and success of these communities than has previously been possible. I rely on the breadth of this data in order to overlay two important factors onto the previous chapters’ discussions of how race and gender shape opportunity: scale and partisanship. Throughout this chapter, I often report the raw numbers of ballot presence and success. This presentation of the data can help to clarify stark differences in the scale of candidacy across groups. To illustrate, lopsided differences in frequency patterns of candidacy among Latinos overall, as compared with Latinas and Asian American women and men, help paint a more accurate picture of electoral opportunity than percentages alone might. Latinos were on the general election ballot approximately three times as often as the two next closest groups, Latinas and Asian American men (Table 5.1). This gulf widens further when we restrict the frequency count to Republican and Independent candidacies (Table 5.2). Reporting these candidacy rates as percentages of, for example, all candidacies overall, would obscure information about differences in the numerators between the groups this study is focused on. Additionally, reporting percentages for the relatively small number of candidacies carried out by these groups may obscure the fact of their rarity, relative to candidacies by white women and men.

The Rest of the Pie  95 Table 5.1.  Frequency of State Legislative Election Candidacies, 1996–​2015 Latinos Latinas

No. All Candidacies 2,545 Percent of All 2.2 Candidacies No. Non-​Incumbent 1,367 Candidacies Percent of Non-​ 2.1 Incumbent Candidacies

998 0.9 4,995 0.8

Asian Asian American American Men Women

All Men

879 0.8

364 0.3

87,290 27,102 76.3 23.7

428

174

50,967

0.7

0.3

77.9

All Women

14,473 22.1

Table 5.2.  Number of State Legislative Election Candidacies by Party, 1996–​2015

Democrats Republicans & Independents Percent of Candidacies by Republicans & Independents

Latinos

Latinas

Asian Asian American American Men Women

All Men

All Women

1,548 969

712 273

587 294

35,703 51,914

15,600 12,460

38%

27%

33%

238 125 34%

59%

46%

Moreover, raw counts, as opposed to percentages, are more theoretically consistent with the way candidacy is conceptualized in the intersectional model of opportunity. Each instance of candidacy can be understood as a particular moment in a set of processes and institutions that results in a person’s presence on the general election ballot. This is especially salient for studying candidate emergence in districts that infrequently have Latinas, Latinos, Asian American women, or Asian American men on the ballot. In those types of districts, each candidacy by a member of an infrequently represented group indicates that one pathway to candidacy for that type of person has been created, or strengthened. Thus, the larger the number of candidacies and pathways, the larger the potential for networks and institutions to develop among members of that group that may facilitate their presence on future ballots.1

96  Nowhere to Run This treatment of the data also facilitates understanding of the ways in which partisanship interacts with race and gender to shape electoral opportunity.2 In the current example, distinguishing between the scales of Democratic and Republican or Independent candidacies further sharpens the distinctiveness of Latinos’ candidacies as compared with other groups in this study. Like other candidates of color, Latinos run more often than not as Democrats. However, the scale of Republican and Independent candidacies among Latinos is much bigger than that of other groups and makes up a larger share of their candidacies overall (Table 5.2). The differences in the frequency of Latinos’ candidacies, particularly as Republicans and Independents, are especially consequential given the context of most state legislative elections—​predominantly white districts. Much of the political and academic discussion of electoral opportunity for Latina/​o and Asian American candidates (and descriptive underrepresentation more generally) is focused on the first two quintiles of Table 5.3, where minority populations predominate. This makes some sense—​that is where most of the candidates of color, including Latina/​os and Asian Americans, have emerged. However, that approach limits our ability to account for the structural electoral advantages held by white candidates and white-​majority populations in districts. Leaving the fourth and fifth quintiles out of an analysis of descriptive representation is like using a single candle to light up an amphitheater—​we may Tables 5.3.  Number of General Election Candidacies by White District Population Quintiles Latinos

Quintile 1 (0–​20% White) Quintile 2 (21–​40% White) Quintile 3 (41–​60% White) Quintile 4 (61–​80% White) Quintile 5 (81–​100% White) Total

Latinas

Asian American Men

Asian American Women

All Candidates

811

312

281

124

4,443

673

265

282

107

8,482

355

171

98

46

9,989

335

142

93

46

25,830

371

108

125

41

65,648

2,545

998

879

364

11,4392

The Rest of the Pie  97 Table 5.4.  Percent of Elections Won by Democrats, by Quintile

Percent Wins by Democrats

Predominantly Minority Districts

Threshold Districts

Predominantly White Districts

Quintile 1

Quintile 2

Quintile 3

Quintile 4

Quintile 5

93

89

64

42

36

learn about the area in that small circle of light, while missing the vastness of the whole structure. An important piece of information obscured by that small circle of light is that the partisan world looks very different in the predominantly white districts where most elections are happening, as compared with the districts where racial minorities run most often (Table 5.4). In predominantly minority districts (Quintiles 1 and 2) Democrats dominate in terms of overall success. That is not the case in predominantly white districts (Quintiles 4 and 5), where Republicans and Independents have won nearly two-​thirds of all election victories. This partisan lopsidedness is less pronounced in “threshold” districts where the majority population hovers between white and nonwhite, and where many fewer electoral opportunities exist. In those districts, Republicans and Independents won 35 percent of all election victories over the period of this study. These distinctions underscore that in order to understand electoral opportunity for Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men in the vast majority of district elections, we must contend with the prospects for candidates running as Republicans and Independents, in districts where whites make up most of the population.

Making Room to Run: Candidacies in Predominantly White Districts Most electoral opportunities to run for a state legislative seat are in predominantly white contexts, and white women and men won 99 percent of electoral victories in those types of districts between 1996 and 2015 (Table 5.5). While political scientists have recently expressed some optimism regarding the prospects of candidates of color (particularly Latina/​os) in districts with a significant white population proportion (Bejarano, 2013; B. L. Fraga, 2014; Juenke, 2014), nonwhite groups of candidates have had relatively little electoral success in these areas as compared with whites (Table 5.5).

98  Nowhere to Run Table 5.5.  Number of Non-​Incumbent Winners in Qs 4 and 5, by Partisanship

Latinos Latinas Asian American Men Asian American Women African American Men African American Women White Men White Women

Democrats

Republicans & Independents

Total

46 23 20 11 169 122 13,459 5,973

50 20 24 8 45 13 22,758 5,793

98 43 44 19 214 135 36,688 11,884

As mentioned earlier, many Latina, Latino, and Asian American women and men candidates see a substantial co-​racial or minority community as an essential component of a viable run for office. In addition to concerns about resources and support, Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American men’s and women’s perceptions of the relationship between race and partisanship among voters also tend to focus their attention on districts with significant minority populations. Most candidates from these groups run and win as Democrats, and predominantly white district electorates tend to select Republicans much more often than not. Among the Democrats who have been successful in predominantly white districts during the period of this study, 97 percent were white men or white women. Given these basic contours of race, gender, and partisanship among election winners in these types of districts, the prospects for officeholding among Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men appear fairly circumscribed. Turning to data on the candidacy stage (Table 5.6), Latinos are far and away the most numerous group of candidates in predominantly white districts when compared with Latinas, and Asian American women and men.3 Among these groups, the partisan character of candidacies in predominantly white districts is quite different from that in predominantly minority districts. Their candidacies skewed heavily toward Democrats in the former, whereas in predominantly white districts, partisanship is more evenly split among candidates within each race-​gender group. Importantly, this small “avenue” to officeholding undertaken by Latinos running as Republicans and Independents in predominantly white districts appears to be a viable electoral opportunity. Using a model

The Rest of the Pie  99 Table 5.6.  Number of Non-​Incumbent Candidacies in Qs 4 and 5 Latinos Democrats Republicans & Independents Total

Latinas

Asian American Men

Asian American Women

219 241

89 72

65 67

32 23

466

161

133

55

developed by Juenke and Shah (2015), I test whether the prospects for a Republican or Independent winning a state legislative general election are any better or worse if there is a Latino Republican on the ballot. Table 5.7 reports relevant results of a probit regression model of the likelihood of a Republican or Independent winning an open-​seat election in a predominantly white district wherein at least one Republican or Independent was on the ballot, using all years from the GRACE dataset (full results are reported in the appendices). The primary independent variable of interest is Latino Republican/​Independent, a dummy variable indicating whether a Latino running as a Republican or Independent is on the ballot.4 I also include independent variables indicating Republican voting strength in the district, the number of candidates running per seat, and average district income, education, and unemployment levels (see full results in the appendices). The coefficient for a Latino running as a Republican or Independent is non-​significant; Latinos running as Republicans are no more or less likely to be successful in a predominantly white district than a co-​partisan from Table 5.7.  Model of Likelihood a Republican or Independent Won Republican or Independent Winner β/​se Latino Republican/​Independent Constant N * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001

–​0.229 (0.15) 0.512* (0.22) 8,644

100  Nowhere to Run some other group—​provided they are on the ballot. It is unfeasible to test this for any other nonwhite group of women or men in this manner; there are not enough cases of Republican and Independent candidacy in these types of districts among them.

The Geography of Opportunity for Republican and Independent Candidates One manifestation of Latinos “making more room” to compete in predominantly white districts is that the array of states they run in is wider than it is for Latinas and Asian American women and men. Table 5.8 reports the 15 states where Latinos and Asian American men running as non-​incumbent, Republican or Independent candidates in predominantly white districts (and where a Latino or Asian American man ran more than once in that state) have been most numerous. It also shows how many women (who are also Republican or Independent, non-​incumbents) from the same racial groups Table 5.8.  States with Most Candidacies by Non-​Incumbent, Republicans and Independents State

Latinos

Latinas

State

Asian American Men

Asian American Women

Connecticut Florida New York Massachusetts Michigan Rhode Island California Minnesota Montana New Hampshire Nevada Texas Illinois Kentucky Missouri

20 17 15 15 12 12 10 10 8 8 8 7 6 6 6

1 2 4 6 4 1 5 2 3 4 0 0 2 0 0

Connecticut New Hampshire Maryland New Jersey Ohio Pennsylvania Utah Illinois Massachusetts New York Oregon Colorado Montana

7 5 4 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 2 2

1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 0

The Rest of the Pie  101 were on the ballot in the same types of districts in those states. Women and men from each racial group live in roughly even numbers in most districts and states. But in the most typical, predominantly white districts, Republican and Independent candidacies carried out by Latinos have facilitated their presence on the ballot in states where co-​racial women are scarcely competitors. A similar dynamic is present in the data on Asian American women and men, but on a much smaller scale. Attempts by non-​incumbent Latina/​o and Asian American candidates to win state legislative office, as Republicans or Independents in the most typical types of districts, span states that encompass historic immigrant communities, as well as states that have been the site of recent rapid growth in immigrant populations. The scale of these candidacies is dwarfed by those of white men and women in these districts. Indeed, the most striking aspect of Table 5.8 is how small the overall numbers across groups are, given that the reported data covers nearly 20 years of tens of thousands of electoral opportunities. The states with the most numerous candidacies by Latinos in Table 5.8—​ Connecticut and Florida—​are also the states with the sharpest within-​racial-​ group drop-​off between men and women. Twenty candidacies by Latinos in Connecticut, versus one for a Latina in the same political context, for example, suggests that race and gender are simultaneously shaping candidacy, and that those intersectional identities may interact with partisanship in very different ways. This lopsidedness also raises a host of questions about the processes leading up to being on the ballot, and whether partisan processes that have long been understood as primarily about race, or gender, may be more accurately analyzed through a lens incorporating more than one dimension of identity. For example, in interviews with Latina Republicans in other states, several reported that they sometimes perceived challenges in gaining entry to mainstream Republican networks, even though a number of prominent Latinos had emerged from the same networks in those areas. In Connecticut, it may be that the informal institutions and networks that supported 20 Latino candidacies were not necessarily oriented around producing Latina and Latino Republican or Independent candidates, as much as they were structured in ways that tend to produce Latino Republican or Independent candidates. Connecticut is also the state with the largest number of Republican and Independent candidacies by Asian American men in predominantly white districts. Seven candidacies over two decades may seem a paltry basis for

102  Nowhere to Run analysis, but it stands in sharp contrast to the number of those types of partisan candidacies everywhere else in the country. Beyond Connecticut and New Hampshire, candidacies in predominantly white districts for Asian American women and men range from few to nonexistent. To the marginal extent that any groups other than white women and men have been able to mount candidacies in predominantly white districts, Latinos have done so most frequently, across a wider array of states than Latinas and Asian American women and men. The democratic stakes for accurately assessing the extent of realistic electoral opportunities in predominantly white districts are high. These types of districts are the most numerous and are located widely in nearly every state. At the same time, Latina/​os and Asian Americans are also living, working, and voting across the country in these communities. Nearly half of the Asian American population (45 percent) lives in predominantly white districts. By implication, approximately 10 million Asian Americans living in those districts have been descriptively represented in state legislatures by 44 men and 19 women from the same racial group, since the late 1990s. One third of the national Latina/​o population also lives in predominantly white districts (GRACE). As this section has outlined, these districts currently hold a similarly dim promise for their descriptive representation and realistic electoral opportunity.

Threshold Districts and the “Promise” of Crossover Candidates Asian American women and Latinas run mostly in predominantly minority districts but do not benefit from the resources and networks in them in the same way as co-​racial men. Those districts are a small fraction of all the available seats in American state legislatures. At the other end of the spectrum, in the predominantly white districts that make up most of the electoral opportunities in nearly all states, Latinos may be carving out narrow inroads to candidacy as Republicans and Independents relative to Latinas (and Asian American women and men). However, even their bids for election are a fraction of a percent of the total (white men won 76 percent of elections in predominantly white districts in the GRACE, the same figure for Latinos is 0.72 percent). Where, if anywhere, do potential candidates from these communities go from here? Are “threshold” districts, where whites encompass

The Rest of the Pie  103 between 40 and 60 percent of the district population, an overlooked set of realistic electoral opportunities for Asian American women, Asian American men, Latinas, or Latinos? Over the years of this study, threshold districts resemble predominantly minority districts in terms of their number (relatively few), but in terms of the partisan and demographic character of successful candidates, threshold districts look much more like predominantly white districts (Table 5.9). There were 1,307 non-​incumbent victories in threshold districts (versus 1,779 in predominantly minority districts, and 13,338 in predominantly white districts). The lion’s share was won by white men and white women (85 percent combined). White men and women also made up nearly three-​quarters of Democratic wins, and 93 percent of Republican wins. These patterns are similar to those that occurred in predominantly white districts, despite distinct differences in the white share of the population and better Democratic performance overall. Thus, while the population and partisan leanings of threshold districts may make them seem like a set of electoral opportunities that looks more realistic to strategic Latina, Latino, and Asian American women and men candidates, the outcomes suggest caution in proceeding with that interpretation. For potential candidates, and other political elites who invest in their emergence, the contours of these districts may send mixed signals about their viability. Partisanship patterns among Latinos, Asian American men, and Asian American women candidates are similar to those in predominantly white Table 5.9.  Number of Non-​Incumbent Election Victories in Threshold Districts, 1996–​2015

Latinos Latinas Asian American Men Asian American Women African American Men African American Women White Men White Women All

Democrat

Republican

All

39 28 15 8 94 41 417 193 837

13 7 5 3 4 3 347 83 466

52 35 20 11 98 45 767 276 1,307

104  Nowhere to Run districts (albeit on a smaller scale), despite Republicans and Independents winning a lower percentage of victories in threshold districts, as compared with predominantly white districts (Table 5.10). Latinas run significantly more often as Democrats in these districts, as they do elsewhere. The numerical gap between Latina and Latino Democratic candidacies is sizable, but smaller here than in other districts as well. The size of the gap between Democratic and Republican and Independent candidacies among Latinas, and between the number of Republican and Independent candidacies of Latinas and Latinos, invokes similar questions as in the previous section about race-​and gender-​based differences in access to partisan networks. One Latina Republican I interviewed, who ran in a threshold district, described herself as a candidate who fit the district well, but not necessarily the parties in her region of the state. She talked about being told she wasn’t “really Hispanic” by prominent Democrats in her area, while also being an outsider relative to mainstream Republican elites. The number of positive cases of Latina Republican and Independent candidacies in threshold districts is fairly small, but further research on these groups of women may be instructive for developing our understanding of how partisan networks operate outside of predominantly minority or predominantly white districts. Another group distinguished by the small scale of their candidacies is Asian American women. Throughout each of the types of districts in this study, Asian American women’s ballot presence, as any type of partisan, has been notably smaller than all other groups, including other women and co-​ racial men. This reflects what I was told in a number of interviews about the status of networks oriented around or inclusive of Asian American women candidates and political elites—​they are very rare and fairly small. Recent narratives in the media and in interviews with elites, marked by optimism about the success of Asian American women, particularly conservatives, in Table 5.10.  Non-​Incumbent General Election Candidacies, Threshold Districts

Democrat Republican & Independent

Latinos

Latinas

Asian American Men

Asian American Women

All

104 112

62 31

33 32

14 17

1,703 3,602

The Rest of the Pie  105 federal and state politics, are a sharp contrast to the empirical reality. Across states that often fit what several elites and candidates described as hospitable terrain for Asian American women to run—​centrist politics, growing and sizable Asian American communities, a plurality of racial groups in the population—​their numerical presence on the ballot in threshold districts barely registers (Table 5.11 and Table 5.12). Overall, threshold districts appear to encompass patterns of electoral opportunity that are most similar to predominantly white districts. However, given the partisan patterns of prior winners, there may be marginally more opportunity for Latina Democrats to carve out places for themselves on the ballot in threshold districts. It is worth noting that in these districts, Latina candidates have translated a first win into a second, and possibly third, and so on, less frequently than Latinos. Among all Latina first-​time winners, 64 percent went on to win at least one more time in the state legislature; the same figure for Latinos is 75 percent. Among Latina and Latino Democratic candidates, the differences in ratios are the same. This gap in the “durability”

Table 5.11.  Republican and Independent Non-​Incumbent Candidacies in Threshold Districts, by Most Frequent States State

Latinos

Latinas

State

Asian American Men

Asian American Women

New Jersey Colorado California New Mexico New York Connecticut Virginia Florida Texas Arizona Maryland Nevada Illinois Massachusetts Rhode Island

16 13 12 11 8 7 7 6 6 5 4 3 2 2 2

2 4 5 4 2 3 0 1 0 2 1 0 0 0 0

California Virginia Hawaii New Jersey Illinois

9 4 4 3 2

2 2 1 0 0

106  Nowhere to Run Table 5.12.  Democratic Non-​Incumbent Candidacies in Threshold Districts, by Most Frequent States State

Latinos

Latinas

State

Asian American Men

Asian American Women

California New Mexico Arizona Colorado Texas Florida Massachusetts Washington Wyoming Illinois Nevada New Jersey

25 17 12 12 11 4 4 3 3 2 2 2

14 7 8 8 5 3 1 0 0 1 2 2

Hawaii California Maryland Georgia Texas Washington Kansas

9 8 3 3 2 2 2

2 3 0 0 0 2 0

of incumbents in threshold districts requires further research to explain, but for now it suggests an additional dimension of the opportunity context in threshold districts that is distinct for Latinas and Latinos. Partisanship interacts with race and gender in a different way for Asian American women in these districts. The absence of a difference in the frequency of Democratic or Republican and Independent candidacies does not necessarily imply that partisanship is inconsequential, but it may suggest that partisanship is playing a role that is relatively less explicit in Asian American women’s candidacies, particularly in comparison with other factors. Threshold districts as a share of all electoral opportunities may change after redistricting following the 2020 census; it is too soon at this writing to tell. Given the current landscape of districts, political polarization, and partisan control in state legislatures, the degree to which new census data on nonwhite populations will dislodge the primacy of predominantly white districts, or increase the number of threshold districts, remains an open question. This brief analysis of state legislative candidacies suggests that optimism about new opportunities that additional threshold districts may offer should be tempered.

The Rest of the Pie  107

Partisanship Interacts with Race-​Gendered Constraints on Opportunity Partisanship matters for elections and representation, but the ways in which it shapes the electoral opportunity context are distinct by geography and race-​gender group. The racial makeup of a district population is a powerful factor in shaping where different types of candidates run, but that element also interacts with candidates’ own intersecting identities, and how they are socially and politically positioned within the partisan context of their district or state. These nuances are consequential for understanding the processes underlying electoral opportunity and descriptive underrepresentation, but they are difficult to detect if we look only at predominantly minority districts. Looking at the entire array of electoral opportunities reveals how partisanship functions in different ways across groups, most prominently in the small inroads being made in predominantly white districts by Republican and Independent Latinos. A mass public–​centered interpretation of the results in this chapter might be that Latinos’ more frequent emergence and success as Republican and Independent candidates is simply a reflection of partisanship in the voting population. Latinos have typically supported Republican candidates for president, for example, at higher rates than Latinas (Bejarano, 2016) (c.f. Donato & Perez, 2016), and the partisan gap between genders among Latina/​os tends to be larger than the same gap between African Americans and Asian Americans (Kiley, 2018; Wong et al., 2011). However, candidates for office are not produced via a random draw from the population. Latina supporters of the Republican party exist, and while their numbers may not be as large as those of Latinos in the mass public, the spread of the partisan gender gap among voters is nothing like the size of the partisan candidacy gaps laid out in this chapter. Moreover, partisanship itself is not a sui generis phenomenon. Each of the major parties has histories and current activities that are informed by race and gender (L. Fraga & Leal, 2004; Frymer, 2010; T. P. Kim, 2007), and that may shape how open or accessible one party’s networks and resources are to Latinos, as opposed to Latinas, or Asian American women or men. Along these lines, women and politics scholars have often argued that the Republican party is less supportive of, or hospitable to, female candidates than the Democratic Party (Crowder-​Meyer & Lauderdale, 2014; Elder, 2012; Pearson & McGhee, 2013; Sanbonmatsu, 2002, 2006b, 2006a).

108  Nowhere to Run Kira Sanbonmatsu has also posited that partisanship may shape the political opportunity context in different ways for Republican and Democratic women (Sanbonmatsu, 2002, 2006b). This analysis refines that contention, by demonstrating that the role that partisanship plays in defining those opportunity contexts is not equally tenable, or impactful, among different groups of women, or men. The data in this chapter reveals that between Latinas and Asian American women, or Latinas and Latinos, for example, partisanship as it relates to candidacy looks quite distinct. I contend that the contours of partisanship—​in partisan networks, in elite informal institutions, and among mass publics in a district—​exacerbate the extant set of limits on opportunity that face women and men from minority communities who are thinking about becoming candidates. Party organizations and the partisan context shape the opportunities for electoral competition in ways that are distinct among race-​gender groups, by magnifying the constraints on candidate emergence that are rooted in these intersecting identities. Put simply, it may be that for most potential Latina and Latino candidates, for example, a predominantly minority, likely heavily Democratic district seems like a necessity. But even within that type of district, the opportunity context for Democrats may provide markedly better and different incentives and support for Latinos to become candidates than Latinas. There may be a similar, if smaller-​scale, set of incentives and support in predominantly minority districts for Republican Latinos and Latinas. In predominantly white districts, the opportunity pathways for Latinos are more narrow overall, but there appear to be some areas where there are sufficient incentives and support for a few Democratic, and even more Republican and Independent, Latino candidates to get on the ballot. Those factors do not appear to have been equally present in predominantly white districts for Latinas, or Asian American women and men. Threshold districts follow a similar pattern, with somewhat less partisan skew toward Republicans and Independents.

Conclusion The implication of the results in this chapter is not that Latinas, or Asian American women, or other groups, could not or should not attempt to become candidates in districts that are not predominantly composed of people of color. It is that for Latinas, and Asian American women and men, and Latinos as well, an impressive number of “stars”—​voter partisanship, district

The Rest of the Pie  109 racial composition, access to elite networks, capacity to fit campaigning into life, among others—​have to align at the district, group, and individual level for them to emerge as candidates. In the predominantly white districts that are most numerous across the United States, those stars lining up just right appears to have happened infrequently. Interview respondents from a wide array of states often spoke with a more hopeful tone about threshold districts, and/​or plurality districts in which no one racial group is a majority, as opportunities for increased representation on the ballot in the near future. As much as those types of districts capture Asian American and Latina/​o political elites’ imaginations for the future, districts in Los Angeles embody their optimism and dreams for candidacy and representation in the present. In the next two chapters, the analysis remains focused on Asian American women and men, and Latinas and Latinos, but shifts from national-​and state-​level aggregation to the group and local level in Los Angeles. This examination of one geographically specific set of electoral opportunities allows the contours and content of the elite networks and informal institutions that candidates repeatedly characterized as consequential to emerge more clearly. As part of the interactive processes that shape electoral opportunity, these systems and institutions are unwritten and often opaque. However, they also provide an essential link between the constraints and resources that candidates experience at the individual and subgroup levels, and more broadly as members of marginalized race and gender groups.

6 If Not Here, Then Where? Constrained Opportunities for Immigrant Representation in Los Angeles County

A question that has animated much of this study is: “Where?” Where do Asian American women and men, Latinas and Latinos, perceive real opportunities to run? Where do they actually run? Where might there be opportunities outside of the districts where those communities are already large and politically established? Over and over, the answers have revealed that the factors that facilitate and constrain candidacy work in very different ways for Latinas and Latinos, and Asian American women and men, across a wide range of political geographies. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity contends that these differences are rooted in the distinct positioning and experiences of race-​gendered groups, and that Latinas’ and Asian American women’s memberships in multiple marginalized groups further distinguish the precariousness and narrowness of their opportunities to run. Los Angeles County is an extreme test of that model. If not here, then where? The Los Angeles metropolitan area encompasses the largest immigrant community in the United States. Roughly six million Latina/​os and two million Asian Americans call it home. Nearly two-​thirds of residents are immigrants or the children of immigrants. In this respect, one way to view Los Angeles’ political landscape is as a preview of the future of the United States as a whole, wherein the population is largely people of color, and growth is driven by immigrants and their families (Pew Research Center, 2016; Ramakrishnan, n.d.).1 Latina/​o elected officials hold a central place in the Democratic coalition politics that dominate elections in Los Angeles, and more Asian American women and men have been elected to state-​level seats and higher in this county than most others in the continental United States. If there could be a place where Latinas’, Latinos’, Asian American men’s, and Asian American women’s electoral opportunities were less circumscribed by their race and gender identities, where else but a diverse, frequently Democrat-​favoring, county spanning nearly 5,000 square miles? Nowhere to Run. Christian Dyogi Phillips, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538937.003.0006

112  Nowhere to Run In this chapter and the next, I use elections data2 and three dozen in-​ depth interviews with candidates, campaign professionals, donors, and other political leaders to examine the informal institutions and networks that exist for developing Asian American and Latina/​o women and men in Los Angeles as candidates. The data shows striking similarity to the national-​level analysis in earlier chapters; electoral opportunity is proscribed by race and gender and ill-​understood by focusing on one dimension of identity alone. Moreover, the Latina/​o and Asian American communities in Los Angeles exhibit distinct trajectories of incorporation into politics, which each reflect struggles and tensions in immigrant communities in other parts of the United States. Latina/​o political elites have developed informal electoral and candidate development institutions that fold directly into the existing “race-​ based” coalition politics of Los Angeles. This is not to say that Latina/​o political elites have not reshaped the political scene in Los Angeles in some ways, including increasing the prominence of immigrant-​related policy issues and labor unions. But they have created a male-​centered race-​based network that works with other, preexisting, and largely male-​centered networks in the Democratic establishment. Asian Americans, on the other hand, are structurally different from Latina/​os as a community and as a political body. Those differences have presented tough challenges for political elites interested in developing the pan-​ethnic political capacity of Asian Americans as voters and candidates in Los Angeles. While Latina/​os’ candidate emergence infrastructure is extensive and “fits in” with other key constituency groups, Asian Americans do not have much infrastructure to speak of and have struggled to establish a legible place as a pan-​ethnic group in local politics.3 These distinctions create analytical leverage for understanding how informal institutions (elite networks, unwritten vetting processes, widely understood criteria for support) constrain and facilitate the electoral opportunities of women and men, within and across racial groups. In both the Latina/​o case, which encompasses a sophisticated and effective infrastructure, and the Asian American case, where there is relatively little electoral organization, women are distinctively marginalized. Social expectations and practices tied to their races and genders interact with the racialized political geography that constrains all members of their respective racial groups in becoming candidates. Latinas are often structurally excluded from powerful Latina/​o Democratic candidate pipelines. Their work and social positioning

If Not Here, Then Where?  113 is marginal to the work and social positioning that is valued within those networks. Asian American women face pressures related to traditional gender roles and community expectations of success that interact with the frequent absence of sizable electoral resources necessary to make candidacy a strategically tenable venture. The remaining sections of this chapter situate Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men within the broad electoral context of Los Angeles County, which is characterized by racial coalition politics within the Democratic party, sophisticated political mobilization networks, and high barriers to entry for newcomers or outsiders relative to those informal institutions. The next chapter then moves to group-​ level contexts and examines race-​gendered processes of candidate development and emergence among Latina/​o and Asian American political elites. Los Angeles provides an opportunity to closely observe two immigrant-​ based communities of political elites side by side and further specify how informal institutions can be formulated and enacted in a race-​gendered manner. This demonstration of some of the processes underlying the results in earlier chapters is informative for other locations, but not exhaustive. However, the abundance of electoral resources and opportunities that many would claim are available to Latina/​os and Asian Americans in Los Angeles directly tests a core idea in the intersectional model of opportunity. That central notion is that constraints and resources that are widely considered racialized work very differently for women and men within these groups and thus are, in reality, race-​gendered. As this case study will show, that very sense of abundance belies how persistent the limits on candidacy opportunities are for women in those communities.

Shared Histories and Divergent Pathways: Asian American and Latina/​o Communities in Los Angeles The respective positions that Asian American and Latina/​o communities occupy in Los Angeles County’s electoral context reflect both opportunities and cautionary tales for the expansion of access to political competition in other parts of the country. Key characteristics shared by both groups include large and diverse populations of potential voters who often require extensive mobilization resources during elections, and fraught political histories that have shaped where community members live.

114  Nowhere to Run The political trajectories of Los Angeles and its Mexican-​ American residents are inextricably tied, and they remain the largest Latina/​o national origin group in the county (although immigrants from other Latin American countries have increasingly made their homes in Los Angeles in recent years). Following the arrival of large numbers of white residents in the late 19th century, Mexican-​Americans in Los Angeles contended with ongoing policies and practices of residential segregation, deportation, and exclusion from political and economic opportunities (Sanchez, 1995; Torres, 2005; Wong, 2008).4 Economic turmoil in Mexico in the 1980s altered the composition and nature of Mexican migration—​ more migrants began staying in the United States for longer periods, and for the first time, a significant share attended college and were lower middle class (Torres, 2005). Larger populations of Central American migrants, often fleeing political violence, also began arriving, fostering the rise of Salvadoran and Guatemalan enclaves near Macarthur Park and Pico-​Union (Zentgraf, 2016). By the 1990s, Los Angeles’ ethnically diverse Latina/​o population was dispersed in large, but highly segregated, communities across the county. The nearly 2 million Asian Americans living in Los Angeles today encompass 16 percent of the county’s resident population (Ramakrishnan, n.d.). In addition to being the largest Asian American community in the country, Los Angeles is also home to one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse. Residents with Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Cambodian, and Thai heritage are more numerous in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the continental United States, and the Indian and Vietnamese American populations are just shy of 100,000 residents each. These communities are also spread across the county in suburban cities, urban ethnic enclaves, and multiracial neighborhoods (Iceland, Weinberg, & Hughes, 2014). The residential patterns and ethnic makeup of Asian Americans in Los Angeles have been shaped by a confluence of factors related to immigration policies, housing and economic discrimination, and a contentious history of internment and political exclusion.5 By the 1990s, the San Gabriel Valley east of downtown had fully transitioned from its predominantly Japanese American origins in the postwar period to a community defined by a large, and growing, Chinese population. These groups lived alongside other immigrants from East and Southeast Asia, as well as a significant population of Mexican Americans (Saito, 1998). Outside of the San Gabriel Valley, Asian Americans were living in smaller clusters, but not necessarily in large racially homogenous neighborhoods.

If Not Here, Then Where?  115 Two events during the 1990s serve as touchstones in the political development of Asian Americans and Latina/​os in Los Angeles—​the beating of Rodney King by police and its aftermath, and organized opposition to anti-​ immigrant ballot propositions, particularly Proposition 187. Following more than a century of resistance and subjugation in the face of social and civic ostracism (Kim, 1999), these moments were a crucible for emerging political activists and leaders in both communities. The informal political infrastructures within the Asian American and Latina/​o communities that emerged from this decade are linked by the racial political context of the county but could not be more different in form and function. The civil unrest following the Rodney King verdict in 1992 shaped each racial community in Los Angeles in distinct ways (Chang, 1993; Kim & Lee, 2001; Sonenshein, 1993). Among many Korean Americans, the aftermath was a politically galvanizing moment. Several scholars and interview respondents I spoke with argued that the Korean American community recognized a need for increasing their representation in mainstream politics in Los Angeles (Oh, 1995; Park, 2001), given what they saw as an inadequate, or even neglectful, response by City of Los Angeles officials and agencies during the uprising. This prompted the development of new civic organizations based around the political parties and rebuilding efforts, but it also highlighted the challenging position that Korean Americans occupied in the political coalitions of Los Angeles. Internal tensions between social and business conservatives, and those who saw Korean American interests as aligned with African American and Latina/​o civil rights struggles, frequently translated into fractured alliances, and a less cohesive advocacy strategy for the Koreatown community. Despite these differences, and being smaller in number than the Chinese-​American community, several respondents pointed to Korean Americans as a potent electoral force, because struggles over the interests of Koreatown residents6 have served as capacity-​building opportunities for political activists and leaders. During the same decade, Proposition 187 (Prop. 187) was the first of three statewide propositions passed by California voters aimed at sharply curtailing immigrants’ access to public services. The ballot initiative aimed to restrict undocumented residents of California from utilizing any nonemergency health, education, and other public services and sought to compel members of certain occupation categories to report the possible presence of undocumented persons to federal authorities. The campaigns and public advocates for passage of Prop. 187, including Governor Pete Wilson, made

116  Nowhere to Run clear that it was aimed at the growing Latina/​o community, which at the time comprised nearly a third of the state’s population. These three propositions “reflected an overall environment of racial threat toward Latinos,” of which everyday residents were cognizant and, on a number of occasions, experienced through violence and direct threats (García Bedolla, 2005).7 Among Latina/​o political elites and organization leaders in Los Angeles, Prop. 187 created an opening for political mobilization in immigrant communities. Several candidates and leaders I interviewed spoke about protesting and organizing during and after the passage of Prop. 187 as their initial serious forays into politics. Rallies in front of city hall during the weeks leading up to the 1994 election were the largest in the region since the Vietnam War (Milkman, 2006). Newly prominent elected officials and labor leaders, such as then–​Assembly Member Antonio Villaraigosa, were determined to translate Latina/​o community members’ energy around anti-​immigrant ballot propositions into electoral power and immigrant-​based workplace organizing. As younger leaders were building grassroots mobilization strategies and increasing the technical capacity for election turnout through unions during this period, members of the “old guard” also saw an opportunity to expand the number of seats held by Latina/​os. Richard Polanco’s name came up often when interview respondents described how the 1990s were a time of galvanization for Latina/​o political leaders, and the overall evolution of the system of succession and coordination among Latina/​o candidates. Polanco, who was part of an earlier generation of Latina/​o elected leadership (and what many respondents called the Art Torres, and Ed Roybal, “machines”), served in both houses of the state legislature in the 1990s and eventually became Speaker of the California Senate. As one longtime political consultant described it, “Polanco drew the line in the sand. He said, ‘We’re gonna double the size of this [Latino] caucus.’ ” Many respondents trace the sophisticated political infrastructure of Latina/​o Democrats that defines Los Angeles now to relationships forged in the crucible of the immigration, labor, and racial political battles of the 1990s. Latina leaders were never mentioned when respondents talked about these formative years. Since that period, the Latina/​o Democratic leadership that has emerged has largely been oriented around men and made significant headway toward Polanco’s promise. In order to build the “Latino caucus,” he foretold, political elites created an infrastructure that can leverage the immense resources and coalitions necessary to consistently win in a sprawling and expensive political context.

If Not Here, Then Where?  117

Los Angeles’ Electoral Context: High Barriers, Few Avenues The recent political histories of the Asian American and Latina/​o communities in Los Angeles helped shape the resources that they draw on to compete for descriptive representation in a challenging electoral environment. Throughout Los Angeles County, institutional arrangements that elevate barriers to entry for elected office at the city and state level are a defining condition that shapes electoral opportunity (Sonenshein et al., 2014; Saito, 1993a; Sonenshein, 2005; Wong, 2008).8 To illustrate, Los Angeles has a relatively small council for a city of its size: 15 seats for a population of approximately four million people in 2016. Likewise, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has five members who run in districts with roughly two million residents each. These unwieldy districts raise the costs of mounting successful campaigns (Mcgreevey, 2017). Jurisdictions encompassing large immigrant communities also necessitate extensive, and often resource intensive, voter mobilization efforts.9 One respondent summarized the institutional limits on candidate emergence in Los Angeles this way: “there are really only four or five ways into winning a seat in LA. No one wins if they don’t go through one of those routes, and there are many people in front of them on the road.” Successful candidates are often identified with one of a handful of key constituent groups, even if they also attempt to neutralize or incorporate other groups into their campaigns. When describing this pattern to me, a donor recounted a series of questions he put to a candidate who asked for his support. The candidate had assiduously avoided publicly attaching the campaign to a particular interest or group: “I said: ‘Are you a developer?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you Latino?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you Black?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you from labor?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you a tree-​hugging hippie environmentalist?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then what the fuck are you?!’ ” This terse encapsulation illustrates the narrow scope of options candidates have for identifying themselves with a group, and the frequent necessity of those ties for a campaign to be perceived as viable. The frequent, single-​dimensional focus on racial group politics in Los Angeles by scholars of coalitions and urban politics (Davis, 2006; Saito, 1993b; Sonenshein, 1993) has obscured the extent to which patterns of representation are race-​gendered. To illustrate, when state legislative election data is broken out into race-​gendered groups, the clear ascent of Latinos and the slow, at times minimal, changes in the number of white men emerge. Figure 6.1 shows that the vicissitudes of descriptive representation in Los Angeles mirror those of the country in several key ways. While white men continue

118  Nowhere to Run

60%

55%

50%

45%

Percent of All General Election Wins

40%

35%

30%

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0% 1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006 Year

2008

2010

2012

2014

2016

Race-gendered Group African American Men Asian American Women White Women

African American Women Latinos Latinas

Asian American Men White Men

Figure 6.1.  State Legislative Election Victories, Los Angeles County: 1996–​2016.

to far outnumber all other groups, the increase in racial diversity over time—​ among men—​corresponds to similar patterns in national data presented in earlier chapters.10

If Not Here, Then Where?  119 Figure 6.2 shows (which reports the same data as Figure 6.1, excluding white men) that over time, Latinos and Asian American men have gained increasing traction, albeit at different rates. The same cannot be said for

25%

Percent of All General Election Wins

20%

15%

10%

5%

0% 1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

2008

2010

2012

2014

2016

Year Race-gendered Group African American Men Asian American Women

African American Women Latinos Latinas

Asian American Men White Women

Figure 6.2.  State Legislative Election Victories, Los Angeles County: 1996–​ 2016 (White Men Excluded).

120  Nowhere to Run co-​racial women. Latinas’ share of electoral wins peaked in 2006 and has not fully recovered. Asian American women’s proportion of election victories moves in a negative direction from 2008 forward and is nearly undetectable in recent elections. Whereas descriptive representation outcomes in Los Angeles mirror those of the rest of the country in some ways, the district population context does not. The distribution of white populations across districts is less lopsided than in most other areas of the United States. The median white proportion of district populations across all state legislative elections from 1996 to 2016 is .34—​nationally, that figure for the same period is .73. Los Angeles County is also home to the only Asian American majority population state legislative district outside of New York and Hawaii.11 Latina/​o populations are also widely distributed throughout the county—​the median Latina/​o proportion of district populations is .39. Figure 6.3 brings together population and electoral outcome data to show how frequently members of each race-​gendered group have won in districts with varying proportions of nonwhite residents. The y-​axis indicates the share of the district population that is nonwhite. The number of districts that are majority nonwhite increased substantially after the 2000 census redistricting round, and only slightly after the 2010 round. Each triangle depicts the general election victory of a man in a district, each circle stands in for an election win by a woman, and different degrees of shading indicate membership in different racial groups. Moving forward in time, the white triangles representing wins by white men shift from being largely below the majority-​minority mark to mostly above it in 2016. As the number of districts with predominantly minority populations increases, so does the number of white men winning in predominantly minority districts. No other group exhibits this degree of apparent mobility, suggesting that white men have access to a wider array of electoral opportunities than other groups. Meanwhile, as Figure 6.3 shows, every group other than white men is often contending for a constrained array of opportunities with regard to the racial makeup of the population. Within that smaller band, Asian American women have had a minimal presence throughout the years covered by the dataset, and Latinas appear to have lost ground since the early 2000s. Latinos consistently win in districts where less than 25 percent of the population is white. Exceptions to this pattern are especially rare after the 2000 census round of redistricting. For Latinas, who won fewer races each year than

If Not Here, Then Where?  121 1.0

0.9

0.8

People of Color Proportion of Population

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004 2006 Year of Term

2008

2010

2012

2014

Latinos

African American Men

Asian American Men

White Men

Latinas

African American Women

Asian American Women

White Women

Figure 6.3.  State Legislative Election Winners by Race-​Gendered Group and District Population, 1996–​2016.

co-​racial men, the elections after 2006 yielded fewer descriptive representatives, in districts within a smaller population range. All but two of the sparse wins for Asian American women occur above the majority-​minority proportion line but do not appear to be consistently tied to any particular districts. Asian American men, in contrast, win much less often than other men but appear to be winning the same districts in consecutive cycles. This data suggests that an electoral dynamic that echoes the national picture outlined in previous chapters is occurring in Los Angeles. White men

122  Nowhere to Run appear relatively unconstrained by racial group populations in which they run and win state legislative office, whereas other groups appear to be winning in a more limited range. Even in a city heralded as a center of Latina/​o political power (Decker, 2010), the increasing proportions of people of color in districts has not occurred in tandem with a significant increase in the number of winners who are not white men (Table 6.1). Notably, the number of winners who are not white men in recent years is lower than it was during the elections from 2002 to 2010. These outcomes in Los Angeles further undermine the notion that district racial composition shapes candidacy and representation similarly across and within racial groups. As in earlier chapters, these candidacies and successes are the endpoints of numerous processes related to candidate emergence, bearing just a hint of the complicated informal institutional arrangements and networks underlying them. The next section provides a window into those arrangements among Asian American and Latina/​o political elites, and the spaces they have created for themselves in the county’s electoral context.

Table 6.1.  Number of State Legislative Election Wins, by Race-​Gender 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 Total African American Women African American Men Asian American Women Asian American Men Latinas Latinos White Women White Men All Except White Men

1

0

0

0

1

2

1

1

2

2

1

11

4

5

5

5

4

4

4

4

3

0

4

42

0

0

1

2

2

0

1

0

1

1

0

8

0

1

1

1

0

2

3

2

1

1

3

15

4 4 4

5 10 2

4 7 4

6 9 4

3 6 5

4 10 4

1 7 4

3 11 4

2 7 2

3 9 1

2 8 2

37 88 36

15 17

9 23

10 22

5 27

11 21

6 26

11 21

7 25

13 18

14 17

11 20

112 237

If Not Here, Then Where?  123

Latina/​os at the Center of Racial Coalition Politics in Los Angeles A number of interview respondents described the electoral politics that Latina/​os in Los Angeles participate in as a game of musical chairs. The description is partly accurate, in that there are a set of players (most Latina/​o and African American Democratic potential candidates) who are essentially circling a set of electoral seats that appear fairly fixed. Term limits in many of the top seats keep the game going, round after round, with experienced candidates moving from the legislature, to the city council, to the board of supervisors, or Congress.12 However, the musical chairs metaphor is also illusory, in two respects. First, there is relatively little that is random about where and when potential candidates land on the ballot—​in the next chapter I discuss in detail how this process is closely facilitated among Latina/​os, and structured primarily around Latinos. Second, the metaphor also implies that everyone is scrambling over seats, but in reality, only Latina/​os, African Americans, and to a limited extent, Asian Americans, are circling endlessly. As noted earlier, white men are contenders in a much wider array of districts than the other groups. Whether playing “the game” or not, in most legislative, city council, county, and congressional seats in Los Angeles, potential candidates must account for a substantial Latina/​o resident population. As an illustrative example, state legislative winners from all four racial groups are elected, in all but a handful of instances, from districts that are at least 25 percent Latina/​o population (Figure 6.4). The left side of Figure 6.4, which shows the Latina/​o district population frequencies for Latina/​o and African American winners, alludes to a frequent topic of debate in political science over coalition building and competition between these two communities in urban politics (Browning, Marshall, & Tabb, 1986; Jones-​Correa, 2001; Mollenkopf, 1986). There are Latina/​o supermajority districts, with populations two-​thirds Latina/​o or greater, and those are most often won by Latina/​os. However, there are also a significant share of election victories by African Americans in districts that are over 50 percent Latina/​o. These districts, and others like them in congressional and city races, feature centrally in the Democratic coalition in Los Angeles. Evidence of the Democratic coalition of African Americans and Latina/​ os is explicit in elite negotiations over candidate emergence and support,

Percent of Legislative Wins 1996–2016

124  Nowhere to Run African American

40 30

30

20

20

10

10

0

0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

Latina/o

40

0

30

20

20

10

10 0.00

0.25

0.50

0.00

0.25

0.75

1.00

0

0.50

0.75

1.00

0.75

1.00

White

40

30

0

Asian American

40

0.00

0.25

0.50

Latina/o Proportion of District Population

Figure 6.4.  Latina/​o Proportion of District Population in State Legislative General Election Wins.

particularly in districts that have historically been home to large African American communities. The ability of Latina/​o Democratic leaders to work with African American Democrats in ensuring electoral cooperation was raised by most interview respondents as a critical component of the circulation of candidates in Latina/​o supermajority seats. Latina/​o leaders regularly account for the possible emergence of African American Democrats in certain seats while making plans for future candidates. Several respondents described the situation African American candidates face as a “race against population change.” One respondent said, You look at the numbers, the Black political world is holding on by their fingernails in so many different areas because everything is becoming Latino or it’s gonna be Asian . . . Their [African American] numbers are declining. These are not Black districts. And people are trying to hold on.

In seats that have historically been held by African American representatives (all of which are now majority Latina/​o population), a balance of trust and enforcement enables cooperation between political elites over candidate

If Not Here, Then Where?  125 emergence and support. Some interview respondents attribute the trust to a history of African Americans and Latina/​os working together on policy in the legislature, or on civil rights issues in the 1960s and 1970s. Those issues were also discussed as part of a pragmatic concern for keeping African American representatives in Sacramento—​they are often liberal Democratic votes that the leadership in the assembly and Senate can count on for legislation.13 The other side of the cooperative balance between African American and Latina/​o elites is enforcement, or the expectation of enforcement, which comes in the form of candidate endorsements, support, and opposition efforts. The internal system of succession and pipeline building is powerful in part because it encompasses a number of politicians who individually have their own political power and resources. Thus, when a decision by “leadership” (as many respondents described the small group of Latina/​o Democratic political elites who coordinate much of the candidate rotation) is made, many Latina/​o and African American political actors are expected to move in support of that decision, either through public statements, or by staying quiet if they have a conflict that prevents them from making an endorsement. One prominent donor described long-​term political consequences for politicians or leaders who do not move with leadership this way: If you piss off a Black politician, you better get ten Black politician friends to cancel them out, because that wound can be deep. Then, the next time we go in the Black community he’s like, “You’re the guy.”

This perception of collective discipline among African American political elites was echoed among a number of respondents. Candidates and elected officials who were not African American typically discussed this dynamic as an understandable response to a political environment largely shaped by racial politics. One candidate said that in a campaign where he tried (unsuccessfully) to gain the support of Democratic Party delegates while running against an African American candidate, “most of the delegates are African-​ American. And everybody’s playing ethnic politics. Me included. So I understood that.” The degree of African American solidarity at the political elite level is not monolithic or impervious; there have been several high-​ profile electoral contests and endorsement splits between prominent African American elected officials in the county in the last two decades. However,

126  Nowhere to Run the expectation by political actors outside of the African American community is that African American political elites will be united if one of the historic seats is targeted by a member of another racial group. There is also a widespread assumption that once Latina/​o Democratic leaders have come to an agreement with African American politicians over who will run, and whether Latina/​os will stay out of a race in a historic seat, other Latina/​os will also fall in line. The process was described in similar ways in interviews where this topic was raised: There’s also, at the . . . political elite level—​where people stake out a position and say, “Hey, that’s a black seat or an Asian seat or Latino seat,” and you see it very effectively with African Americans where there would be a seat that’s vastly majority Latino population, even majority Latino registration, and the Black political elite will say, “That’s a black seat. Always has been. Needs to continue to be.” They will then get many of the Latino political elite to agree with them. More importantly, labor and all that. Then . . . it becomes a consensus that we need to recruit some African American to be the candidate there, so that any Latino that runs is gonna go up against that whole system.

Balancing trust and enforcement has been a primary strategy of Latina/​o political elites for the past two decades, in negotiating what many respondents described as a “transition” period for African Americans in Los Angeles politics. Several younger candidates and organization leaders and a number of Latinas sometimes evinced a sense of discomfort around the negotiation over historic seats that had been “claimed,” either by African Americans or Latina/​os: “I feel bad. I mean, I feel bad when I have to say, ‘Well, that’s a Latino seat. Why are we letting another person take it?’ Right? Because politics is still very territorial.” This language of claiming and territory was repeated often and points to Latina/​o political elites’ perception of the high stakes inherent in each available seat. The undercurrent of their descriptions of electoral opportunities for Latina/​os in Los Angeles was often that these seats could be “lost” to other racial groups, if candidacy opportunities are not tightly managed and coordinated. Importantly, this careful balance rests in a small, tightly knit network of largely male Latina/​o and African American Democratic leaders, who have frequently operated with a single-​dimensional focus on outgroup racial group members as the primary competitors for representation. This has left

If Not Here, Then Where?  127 little attention to Latina/​o subgroups of significant size, such as national origin groups other than Mexican Americans (which were rarely mentioned in the interviews I conducted), and Latinas more broadly. For example, I spoke to many of the respondents for this case study in the months after a congressional race with an upset result, wherein Nanette Barragan (a Latina attorney and former Mayor of Hermosa Beach) beat Isadore Hall III, an African American member of the State Assembly. All of the respondents who spoke about the race described Barragan’s emergence as a surprise to Latino and African American elites and said that both communities had long been lined up behind Hall, due to an understanding around his candidacy that had been forged several election cycles earlier. That “understanding” was largely brokered among Latino and African American men. Even as Latina/​o leaders negotiate candidacies in coalition with African Americans and, occasionally, Asian Americans, within a fairly defined subset of seats, white candidates run (and white men win) in a much wider array of districts. They are not playing the game of musical chairs. Several respondents told me in interviews that the mix of candidates of color in districts with substantial Latina/​o populations is carefully orchestrated, and elites work to keep promises of support and resources to overcome any hurdles along the way—​but that a white man or woman candidate could get in the race in many districts and make it to the runoff, if not win. Further research is necessary to explain white men’s sustained success in Los Angeles, but interviews and the outcomes suggest that they are not constrained by the game of musical chairs that Latinas, Latinos, and other candidates of color are working within. Some aspects of Los Angeles’ patterns of candidate emergence may be distinct to the region; there are few U.S. cities where Latina/​os have achieved the mix of political resources and allies that is present in Los Angeles. Labor unions, for example, play a central role in stabilizing and leading the efforts of the coalitions described in this chapter. The Los Angeles County Labor Federation (County Fed) and its constituent unions potentially provide endorsed candidates with a level of support that many respondents said can determine the terms of electoral contests. Due in part to intertwined personal histories among key political and labor leaders and the history of organizing in Los Angeles in the past two decades, the support of major labor organizations and the preferences of Latina/​o Democratic leaders in elections are rarely out of sync. All respondents agreed that while it is not a guarantee of success, labor union

128  Nowhere to Run support can help determine close races or turn close races into landslides by discouraging competition.14 That degree of political strength and engagement by organized labor is rare in large American cities. But the overall dynamic, whereby communities of color contest a limited number of “Latino” or “Black” seats, while white men continue to run in a wide array of districts with varying populations, is not. As Latina/​o and Asian American populations grow in metropolitan areas like Houston, Detroit, Atlanta, and Raleigh/​Durham, and in long-​ standing immigrant communities like Seattle and Chicago, it is likely that Democratic coalitions of color will have to repeatedly consider whether they are playing a game of musical chairs or getting played. At the same time, the next chapter shows that even as Latina/​o elites are engaged in high-​stakes, “race-​based” politics in Los Angeles and other cities, they are simultaneously making decisions and building informal infrastructures that shape whether Latinas are part of the team.

The “Crossover” Conundrum Constrained geographies also played a central role in interviews focused on the electoral prospects of Asian American women and men in Los Angeles. However, these conversations reflected the distinctive position Asian Americans occupy as a group of potential voters and political actors in the county. Many respondents who believed that Asian Americans can increase their descriptive representation in Los Angeles discussed the need for Asian Americans to become better “crossover” candidates in order to achieve that goal. In follow-​up conversations, I asked why, if the crossover model was the ticket to Asian American representation, were most respondents only able to name one person (Mike Woo, a Los Angeles City Council Member in the 1980s) who had successfully used it in three decades? They typically laughed uncomfortably, or were momentarily silent, in response. As the discussion of Asian Americans unfolded during interviews, it became clear that while Woo is widely considered a crossover candidate, the mix of communities and support he relied upon had rarely been replicated for other Asian American candidates. One respondent described it as “this kind of people of color coalition plus the [largely white] west side”15 base that was supported by the key Latina/​o leaders at the time, like Al Torres. In contrast, other Asian Americans who have been elected to city, state, or

If Not Here, Then Where?  129 congressional seats in the county over the past two decades have come from districts with larger proportions of Asian Americans and whites. The Asian American proportions of these districts range from roughly 10 percent to 25 percent in most cases. The two Asian American Congress members from the county, Judy Chu and Ted Lieu, represent districts that also encompass 49 and 75 percent white populations, respectively. Former Council Member David Ryu’s 10th City Council District has a white population that is 75 percent of the district. Carol Liu, the only Asian American elected to the State Senate from Los Angeles County, represented a district that was 50 percent white. Of the 18 electoral wins by Asian Americans in the State Assembly over the same period, one-​third were in districts with a white-​majority population. Despite the fairly consistent presence of relatively large white and Asian American populations in seats held by Asian Americans, interview respondents struggled to pin down the exact terms of being a crossover candidate. Many followed a general pattern of first talking about working in coalition with Latina/​ os—​ who they acknowledged have been and would increasingly be a significant population in most districts—​and then reconsidering, and shifting to talking about Asian Americans’ abilities to garner the support of white voters. These respondents were not confused, or inconsistent, but their discussion of crossover candidates reflected the simultaneous perils and promise of this strategy for Asian Americans attempting to identify realistic electoral opportunities in Los Angeles County. In most of the jurisdictions that respondents identified as potential new opportunities for Asian Americans, the majority of voters are likely to be either Latina/​o or white. These factors further complicate the choices for Asian Americans attempting to compete in elections in the racial coalition context of Los Angeles. Putting together a coalition with Latina/​o elites and voters poses structural challenges for potential Asian American candidates, when it is likely that a Latina/​o, perhaps with more extensively organized electoral resources, will also be on the ballot. Targeting white voters, or running more to the ideological right in the areas east of the City of Los Angeles, potentially puts Asian American women and men candidates in a tenuous position in the Democratic coalition and “ethnic politics” landscape of the county. One possible reflection of this positioning is that, in recent years, the only Asian Americans elected to the state legislature from this region of Southern California have been Republicans outside of Los Angeles County who relied heavily on the support of white voters.

130  Nowhere to Run One respondent’s attempt to summarize the crossover candidate approach highlights its challenges in a context defined by race and Democratic power: It’s different because Latinos is pure numbers, right? They’re just trying to overcome with numbers. There’s no right way. I think it’s a hybrid model. It’s something like what the Jewish community, and Latino community—​ and that’s what we got to figure out . . . Also, the Asian Americans—​they’re not all progressive and liberal. I mean, I think it’s more—​in California—​ it’s more like 70/​30 but others would argue like 60/​40. It’s about how you bring everybody under the tent but it’s while I want to empower Asian Americans, I also want to empower progressives and there’s all sorts of different things at play.

In addition to Mike Woo, a handful of elites pointed to Judy Chu’s election to Congress in 2009 as an informative case—​she “brought deep roots in the Eastside” (a historically Latino part of the county) and her long history with labor and Latina/​o immigrant organizing to bear against then–​Assembly Member Gil Cedillo. One in three Latina/​o voters in that election chose her over Cedillo (Tobar, 2009). I asked several respondents whether Chu was an anomaly, or a blueprint, and each answered in a way that emphasized the singularity of that election: either Chu was wholly unique as an Asian American candidate who also checked all of the boxes that Latina/​o leaders sought, Cedillo’s personal relationships with labor leaders were fraught enough at that time to allow them to support Chu, or Chu’s standing as a leading Democrat was connected to a system of coalition politics that has since changed dramatically. Respondents’ interpretations of the Chu/​Cedillo contest highlighted similarities and differences in the relationship between the Latina/​o Democratic leadership and Asian Americans versus the relationship between Latina/​o and African American political elites discussed earlier in this chapter. Several Latina/​o leaders I spoke with talked about the “crossover” districts, like Judy Chu’s, as presumed Latina/​o seats, either now or in the immediate future. One leader was blunt that “for you to have an Asian seat, it literally costs a Latino seat. Every Asian assembly member, state senator, or congressman could easily have been and more likely to be a Latino elected official. It has to be some type of situational—​something special that happens. Judy Chu only gets elected because it’s a special election in the old, two-​party system where she’s the top Democrat.”

If Not Here, Then Where?  131 Several Asian American respondents took essentially the same tone—​ Latina/​os were or would shortly be the largest single racial group in many of the districts in question, and thus it was most likely that they would take or hold those seats, as a matter of racial “strength in numbers” politics. Other Asian American respondents argued that it was a mistake to consider crossover seats as Latina/​os’ to lose. Some took issue with what they saw as Latina/​ o leaders’ perceptions that victories like Chu’s should be considered a favor, to keep the Democratic coalition “happy.” They emphasized that this was “the tension”: that for Asian Americans to increase representation, they would have to “take it” from Latina/​os. Another common tack that respondents pursued in making the case for crossover candidates was a move away from race-​based politics, or at least race-​based appeals to voters. Some described it as candidates simply not emphasizing their racial identity, and running as progressive Democrats. One former candidate described it: Asians are gonna have to be running in areas where they’re not so—​you gotta have a chance. . . . And other ethnic communities come in and say, “No, it’s our seat. It’s our area.” And I said, “Well, look at the numbers.” They’re not. So I can run. I’m not gonna run as an Asian. I’m not gonna win as an Asian. I’m gonna raise money as an Asian.

John Choi and David Ryu’s city council campaigns (in 2013 and 2015, respectively) were identified as two attempts at this strategy, with divergent results. One respondent was disappointed in Choi’s loss and expressed skepticism to Ryu early on about his approach, saying that in Los Angeles, you have to be with a specific group so that you can turn out voters and get donors: “You say you work for everybody, that means you work for nobody.” He confessed to being surprised that Ryu won, and that it made him consider more seriously whether Asian Americans who were committed to their ethnic or racial community could also win over white voters. This respondent saw an evolution in the Asian Americans’ political development as a group, that they could eventually cultivate candidates committed to their issues, and help them win, but not need their racial identity to be front and center during the campaign. Other respondents also saw white voter support as the key to Asian Americans winning ethnic plurality districts but argued that it would be attainable because Asian American women and men are more willing to

132  Nowhere to Run run from the center and center right than other people of color in Los Angeles: “We’re gonna be getting a few more Republicans elected because they’re gonna be getting elected in the suburbs against white candidates. And so a lot of our building’s gonna have to be more in the suburbs, not L.A. city.” This respondent viewed the move away from progressive and liberal Democratic positions as a natural fit for the largely nonpartisan and first-​generation immigrant portions of the Asian American community: Now, they’ve swung back to, it’s up for grabs, which is really where the community should be. I think the community actually is up for grabs because the DTS [Decline to State] vote speaks volumes. Most people are registering DTS, now. . . . I think the open primary helped . . . the Republicans make some of these districts more competitive. I think when you look at Phil Chen or Ling Ling [Chang, Republicans elected to the state legislature] and them, they’re getting a fair amount of Anglo votes, too, right?

Not all respondents saw the same opportunity in expanding Asian American candidacies through the Republican Party. One candidate argued that given the history of Republican Asian Americans in statewide and state legislative office in California, the recent emergence of Asian American Republicans in the legislature is not all that significant. He pointed out that regardless of affiliation, Asian American candidates will have to go the way their co-​ethnic base goes, and that in the last three presidential cycles, they are moving steadily in the Democratic direction. A final complicating factor in the prospect of Asian Americans as crossover candidates is their position as a group within political coalitions in the county and state. As discussed earlier, Asian American candidates who attempt to pull Latina/​o or African American votes, when there is a Latina/​ o or African American on the ballot, can create tensions in the electoral arrangements that Latina/​os and labor unions have been working to facilitate for the better part of two decades.16 If Asian American women and men run from the ideological center, or the Republican party, that also puts them in the position of being the only nonwhite racial group that is not closely affiliated with organized labor, and Democratic policy priorities, in Los Angeles. This has yielded mixed results for the small handful of candidates who have attempted it. David Ryu did not have significant labor support

If Not Here, Then Where?  133 or a long list of union endorsements in his successful, nonpartisan city council election campaign. Ling Ling Chang and Phillip Chen won consecutively in Assembly District 55 as Republicans, in a district adjacent to Los Angeles County where whites are a third of the population but a majority of voters. On the flip side, when Chang first ran for the State Senate seat overlapping her assembly district in 2016, she lost to a novice white male candidate supported by Bernie Sanders and other high-​profile Democrats. When Chang won the seat back in a recall election two years later, the Latino Democratic leadership in the legislature lost the supermajority they had established in recent elections. On balance, while a crossover strategy expanding Asian Americans’ electoral opportunities is frequently on the minds of political actors in Los Angeles, it is not a well-​developed model. Some respondents that I spoke to agreed with that assessment but said that it may be that Asian Americans need to wait for another round of redistricting before the crossover strategy can become viable. What they said they were waiting to see was not another majority–​Asian American district, but one where Asian Americans and Latina/​os were each a significant portion of the district, between 30 and 40 percent. In that “sweet spot” scenario: If this is a type of race where now you’re the only Asian . . . if multiple Latino [candidates] have jumped, they have cut their base and then you have whites determine the winner. In that scenario, an Asian will win, I think, because . . . Latinos . . . start to battle royale, and then it’ll leave the whites up for grabs. You have to have a [voter] base below the threshold where it’s turning off whites but then you have other ethnic candidates where the whites now have to make some sort of a choice.

The underlying premise of this scenario—​that if white voters are forced to choose between an Asian American candidate and a Latina/​o, they will choose the former—​requires further empirical study. However, the motivating premise for it is one that may be the most realistic aspect of the crossover strategy: at some point, the population of Los Angeles County will have an even more significant proportion of Asian Americans and Latina/​os, and other groups’ relative share will dwindle. Whether that translates into candidate choices that include a significant number of Asian American women and men also remains to be seen.

134  Nowhere to Run

Conclusion If we take a more historical view of Los Angeles politics, the informal institutions currently animating electoral politics came into being fairly recently. One respondent noted that the array of leaders and powerbrokers who are central today may change as political gravity for Latina/​os shifts away from the City of Los Angeles to broader parts of the county, and to the legislature in Sacramento. The respondent also described a potential generational tension around race-​based politics as it was advanced by earlier cohorts of Latina/​o leaders: Respondent: All these ethnic caucuses to me are kind of dated. And I think we’re going to move to a place where everybody’s going to be multi-​ ethnic, multi-​racial . . . and I think it’s important for those Californians to see themselves in positions of power, so I think that’s the future, in my opinion. And I think we move away from this territorial politics of, like, “Oh, that is a Latino seat. That is an Asian seat. That is a Black seat.” . . . It worked for us in the 70s, 80s, 90s, but now, with this new generation, this has its expiration date. I don’t think the new generation of folks are as worried about this ethnic representation, how we were . . . But I also understand that we need to maintain some sort of identity in this process. I know, I know. I’m conflicted. Interviewer: Are you? Respondent: I am conflicted with the previous question about still trying to fight for seats and still trying to be part of this new wave of thought . . . But there’s the Polancos, Al Torres that are still holding me, like, wait, you’re one—​So I want to be part of this ethnic revolution, but then I see—​Yeah, I’m conflicted. Throughout the interview, a key concern for this respondent was how Latina/​ os would grow as a political community, in harmony with and alongside other growing groups of people of color in Southern California. Part of that growth may be shaped by younger, rising Latina/​o politicians, who are less invested in the coalitions of previous eras based on civil rights coalitions with African Americans, or immigration or labor activists who worked together in the 1990s. Several respondents pointed out that Latina/​o and Asian American political figures who fit that latter description were emerging more frequently

If Not Here, Then Where?  135 in communities like the San Gabriel Valley, or in Riverside and Orange Counties, where they were competing in ethnic plurality districts and had to make a case to voters that extended beyond race-​based politics. The necessity, and effectiveness, of working in cross-​racial coalitions in order to maintain and increase Latina/​o descriptive representation may acquire renewed importance in these areas. Asian Americans in those same districts have made several attempts to develop winning cross-​racial coalitions of voters, with inconsistent results. While Asian Americans as a political group are, in some ways, a long-​ standing fixture in Los Angeles politics, in other ways, particularly at the elite level, they are a group that has yet to coalesce around a particular strategy or informal network. One respondent began our conversation by telling me that in the 1980s, he used to walk around saying that “Asian Americans are just 20 years behind Latinos, politically.” I closed the interview by asking him if, nearly four decades later, he still walks around saying that, because it implies that he can imagine the community moving toward something different. He paused, and said “Yeah. I do. I’m actually an optimist.” Many respondents ended the interview on a similarly hopeful note, because they view the current state of Asian American politics in Los Angeles as part of a longer arc of the community’s political evolution. This perspective often took two forms. One was that Asian Americans are an immigrant community that is fairly new, that needs time to develop deep civic institutions and figure out how to navigate as a group in a political system that is unfamiliar to many of its members. The other viewpoint was that Asian Americans have been fighting to match their political voice to their presence in American communities for decades, and that this moment may not be the finish line, but compared to the 1960s and ’70s, there is discernible progress. As one respondent put it, “if you think about it, we’re pretty early in our political development. Japanese-​Americans and Asian immigrants couldn’t become citizens until the ’50s. We’re on the new end of this, so I’m not discouraged by it. It’s gonna be interesting what form it takes.” Others were also hopeful because they could identify the challenges clearly and saw openings in both the internal organization of Asian American communities and the functioning of politics more generally. For example, one respondent argued that machine politics is no longer sustainable, because younger generations, from any racial group, are not interested in identity-​ based solidarity:

136  Nowhere to Run But the old school Antonio talking with Kevin de León, talking to Fabian Núñez, who’ve both talked to Richard Alatorre, who’s coordinating with Polanco, who’s touched base with Art Torres . . . that’s my generation. It’s moving off the board. And what happens now, people are becoming more free agents.

Without the machine, this respondent went on to reason, there would be more space for Asian American candidates who are taking on districts and elections individually, instead of waiting to create a place for themselves in an unwieldy, race-​based coalition. In a related manner, other respondents said that Asian Americans had achieved enough to start developing their own systems for increasing representation, but that it would look different from the infrastructure that Latina/​os have built. One respondent remarked that “we might do it in a very different way. We’re at the point now where we have the ear of a lot of powerful people, but we are going to go about it in a completely different manner. We’re not easy to say ‘Well, I’m gonna deliver the Asian votes for this.’ ” Throughout respondents’ reflections on what the community should do going forward, the necessity of building political institutions and informal networks was a common thread. On balance, that thread is an argument in favor of the expectation that Asian American descriptive representation, and political capacity, can increase. The challenges facing Asian Americans as a group—​building a reliable voter base, lack of clarity on the best model to win elections, and the identity issues that have yet to be bridged by elites—​are not inherent to Asian immigrants exclusively, or immutable. They can be mitigated by the development of civic institutions, networks of elected officials and potential candidates, and other political infrastructure. On balance, Asian Americans have not developed a clear model or infrastructure for building their political power and levels of descriptive representation in Los Angeles. Replicating the “majority-​minority,” race-​based political machines of Latina/​os and African Americans is untenable, given the size and dispersion of the population and its internal diversity (along several dimensions). Turning to a strategy of “crossover” and “coalition”-​based candidates would require peeling off voters from other, more highly organized political communities and may make Asian Americans’ place in California’s Democratic coalition increasingly tenuous. As many respondents emphasized, what emerges as the political model for Asian Americans will likely look different from what Latina/​o Democrats and labor have built—​but there

If Not Here, Then Where?  137 may be opportunity in having room to grow. It is an open question whether or not a new model will emerge, and if it will incorporate and develop the female half of the community as leaders and candidates. The case in this chapter reflects broader national patterns of an electoral context where opportunities for candidacy are constrained by race and gender. Racial composition of districts serve as an important foreground among elites actively working and strategizing to “claim” or maintain seats for “one of their own.” However, the next chapters’ analysis of the resources and strategies elites develop in order to deal with race-​based limits on viable opportunities shows that they tend to be structured around men. Latina/​os and Asian Americans as pan-​ethnic groups occupy distinct positions within the electoral context of Los Angeles County. The next chapter shows that the pressures associated with those positions interact with and shape the internal dynamics of candidate development within those communities in distinct ways as well. Latina/​os’ informal but highly organized candidate emergence systems often actively exclude Latinas and limit their access to electoral opportunities that are otherwise available to Latinos. Asian Americans’ lack of political infrastructure contributes to an “entrepreneurial” field of candidates and a dearth of resources to facilitate the emergence of potential Asian American women candidates, in an electoral context marked by a high cost of entry. In both groups, race and gender simultaneously narrow Asian American women and Latinas’ opportunities to emerge as candidates and limit the overall prospects for ballots that reflect the populations they serve.

7 “She Came out of Nowhere” Elite Networks and Candidate Emergence in Los Angeles

The informal institutions and processes related to candidate development within the Latina/​o and Asian American communities in Los Angeles are quite different and, are related in part to their unique positions in racial coalition politics more broadly. The degree to which the Latina/​o and Asian American communities are internally organized as pan-​ethnic political actors is also not the same. However, one shared characteristic across both groups is the lopsided representation of women and men—​the lion’s share of Latina/​o and Asian American representatives across the most prestigious offices in the county are men. Many of the male political elites that I interviewed attributed the relatively lower rates of Asian American women’s and Latinas’ success and emergence as candidates to issues specific to women themselves: either that there was no such thing as “women’s solidarity” or that women lacked some emotional component—​ambition, a desire for the spotlight, confidence—​necessary for candidacy. The responses from Latinas and Asian American women were a sharp contrast. Nearly all described candidate development in Los Angeles as simultaneously racialized and gendered, and shaped by informal in-​group institutions and processes, or the absence thereof. To be frank, a number of female respondents also related that male political leaders within their racial groups tended to be sexist. They shared instances of explicit bias related to their reproductive choices, domestic arrangements, and general treatment by some Latino and Asian American male elites. However, the interviews also reveal that race-​gendered advantages for Latino and Asian American male potential candidates are not dependent on individual attitudes of bias or prejudice but, instead, are woven into the political organizational fabric of each respective community in different ways. Latinas are frequently excluded from, or unrecognized within, the central Latina/​o candidate development processes in Los Angeles. As the goal of building the Latina/​o caucus in the state legislature and in offices across Nowhere to Run. Christian Dyogi Phillips, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538937.003.0007

140  Nowhere to Run the county has crystallized over the past two decades, informal institutions oriented around that single dimension of identity have been erected. These institutions have been largely built around the interests and relationships of privileged members of the Latina/​o political community. The exacting criteria for being the “chosen” candidate, being included in negotiations over future plans, or mentored with the explicit purpose of succession are structured among “the Latino leadership” in race-​gendered ways that often render Latina potential candidates ineligible for support from political insiders. Whereas the central issue underlying Latinas’ underrepresentation might be described as tightly constructed pipelines and fences keeping them out, a more apt analogy among Asian Americans might be that there is such scant political structure that women have little scaffolding to hang on to in order to get on the ballot. In Los Angeles’ racial coalition politics, Asian American women and men are relatively less organized at the elite political level than Latina/​os and African American women and men. The absence of a coherent internal candidate development infrastructure, or collective accumulation of electoral resources for political mobilization, means that most recent Asian American women and men candidates have been entrepreneurial—​acting on their own, without any significant organizational ties or connections to the broader Asian American political community. This dynamic, within an already constrained geography of opportunity, exacerbates preexisting differences in the social and political positioning of Asian American women and men as potential candidates. This chapter’s descriptions of the internal contours of Asian American and Latina/​o elite politics in Los Angeles are not intended to identify the underlying causes of each group’s political “cohesion” as racialized immigrant communities—​that is beyond the scope of this study. Instead, I outline these internal dynamics to illustrate how different stages and manifestations of group-​level organization and infrastructure can inform women’s electoral opportunities. In both cases in this study, the degree to which electoral opportunities are realistic and accessible is intersectional in nature. Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women and men are surrounded by districts with sizable co-​racial populations but, countywide, still face race and gender-​ based constraints on realistic opportunities to run. Those limits reinforce a single-​dimensional (racialized) pressure on candidacy that elites within each racial group have responded to in ways that are distinctively race-​gendered but have yielded similar results; Latinas and Asian American women have been markedly absent from the ballot.

“She Came out of Nowhere”  141 In every interview focused on Asian Americans, the lack of an “Asian American infrastructure” among political elites and potential candidates was a consistent topic. Respondents used this term to refer to informal institutions and networks—​ campaign professionals, civic organizations, incumbents identifying and systematically developing their replacements, etc.—​as well as the lack of a clear set of leaders who are working to increase political power beyond their individual seat or personal trajectory in politics. The absence of pan-​ethnic political organizing around elections and candidates carries material consequences for the development of Asian American women and men potential candidates in Los Angeles, in part because so much of electoral politics is organized around racial groups and race-​based coalitions in the Democratic Party. At a basic level, one Asian American candidate told me that even if other coalition members wanted to work with Asian Americans as a group, they would have no idea who to talk to. Another Asian American respondent put it this way: “There’s no consensus on Asian here,” and the result is an absence of leaders trying to establish districts as “Asian seats” or aggregating political resources between ethnic groups and leaders.1 When interviews turned to explaining this current dearth of organization, respondents emphasized four interactive elements—​ internal heterogeneity, geographic dispersion, few civic organizations, and low political participation—​that they view as characteristics of the Asian American public. In their view, these four elements pose challenges for developing an Asian American voter base that is considered reliable or substantial by most political elites, including Asian Americans themselves. This, in turn, eliminates a potent resource for Asian Americans considering a run for office, which is central to other racial groups in the Los Angeles political landscape: the promise of voters who will show up in significant numbers for “one of their own,” or who might threaten the success of a candidate from another racial group running on the “ethnic politics” model. The internal heterogeneity of Asian Americans as a racial group was the most frequently raised challenge that respondents emphasized in explaining the lack of an Asian American political infrastructure. The ethnic and linguistic diversity of Asian Americans in the county is the tip of the iceberg.2 The number of foreign-​born Asian American residents in the county is close to one million, and over a quarter of that group has arrived since 2000. Approximately 130,000 Asian Americans living in the county are undocumented (Asian Americans Advancing Justice—​Los Angeles, 2013).

142  Nowhere to Run Educational attainment and income levels vary considerably among ethnic groups. As a racial group, Asian Americans are less likely than whites to have completed high school or obtained a GED, but individual ethnic groups—​ Taiwanese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans—​are all more likely than whites to have achieved that level of education.3 These and other differences in education and immigration histories among Asian American ethnic groups were among the reasons that respondents gave for what they saw as a wide range of political orientations (among and within ethnic groups) that do not always fit neatly into Democratic politics in Los Angeles. They also cited ethnic differences in patterns of migration to the United States as a complicating factor for potential candidates: several respondents said that older generations of East Asian immigrants had experienced the civil rights movement in the United States and had greater interest in political coalitions with other Asian ethnic groups, African Americans, and Latina/​os. Some respondents shared their view that relatively recent immigrants from the Philippines, South Asian countries, and wealthier parts of China and South Korea were either excluded from Asian American political leadership circles or uninterested in supporting Asian Americans outside their own ethnic groups.4 These dynamics do not fully capture the social, cultural, and political diversity of the Asian American community in Los Angeles. Instead, they serve as small indicators of the heterogeneity that leaders must reckon with when trying to mount cross-​ethnic mobilizations across Asian American subgroups, or when working in coalitions with “Asian Americans” as a group from outside. The geographic dispersion of Los Angeles’ Asian American community was often raised by interview respondents as a tandem challenge, alongside internal diversity. Asian Americans make up 15–​20 percent of the population in eight of the L.A. City Council Districts (Los Angeles Times, 2017), and more than 15 percent of the population in 9 of the 38 legislative districts in the county. Figure 7.1 lists the percent of the population that reports being of Asian descent in each state legislative district; the district numbers are listed along the x-​axis. One respondent described the array of Asian American populations across political jurisdictions in the county succinctly: “We’ve got packing and cracking!”5 Several respondents also said that being spread out across the county created practical challenges for potential candidates and deprived them of important “psychic benefits” (Bobo & Gilliam, 1990). Economic differences between the Chinese communities in downtown and the San Gabriel Valley,

Asian American Proportion of District Population

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0.0 59 36 63 62 39 64 52 44 46 50 57 70 54 38 45 41 48 51 58 43 53 66 55 49 State Assembly District Number

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18 27 35 25 26 State Senate District Number

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Figure 7.1.  Asian American Proportion of District Populations in Los Angeles County, 2016.

144  Nowhere to Run for example, were raised by one respondent as an obstacle for fundraising. She was concerned that the historic community of potential voters who could be mobilized around an ethnic identity and Democratic politics were in Chinatown, but that the community of wealthier potential donors, who did not have the same group consciousness or partisan ties, was far away in the San Gabriel Valley: Chinatown is dead. I used to go to fundraisers for Michael Dukakis at Golden Dragon Restaurant and a succession of others. That doesn’t exist, anymore. Even Chinatown is not a place where people can come to raise money at all. It is all migrated to San Gabriel. There is no community here, politically, because it’s too divided.

Later, the same donor compared the effects of living in LA County as an Asian American interested in politics versus living in Orange County’s dense Vietnamese neighborhoods: We don’t have—​I mean, yeah, there’s a Chinatown but it’s dispersed. Little Tokyo is certainly not a concentrated group of Japanese. Sawtelle [a historic Japanese neighborhood that is now majority-​white] is no longer what it was. . . . The big Vietnamese community [in Orange County]—​I think that having that geographical—​when you go into an area and all the restaurant signs are in a different language, then you think, “These are people who can elect somebody.” You’re not gonna get that so much in the other, older areas.

Interview respondents also often touched on the reality that few pan-​ethnic organizations are thriving in the county. Several pointed out that in addition to creating mechanisms for mobilizing votes, a more robust civic landscape would also help to build political leadership capacity within the Asian American community. Organizations related to pan-​Asian or specific Asian ethnic groups are a small fraction of all of the nonprofits operating in Los Angeles County (Ramakrishnan & Bloemraad, 2008). Nearly half of those that do exist are oriented around the Korean-​American community, and one-​fifth target Chinese Americans (Hung, 2008). One respondent described the situation thus: The only agency we have on the map is Advancing Justice. That’s about it. We need multiple. Advancing Justice is nowhere near MALDEF [Mexican

“She Came out of Nowhere”  145 American Legal Defense and Education Fund]. It’s about being able to have multiple platforms. Multiple advocacy groups. Multiple think tanks. We don’t even have a think tank. Just educational. Get ready for redistricting. We need someone to start raising money and start putting maps together. Stuff like that.

Respondents also noted that ethnic and Asian-​oriented organizations were not the only ones capable of mobilizing and building technical political skills in the community. Several suggested that the lack of an official Democratic party infrastructure advantaged groups that had relatively more robust organizational resources. There were mixed appraisals of the efforts of the labor movement to incorporate Asian Americans during the interviews, but every respondent who brought up organized labor said that despite being “immigrant oriented” in the last two decades, the reality was that much of labor’s energy for mobilizing immigrant voters was directed at Latina/​os. One respondent said that this was in part due to Latin/os leaders’ interest in building Latina/​o power specifically and labor’s role in that effort: I used to always complain labor never reached out to Asians and they always talk about it but they never do it and all sorts of things like that. They’re still talking about it. Same thing with the Democratic Party. The thing is when you reach out to them; you got to share your power. They don’t want to share power. It’s just whoever has the power.

This is not to suggest that organized labor has not played any role in the support and election of Asian Americans in Los Angeles. There are a handful of names that respondents consistently raised as examples of “Asian Labor candidates”: Congresswoman Judy Chu, former Assembly Member Warren Furutani, and unsuccessful city council candidate John Choi. Each of these candidates’ resumes’ bears some resemblance to those of many of the Latino state legislators discussed later in this chapter; they all had long histories as labor and civil rights organizers or, as in Choi’s case, worked directly for the Chair of the County Federation of Labor. However, even as “Labor candidates,” they also illustrate the potential limits of labor’s power to deliver for Asian American candidates—​which are likely distinct from what they are for Latina/​os. Both Furutani and Chu won their highest offices during special elections with very low turnout. Choi lost his election bid, despite entering the race as the clear choice of labor and a sizable independent expenditure

146  Nowhere to Run campaign by unions in support of his candidacy. These three candidates are the only ones that respondents identified as Asian Americans backed by labor. Finally, the underlying causes for low rates of voter participation that respondents raised are among those that are well documented in political science, and not unrelated to the three structural issues raised in this section—​lack of mediating institutions oriented toward politics, and outreach from political parties; limited access to ballots and voting materials in Asian languages; low levels of information about American elections for new immigrants; and alienation from political bodies that seem to ignore the community’s interests, among others (Hajnal & Lee, 2011; Masuoka & Junn, 2013; Lien, 2006; Ramakrishnan & Espenshade, 2006; Wong et al., 2011). Respondents’ enumerations of the issues that limit Asian American voter participation in Los Angeles support these extant conclusions. In one illustrative example, a respondent talked about how seemingly preventable issues, like competent translation on ballots, affected Korean Americans voting in a congressional primary a few days after our meeting: There’s all of these people—​they show up, they took the time out of their day, they show up to the polling place, and they can’t even read the frickin’ thing. That’s insane to me. The election is in . . . five days now. They were saying that a lot of the ballots that were sent to the Korean-​American—​ within Koreatown—​had misprinted names next to candidates. We need to do something about this. This is insane. People are going to think that they’re voting for one person and voting for another person.

This respondent’s primary concern was that even when civic institutions had worked, and non-​habitual immigrant voters had overcome all of the other structural barriers to making it to the polls, being faced with a misprinted translation could discourage them from trusting future translations, or showing up again at all. These challenges—​lack of access to mediating institutions, populations spread across districts, internal diversity, lack of participation—​are not sui generis, or exclusively a function of Asian Americans’ cultural backgrounds or immigrant status. Just as the geographic dispersion of ethnic groups and enclaves is related to past discriminatory economic and social policy regimes, the relative youth of civic organizations is also tied to the ways in which immigration policies shape migration, and the historic efforts of the state to

“She Came out of Nowhere”  147 dismantle organizations and communities (L. Kurashige, 2000; S. Kurashige, 2010; Park, 2001). Notably, many of the underlying causes of low levels of political participation and incorporation among Asian Americans are tied to electoral and political institutions that are formulated in policymaking spaces wherein Asian American women and men have little to no descriptive representation.

Unmarked Paths: Asian American Women’s Absence from the Ballot I interviewed a number of Asian American women for this study who have been involved in Los Angeles politics in different ways for at least a decade, or two, or longer. I told one of them, Jane Cho,6 that several respondents had explained to me that Asian American women were underrepresented on the ballot because they could not be convinced to run. Cho quickly corrected me. She said that, actually, “women are out there, setting themselves up, and its largely independent.” This reflected a broader dynamic in Los Angeles, whereby Asian American women and men involved in politics operate largely as individual entrepreneurs. That independence can make it difficult to perceive the breadth and depth of potential candidates at any given moment and can reinforce the sense among Asian American women and men thinking of running for office that there is very little in terms of race-​based electoral resources and networks to support them. In terms of electoral opportunities for candidates, the consequences of this lack of coherence are often discussed as if they are gender neutral. However, the distinctively low rates of candidacy among Asian American women, even in comparison to Asian American men, suggest that race-​gendered dynamics may be unfolding. Recalling Table 6.1, Asian American women’s rates of primary candidacy, and ultimate success, stand out among all other groups. The few Asian American women who have run have had among the highest rates of ultimate success of any group. However, they have run less frequently than every other group, making up less than 1 percent of all primary candidates in over two decades of state legislative races. Most interview respondents spoke about one successful woman in particular, Congresswoman Judy Chu, who is the highest-​ranking Asian American elected official in the county. She was often discussed in the context of coalitions with labor and Latina/​os and leftist Asian American activists,

148  Nowhere to Run and “old school” Democratic party politics. And yet, when I asked interview respondents if they had ever noticed or thought about why Judy Chu was often the only woman mentioned, or why fewer Asian American women ran than Asian American men or other women, male respondents often paused and then commented in one of three ways. They either said that it was regrettable, and that they were not sure why, or that it was an irrelevant question when there were so few Asian Americans of any gender in office, or they reminded me that Judy Chu is a woman and left it at that. These responses highlight the extent to which Asian American male elites I interviewed channeled their views of electoral competition and opportunity through the lenses of race and ethnicity. Several made it clear in our conversations that given the current numbers of Asian Americans of any gender on state and federal ballots, the candidacy of Asian American women was a secondary, or even slightly ridiculous, concern. The Asian American women I interviewed seemed unsurprised by the same question and said that the paucity of women in politics was something they had thought about quite a bit. Some said that this was in part because they noticed, more than once, that they were the only woman in a room during events or meetings with Asian American political leaders. Several respondents attributed the gender gap in Asian American candidacies to an interaction between Asian American women’s professional and sociocultural positions. They pointed out that Asian American women often face race-​ and gender-​based discrimination in the workplace and are underrepresented among partners in law firms, on corporate boards, and in other professions where they would expect to see potential candidates emerge (Kim & Zhao, 2014). Therefore, despite assumptions about Asian Americans socioeconomic achievement and how that might move them into a pool of potential candidates, respondents underscored that Asian American women did not benefit in the same way as men, despite often having the same educational pedigrees. A number of respondents saw these professional challenges, and obstacles to obtaining prestige, as working in concert with what they described as cultural norms that dissuade Asian American women from considering candidacy. They echoed comments from Asian American women and men in other parts of the United States, who said that putting yourself “out there” as an individual for office, or asking people for money, runs counter to the way they were raised and their understanding of the sacrifices their families had made for their educations. One version of this was a thread of statements across several respondents about how the necessary “track” for candidates

“She Came out of Nowhere”  149 in Los Angeles was one of working as a staffer for elected officials. In their view, that career trajectory was simply a poor fit for Asian Americans, who, according to one respondent, know that that type of work is “not considered something than an Asian parent would want their kid to do. It really isn’t.” After anecdotes like these, Asian American women would often follow up by making comments to the effect that these types of barriers were compounded for them because of their race and gender. Most Asian American women I interviewed talked about being “held to a high standard,” and socialized by their families and communities to avoid situations where they might fail publicly. That public failure could take a number of forms, including running for office and losing, as well as failing to perform traditional family roles or having a prestigious profession. They saw this high standard as encompassing many of the same pressures that Asian American men experienced, but also distinct. That distinction was rooted in having to navigate race-​and gender-​ based biases and expectations within their own ethnic group, and beyond. One Asian American woman respondent was blunt about why she thought she and others had to work harder and be more carefully strategic than men in order to gain recognition from political elites in their racial group. According to her, as an Asian American woman expressing an interest in political office, she described the following response from male political elites as fairly typical: “He pretty much thought I was a joke. I knew that, but I didn’t want him to try to squash me.” Another respondent summarized an ongoing process of trying to build relationships with political leaders in her ethnic community as similarly fraught: Being a woman just really sucks, especially in [my] community. It took 5 years before the men, the older ones would give me any respect. And then afterwards it’s as if they loved me all along. They think I am their own and they love me now, but I put in a lot of work. I see men, and they just show up. They are immediately embraced.

In another interview, an Asian American woman described the lengths she went to in order to figure out who else was thinking about getting on the ballot in an upcoming election. Instead of talking directly to people she had heard might be running, she asked other leaders to make inquiries, in order to avoid inciting a preemptive backlash over the idea of her becoming a candidate, or appearing that she was only interested in “having a title.” She specifically described the necessity of these tactics as rooted in being a woman from her ethnic community

150  Nowhere to Run and lamented that “African Americans have no qualms about a strong woman, unlike [my] community.”7 She and other Asian American women viewed the interaction between these social, cultural, and political challenges as key factors in the dearth of Asian American female candidates. When I asked respondents if there were any women they thought should be running, but who were not, many said yes. Several referenced the cultural and social pressures discussed previously as important reasons why these Asian American women were not on the ballot, but respondents also cited the lack of any widespread Asian American organizational or coordinated support that could boost potential candidates’ sense that they would be viable in a campaign. One respondent said that the lack of Asian American infrastructure depressed the numbers of women who were preparing to run, but that she took hope because despite these conditions she could think of women who were attempting to piece together the resources and résumé they would need to run if the right opportunity arose. The same respondent declined to tell me who those women were, out of concern that word of their ambition would ill-​serve their political hopes. These constraints on Asian American women’s candidacies are socially specific to their race and gender identities. Many of the issues related to social expectations that respondents see as limiting Asian American female candidacies are similar to those Latina respondents raised, but substantiated and enacted in different ways. Moreover, Asian American women’s racial group membership gives them a different view of the candidacy opportunities available to them in a highly racialized electoral context. The Asian American women candidates and political activists I interviewed were attuned to the notion that if or when they run for office, they would be forging a path where very few others had been. As one respondent put it, “It’s doable . . . But it’s definitely do it yourself.” In light of the potential social consequences for upending expectations and taking public risks, and the unsettled position of Asian Americans as a group in Democratic coalition politics in Los Angeles, candidacy is a high-​ risk proposition for Asian American women in a way that is distinct from other groups. In this way, the lack of an internal electoral infrastructure organized around racial or ethnic identity has race-​gendered consequences for candidacy. Asian American women’s marginalization as subgroup members and as women of color more broadly shape the structural constraints they face, the material and social resources they can bring to bear as potential candidates, and the recognition they garner as serious political actors.

“She Came out of Nowhere”  151 In light of this sociopolitical positioning, the absence of an organized set of networks for Asian American elected officials means that there are few resources to strengthen Asian American women’s disadvantaged position as potential candidates. For strategic and successful individuals, that dearth of resources is often dissuasive.

Organized Exclusion: Latinas in the Latina/​o Candidate Pipeline Latina/​o Democratic elites in Los Angeles have developed a sophisticated network of candidates, campaign professionals, and donors across the county. Among Latinos in particular, interview respondents and media reports are in consensus that while surprises occur, candidates who become eventual frontrunners are identified by elites long before open-​seat elections are announced. When Latina/​o leaders and candidates negotiate who will “wait their turn” and take a seat in an election cycle down the road, or who will replace someone looking to move up the political ladder, Latinas are rarely part of, or participants in, the conversation. The recent candidacies of several Latinas for the state legislature and Congress were typically described in interviews with Latino leaders as “coming out of nowhere,” and occurring in spite of the ambivalence, or opposition, of (what respondents commonly referred to as) “the leadership.”8 The central reason that emerged repeatedly throughout the interviews for women not being part of the pipeline or the plan was that very few were part of an inner circle of elected and political leaders in the Latina/​o Democratic establishment. There are clear criteria for being included in that inner circle, but the political experiences and social practices of Latinas are quite often marginal to the political experiences and social practices that make potential candidates acceptable or recognizable to the leadership. Close relationships between labor, immigration activists, and Latina/​o Democratic leaders have defined this inner circle. Those connections also shape the primary avenues for gaining sponsorship from prominent Latino political leaders, which generally include being a trusted (often male) relative, or former legislative staff member or union colleague, and proving your commitment to the coalition by working on special projects and election campaigns. When viewed in their totality, the gender differences in the political backgrounds of Latina/​o legislators elected since 1996 suggest that there

152  Nowhere to Run are structural limits on Latina’s access to possible political patrons through these well-​established venues. Tables 7.1 and 7.2 list every Latino and Latina elected to the California State Assembly or Senate from 1996 to 2016. Next to each member’s name, I indicate whether that member has been a senior staff member for another legislator (Staff), has been a senior director for a labor Table 7.1.  Political Backgrounds of Latinos in the State Legislature, 1996–​2016 Dante Acosta Richard Alarcon Joe Baca Rudy Bermudez Raul Bocanegra Louis Caldera Ron Calderon Ian Calderon Tom Calderon Tony Cardenas Gil Cedillo Edward Chavez Hector Delatorre Kevin de Leon Marco Firebaugh Dario Frommer Felipe Fuentes Martin Gallegos Jimmy Gomez Ed Hernandez Roger Hernandez Ricardo Lara Tony Mendoza Fabian Nunez Robert Pacheco Alex Padilla John Perez Richard Polanco Anthony Rendon Freddie Rodriguez Miguel Santiago Antonio Villaraigosa

Staff Staff Pacific Gas &Electric Norwalk City Council Staff Counsel for LA County Relative (Brother) Relative (Son), Staff Relative (Brother) Real Estate Director Staff Staff Staff Staff Staff Staff Baldwin Park City Council Staff, Director Mayor of West Covina Mayor of West Covina Staff Director Director Walnut City Council Staff Director, Relative (Cousin) Staff Staff Pomona City Council Staff Director

“She Came out of Nowhere”  153 Table 7.2.  Political Backgrounds of Latinas in the State Legislature, 1996–​2016 Martha Escutia Cristina Garcia Sally Havice Connie Leyva Patty Lopez Diane Martinez Cindy Montanez Grace Napolitano Gloria Negrete Mcleod Jenny Oropeza Gloria Romero Blanca Rubio Hilda Solis Nell Soto Norma Torres

Private Law Practice Community Activist Community College Instructor Director Community Activist Relative (Father) San Fernando City Council Mayor of Norwalk Chaffey Community College Board Long Beach City Council Academic Baldwin Park School District Staff Relative (Husband) Mayor of Pomona

union (Director), or has a close family connection to another Latino elected official (Relative). If they do not have any of those ties in their background before being elected to the legislature, I list their most relevant political or professional experience. Among the 32 Latinos elected to the state legislature during the period of this study, all but nine were either senior legislative staff for another Latino elected official, a senior director with a labor union, or the close relative of a Latino elected official. The ratio of individuals who fall into that category is reversed among Latina legislators; only 4 of the 15 were on the staff of a Latino elected official, a union director, or closely related to a Latino elected official. This divergence underscores that Latinas’ sociopolitical positioning as potential candidates is qualitatively different from that of Latinos serving in the same legislative body, from the same county. When asked to identify why there are fewer Latinas than Latinos included in the leadership’s candidate pipeline, several male respondents stated that it was for fairly straightforward reasons—​the leaders pick people they know and have worked with, and women just happened not to work for them. Two respondents noted that Latinas are simply not as prevalent as Latinos in the senior staffing positions in legislative and city council offices from which favored candidates often emerge. Others noted that while Maria Elena Durazo

154  Nowhere to Run (former chair of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor) was a prominent labor leader who also happened to be a Latina, her first priority was advancing union candidates—​not “women candidates”—​and very few of the key leaders of the major constituent unions were women of any race. The tone of these comments indicated that the absence of women from these strategically valuable positions was simply a matter of unfortunate luck, coincidence, or timing. Studies of legislative staff hierarchies (Koseff, 2017; Tabakman, n.d.), the composition of corporate boards (Terjesen, Sealy, & Singh, 2009), and senior staff in organized labor (Kaminski & Yakura, 2008) show that the lack of women in organizational and staffing leadership is not unique to Latina/​os or Los Angeles politics. Respondents who point to the deficit in women’s formal leadership positions as a matter of coincidence overlook the extent to which the absence of women in these roles is a systemic phenomenon. Additionally, similar to respondents in other areas noted in Chapter 3, Latina candidates in Los Angeles talked about serving on election and issue campaigns and in staffing roles, but not being recognized for that work and missing opportunities to build trusted relationships with powerbrokers over time. In turn, they were less frequently turned to and asked to perform political favors and tasks that are important tests of commitment to the coalition. Thus, their political work was often marginal to the tasks and activities required to be considered “good members of the team.” All but one of the Latino candidates I interviewed focused primarily on the series of “boxes” they checked and the political opportunities they faced, when asked to describe their decision to run. They spoke extensively about their connections to other Latinos in the leadership and were frank about paying their dues to earn the trust of the inner circle. Their narratives were fairly consistent: fulfilling the criteria required by the leadership was hard work, so they did that work and got what they deserved and expected, which was support when their turn arrived. The status of being a favored candidate by this group is highly coveted among those considering a run for office. Among many Latinas and Latinos I interviewed who have thought about running for a particular seat in a specific cycle, gaining that status is often a defining factor in whether they throw their hat in the ring. After arranging your life to check the boxes, the stakes for potential candidates are very high: if you get the nod, there is a clear path to victory, barring any surprises. One campaign professional describes the benefits of getting the endorsement of the Latina/​o Democratic leadership thus:

“She Came out of Nowhere”  155 When they go to you and they say, “You’re the one,” . . . you don’t do too much other than what you’re told, right? It’s not that hard. I mean, you have to make the calls; you have to do what the [leadership says is required]—​but the fields have been cleared out, so you’re gonna be the man. Your barriers to entry are—​once you’ve cleared that out . . . you get anointed by it being cleared out. It was literally done like that: “These are the ones we’re gonna work on. This is where that infrastructure’s going.”

The words “anointed” and “chosen” were used to illustrate the favored position of candidates who received this support in nearly every interview I conducted, including among those who had been the beneficiaries and contributors of that support. The implications of not being chosen are significant as well. Many respondents reported that candidates in that category are almost universally told: “it’s not your turn,” even though the reasoning behind that decision could vary widely. The negative impact of not being chosen can be severe, as one respondent illustrated by describing the options facing potential candidates: You tie yourself to a patron . . . [and that person] is going to have ten to 20 individuals that he or she are sponsoring. Every time a position comes up, that sponsor’s only gonna be able to tag one and so that if you’re not the one that’s chosen, you have to go up against your whole network . . . Just makes it very difficult.

Latina candidates also discussed extensive efforts to check the necessary boxes (“checking the boxes” was language used across a number of interviews) in order to achieve favored candidate status in the eyes of the Latina/​o Democratic leadership. However, they also raised additional issues that expose how their simultaneous membership in multiple marginalized groups creates a number of distinct disadvantages in their emergence as candidates. First, the Latinas I interviewed universally addressed how their family structure played a role in their ability to run. For example, several viewed having a family life that they saw as “untraditional for a Latina” as a double-​ edged sword: they sensed that they had more flexibility in their lives to run than other Latinas with more traditional family roles, while also feeling that their domestic arrangements exposed them, or their loved ones, to some

156  Nowhere to Run stigma. Another respondent raised a similar point when talking about several prominent Latinas who had been elected: If you look at [Latina Elected Official A], who was on a mission, there was a lot of innuendo about what her personal life was like, or [Latina Elected Official B] . . . these women haven’t had a traditional boundary. They may have made sacrifices, in that regard, but they were—​they’re both very committed to a sense of community and why they’re doing it. They put their community above.

Second, respondents offered variations on the idea that Latinas were less willing to declare that they wanted a seat, and arrange their lives around running for office, to the extent that Latinos were. One male respondent described the political résumé of a Latina candidate to illustrate this point: If you look at her bio, she’s been plotting since she was six years old to run . . . She has been incredibly thoughtful about checking her boxes [working in different sectors, building relationships with coalition partners] . . . and, all of that, she’s been able to pull together and now make her case. ‘I can raise the money,’ the whole deal. I haven’t seen as many female candidates be as methodical about it in that way, as guys are, who are just ambition.

This description fits in with the political journey many of the Latino candidates related to me in interviews. The implication that Latinas are less politically ambitious does not correspond with interviews and data reported elsewhere in this book, but it makes sense in light of a number of comments Latinas made about paying a public price for being openly ambitious, such as “when a female candidate will say, ‘I’m running,’ they’re kind of scrutinized for being too ambitious.” Another candidate described how she would not have been able to check her boxes if she had told people she wanted to eventually run, because she would have denied those opportunities because she was “too about the seat.” In some respects, this is an extension of a widespread finding in the women in politics literature; some traits like ambition and confidence are more acceptable to voters from male politicians than female. In this case, however, elites are basing their candidate development plans on the same types of attitudes, and Latinas’ perceptions of those biases inform a longer-​term candidacy strategy.

“She Came out of Nowhere”  157 Finally, in contrast to the responses from men, Latina candidates that I interviewed had a different focus when they spoke about the factors that may have hindered them from running; they tended to bring broader social expectations, or the structure and networks of Latina/​o Democratic leadership, and their influence on choices, back into the conversation repeatedly. To illustrate, several Latina candidates discussed how their professional and political focus on local issues and community activism, instead of working as council or legislative staff or on big union or immigration campaigns, was often viewed as a negative mark in the eyes of the most powerful Latina/​o leaders, because it made them appear less active or invested in being part of the “team.” One candidate described this as a direct connection between why Latinas were underrepresented, and the types of work and social expectations Latinas were engaging in: Having someone who has been in the community who’s talented and qualified . . . be told that it’s is not their turn is not unique. It’s even less unique when it’s a woman. It’s never our time because we are never in that line because we’re busy being the caretakers, the teachers, the community activists doing the work and not kissing the pinky finger. So it’s never our time. So we’re never at the top of the list.

Another candidate said that her attention to local politics and her own upward political mobility independent of the “machine” made Latina/​o Democratic leaders unsure of her motivations and loyalties, and that as a result, she was not “chosen,” and effectively blocked from receiving major endorsements. Latina candidates and legislators report working in nonprofits and community organizations more than any other group of candidates (ALS), and while the political orientation of much of that work is in line with the policy goals of the Latino Democratic leadership in Los Angeles, it is not valued in the same way as work in labor unions and political staffing. The reward for painstakingly building your résumé around the criteria seen as necessary for support by the Latino Democratic leadership is substantial. The criteria were widely and consistently repeated across respondents. However, that does not mean that they are consistently achievable. The “boxes to check” often include work, recognition, and social practices that are less available to Latinas in part because of their intersecting race and gender identities. This renders the political work that Latinas are engaged in marginal to the candidate development pipeline and often results

158  Nowhere to Run in their exclusion. Instead of a reward of endorsements and mobilization resources, Latinas who persist in getting on the ballot despite these structural disadvantages often receive discouragement and treatment as “an outsider.”

Latinas as Political Outsiders The infrastructure’s pulling the men. Most of the women are running despite that fact. —​Luis Renald,9 campaign consultant

Many Latinas’ recent elections to the legislature were described by Latino male respondents as “coming out of nowhere.” Their characterizations of Latinas getting on the ballot and winning were often as outsiders and disruptors who disturbed carefully facilitated plans of the Latina/​o Democratic leadership. For one race in particular, several respondents described the emergence of a Latina candidate (at the prompting of a Latina elected official acting on her own) as her “swooping” in unexpectedly, despite a long-​standing agreement among the leadership in favor of another candidate: “That was the deal that they put together because then everybody gets to move up. Everybody gets a seat in the whole thing. Then, [Latina Candidate] comes up on the side and ruins that whole thing.” When I asked one Latina candidate whether that description rang true for her, she responded that she was not an outsider, despite assertions otherwise. She ticked off her efforts to become an insider by building relationships with party activists, local unions, and political elites in her region of the county. Her explanation for nonetheless being described as an outsider was tied to the Latino leaderships’ refusal to recognize Latinas’ political work or incorporate them into the candidate development system: I was told not to run because . . . “we have deals carved out for these districts and you’re screwing it up.” People were really dismissive because I was to them, coming out of nowhere and it’s like, “Well, I’m not coming out of nowhere. I grew up in this community.” . . . The problem is that I didn’t come out of nowhere. The problem is that these individuals weren’t paying attention. Them telling themselves that I came out of nowhere is convenient for

“She Came out of Nowhere”  159 them that . . . they’re putting the blame someplace else and choosing to have no self-​reflection. I think that that’s actually the bigger problem and I think a lot of it is because . . . I was a woman.

She was far from the only person I interviewed who saw the candidate development infrastructure as oriented around men. Several respondents who were not candidates themselves perceived that there may be structural issues related to gender underlying Latinas’ relatively smaller presence on the ballot. Most were frank that when Latina/​o leaders were deciding who to tap for a race, or began setting up as a potential candidate down the road, they rarely chose women. One respondent said that I think of that as part of this—​the process in which people become candidates. The infrastructure . . . we just talked about the Polancos [Torres’s, and Martinez’s] and all that. They were pulling their staffers up. By and large, they were pulling men, weren’t they? Yeah. They were pulling men and then the labor unions themselves are pulling men, generally.

Because they had often run without the support of the leadership, a number of successful Latina candidates told similar stories about the ways in which the leadership attempted to discourage their candidacy, beyond being told that it “was not their turn.” Several talked about how the leadership moved pieces of the informal electoral infrastructure out of their reach: They called Treasurers. And every Treasurer I called like, “Will you take me on?” they’d tell me, “No,” because they were told not to take me on. They called consultants to make sure they didn’t take me on. They called people to make sure I couldn’t hire people . . . They were like “Let’s make sure no one picks her up as a client.”

According to respondents, more overt tactics of dissuasion and detraction from outsiders’ campaign efforts were also employed by coalition leaders and their associates. One former candidate stated, “the other thing is a lot of it here is bullying. So I’m gonna bully you or if you’re gonna run against me I’m gonna run a really negative campaign against you even if it’s not true.” Another candidate described what he saw as the “machine at work” against a Latina who was asked to sit out a race and persisted anyway:

160  Nowhere to Run I was one of the few people that were friendly to [her]. She was a good, young woman. But she would go to these places I’d go. I’d get to speak. They wouldn’t let her speak because [the favored candidate] was there. They would—​people were just blocking her out constantly. She was everywhere. Complaining, “How come I—​how come you don’t introduce me?” Complaining to everyone. Oh God. She was tenacious.

Latina candidates’ relatively frequent positioning as outsiders, vis-​à-​vis the Latina/​o Democratic leadership’s candidate pipeline, is also physically manifested by the geography and demography of the seats they contest and win. Many of the districts where Latina legislators have recently won were described to me by Latino respondents as “crossover” districts, or “marginal” districts. Many of those districts have been on the outskirts of the county, outside of the city Los Angeles itself. They have also always been in majority-​ minority districts, which often encompass majority-​Latina/​o populations. However, the Latina/​o proportions of those districts are often smaller than the Latina/​o majorities present in long-​standing “Latino” seats held by Latinos. This dynamic was discussed by a Latino respondent as evidence of Latinas’ “advantage” in electoral politics, as well as their shortcoming as members of the Latina/​o caucus: [Latina-​held seats], they’re not sustainable as Latino seats. As soon as the [Latinas] left, all of them, stopped being Latino. Latinas have that advantage . . . It takes a Latina to win those marginal—​Latino seats.

This explanation of an advantage rings hollow in light of the empirical reality. If Latinas are advantaged in this way, their “crossover appeal” should also be an asset for running and winning in larger Latina/​o population districts as well. That has not been the case. Additionally, most of the “crossover” seats have been held by Latinas for one or two cycles and then won by a succession of Latinos at some later point, as well.10 Several respondents offered a more likely explanation for why Latinas have won primarily in racial plurality districts farther from the historic Latina/​o core neighborhoods of the City of Los Angeles: districts closer to the center of the county are more tightly controlled by the leadership and encompass few offices that generate a notable public profile but do not require enormous resources to obtain. For example, one set of opportunities that the outer

“She Came out of Nowhere”  161 areas of the county provide to Latinas (and Latinos, for that matter) who may be operating outside the “musical chairs” are the midsize cities in which to build a political brand. The barriers to entry for electoral politics in cities like Baldwin Park, West Covina, Pomona, and Norwalk are lower than they would be in making a run for the city council, or even school board, in Los Angeles. Tables 7.1 and 7.2 suggest that for those Latinas and Latinos who are not directly connected to the inner circle of Latina/​o and union political leaders, working in local government in those types of communities can be an effective launching pad for potential candidates. In a similar vein, while the “leadership” still has influence in these exurban areas, the weight of their endorsements, and the impact of labor’s mobilization efforts, is less consistently powerful in these communities, relative to areas closer to the historic core of Los Angeles.11 Nevertheless, the Latina/​o and labor leadership in Central Los Angeles does consider these communities that border other counties as part of their electoral purview. This was apparent from interviews with key figures in that leadership group, as well as in my conversations with those who consider themselves outsiders. Respondents generally described Latinas who have run recently, and won, in these areas as having gone up against the machine. There’s no one formula to get there. . . . You know, coming and getting Antonio [Villaraigosa], getting us, it’s more like getting an ego thing, an ego boost, and to me that is essential, when everybody fucking tells you no, no, no, no. You need a validator to say, like, am I doing the right thing. It’s important. I’m not going to discount that, but is it essential? No, because the women who I think have been successful are the ones that have said, “I don’t need you. I’m gonna do this. And that worked for them. [Latina Candidate E]. She took on the establishment, and she did it. . . . She really broke the mold and said, “I’m gonna do this regardless of what anybody says.”

Many of the Latina candidates outside of the City of Los Angeles who have been successful ran their campaigns in areas a bit farther from the Latino Democratic leadership’s concentrated areas of influence, based on political brands built through local politics. They are, by dint of the process they must overcome in order to win, very independent, or at least independent from the Latina/​o Democratic and union leadership coalition. One Latina, whose candidacy had been opposed by the leadership, explained how her

162  Nowhere to Run independence had been forged. She said, “I think they wanted me to lose so they could go ‘see without us, you can’t win.’ And then guess what I’m learning? I don’t need you. I’m doing this on my own.” That sense of independence, on top of being perceived as disruptive to the overall goals of widening Latina/​o descriptive representation, pushes the succession plans and preferences of Latina candidates who win even further into the margins of mainstream Latina/​o candidate development processes. The extent to which Latinas are an aberration relative to these informal institutions is starkly visible when we consider the descriptive representation patterns of individual assembly seats over time. Figure 7.2 shows the race and gender of each assembly member elected in Los Angeles County between 1996 and 2016. The shading denotes the race-​gender identity of the winning candidate, and Latina/​o legislators’ last names are included as well. Co-​racial men tend to have longer unbroken stretches in single seats than women from the same racial groups, and white men’s contiguous terms in a single seat are more numerous than any other single group. Latina/​os are the racial group in Los Angeles that is generally described as having a system—​a machine—​in place to ensure that once a Latina/​o wins a seat, it becomes a “beachhead.” As Figure 7.2 illustrates, that is much more the case among Latinos than Latinas. The sections of the figure that are black with gray lines indicating officeholding by Latinas are more spurious than those of Latinos (solid black). In all but one seat, Latinas were replaced in three or fewer cycles by a Latino or a member of another racial group. This indicates that when individual Latinas win, they are not preceded or followed by other Latinas when they are termed or forced out. That is the opposite of the case for most Latinos who served in the assembly. Nell Soto and Norma Torres’ tenures in District 61 are the exception to this general pattern—​that seat was held by Latinas for 12 years. Other seats won by Latinas did not remain that way for long.12 Several of my interview subjects would disagree that there is a general pattern of Latinas’ exclusion from the inner workings of Latina/​o candidate development efforts by the leadership. During interviews, if the respondent had not already raised gender differences or issues during the course of our conversation, I asked at the end whether they had noticed or thought about the decline in the number of women getting elected, and whether they thought it was related to other issues we had been talking about. Some male respondents said that they had not thought about it, and that the recent composition of the board of supervisors being four women and one

“She Came out of Nowhere”  163 36 38

Acosta

39

Cardenas

Montanez

Alarcón

Fuentes

Bocanegra

Lopez Bocanegra

40 41 42 Frommer

43 44 45 46

Villaraigosa

DeLeon

Calderon

Cedillo

49

Martinez

Romero

50

Escutia

Nunez

Cedillo Perez

47

District No.

48

Rubio

Hernandez Firebaugh

DeLaTorre

Lara

51

Gomez

52

Torres

Rodriguez

53

Perez

Santiago

54 55

Oropeza

56 57 58

Bermudez

Havicce Gallego

Mendoza

Chavez

Napolit

Calderon

Hernandez Calderon

Garcia

59 60

Pacheco

61

Aguilar

Soto

Negrete

Soto

Torres

62 63

Rendon

64 66 70 1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

2008

2010

2012

2014

2016

Year of Term Latinos

African American Men

Asian American Men

White Men

Latinas

African American Women

Asian American Women

White Women

Figure 7.2.  Race and Gender of California Assembly Members Elected in Los Angeles County, 1996–​2016, by District.

African American man showed that there was “no issue.” Other men also ticked off influential women in Latina/​o political circles, like former County Supervisor Gloria Molina, former State Senator Gloria Romero, and current County Supervisor Hilda Solis. However, these women’s names were not raised earlier in the conversation, when I asked those same respondents to specifically identify who “the leadership” was that everyone talked about as central figures in candidate emergence. As was often the case during interviews in other states, I did not have to explicitly ask about the differences between women and men in Latina/​o

164  Nowhere to Run politics when interviewing Latinas—​most talked about it as inherent to their journey as candidates, or as a key aspect of the trajectory of candidates they had known or observed. While several women have been elected who were part of the leadership’s trusted network (Hilda Solis is a frequently raised example, who was a close associate of the late County Federation director Miguel Contreras and has been elected and appointed to ascending offices since the 1980s), they are outliers. This dynamic raises questions about the consequences of solidarity and coalition building in electoral politics based on a single dimension of identity for marginalized subgroups like Latinas and other women. Los Angeles is renowned as a place where Latina/​os have risen as powerful figures in politics. But a more accurate description is that Latinos have made some claim to that status, while Latinas continue to fight for access on several fronts. Latina candidates I interviewed were largely amenable to the development of plans and pooling resources in order to expand descriptive representation for Latinas and Latinos. Many of them cited their desire to bring voices from their own communities to the table as a key reason for running. However, many do not find the informal institutions and plans of the Latina/​ o Democratic leadership acceptable, because of the ways in which they and other Latinas have been structurally excluded.

Conclusion As the Latina/​o and Asian American communities’ more recent political histories in Los Angeles have unfolded, candidates, activists, voters, and residents have had to contend with elections that require extensive resources to win, relatively few offices to hold, and an abundance of experienced candidates in constant circulation. These conditions have created a competitive context for descriptive representation that is very narrow, in certain respects, particularly for Latinas and Asian American women. The aggregation of electoral resources among Democrats is severely lopsided. While that aggregation has benefited the representation of Latinos, it often creates distinct obstacles and hurdles for Latinas who wish to compete for descriptive representation. At the same time, while some Asian Americans have worked in coalition with Latina/​os, labor, and other Asian Americans, there is no consensus among key political actors about whether that is a scalable blueprint for

“She Came out of Nowhere”  165 future representation. Despite efforts by activists and organization leaders, the civic infrastructure and political networks of Asian Americans in Los Angeles remain a shaky scaffolding, where a solid system of support is required. This lack of a solid infrastructure has left Asian American women with few resources for candidate development. More broadly, the electoral field of competition in Los Angeles is constrained by race and gender in many of the ways suggested by previous chapters; the pool of realistic or viable districts is much smaller for nonwhite potential candidates than for others, and Latina and Asian American women are less visible and available as potential candidates than men within their own communities. Los Angeles is, in many ways, a possible preview of how immigrant-​dominant metropolitan areas may organize their politics in the future. Yet, it also reflects much of the political exclusion and limitation that already marks many other areas in the United States today.

8 Conclusion The Future of Candidacy and Representation in American State Legislatures

“It was a very unique situation.” “He just happened to know my mentor.” “I was lucky—​just in the right place at the right time.”

Many candidates I interviewed began telling me about their decision to run for the state legislature by invoking chance, luck, or once-​in-​a-​blue-​moon circumstances. These individual-​ centered stories often involved being around the corner from the clerk’s office right before a filing deadline, or happening to know someone intimately involved with a campaign or the party leadership at a precise moment. More than one candidate told me that they felt God had a direct hand in the chain of events leading up to their presence on the ballot. Undoubtedly, running for state legislative office is a special and life-​altering experience for many of the people who shared their stories with me. Yet, as the analysis that has unfolded in this book has shown, these very personal situations are embedded within a complex set of institutions, informal systems, and structures shaping what types of people run where, and when. For example, a number of the Latinas and Asian American women I interviewed also expressed that they were lucky in one way or another. But among those candidates, good timing and a sense of public purpose were far from sufficient conditions to enable their candidacy. They spoke of having to be simultaneously insiders and outsiders, treading lightly on co-​racial men’s egos while asserting their independence from them, getting shut out from fundraising circles, feeling the weight of speaking for multiple marginalized groups, and being asked again and again how serving in office would affect their husband, children, or marital prospects. This long list underscores the Nowhere to Run. Christian Dyogi Phillips, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538937.003.0008

168  Nowhere to Run narrow, and often precarious, pathways to electoral opportunity that shape Asian American women’s and Latinas’ descriptive representation on the ballot and in office. The results in this book detail how political and social processes related to their races and gender sharply circumscribe electoral opportunities for Latinas and Asian American women. These findings are among the first to provide in-​depth and comparative insights into how these identities shape the candidacies of women from immigrant communities. However, the results also point to the salience of race and gender in understanding how opportunity is facilitated, and constrained, for all groups. Both dimensions of identity are not only relevant to members of multiple marginalized groups. Race and gender are just as essential for understanding the overrepresentation of white men, and the seemingly unrestricted range of electoral opportunities they face, as they are for unraveling why the underrepresentation of Latinas, Asian American men, and other groups persists. These processes rooted in identities are intersectional, and simultaneously occurring at the individual, group, local, and national levels. By the time that “lucky” convergence of timing and circumstances comes along for a particular race or seat, race-​gendered processes have already gone a long way in defining who is likely to be able to act on that opportunity.

New Perspectives on Candidate Emergence: The Intersectional Model of Electoral Opportunity Recent election cycles have renewed national attention to the complex ways that multiple identities, like race and gender, shape the prospects of candidates. In 2008, press accounts of the Democratic presidential primary often raised questions about how Black women might vote, given what were described as potentially “disconnected” or “divided” loyalties to their race and gender (because a white woman—​Hillary Clinton—​and a Black man—​ Barack Obama—​were on the ballot) (e.g., Seelye, 2007; Dickerson, 2008; Leibovich, 2008). During the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the role of race-​gender identities in white women’s support for the Republican nominee was contentiously, and continues to be, debated by academics and pundits alike (Phillips, 2018; Frasure-​Yokeley, 2018; Junn, 2017). And, in 2018, the midterm elections were widely discussed as the potential dawn of a

Conclusion  169 new day for women of color running for office (Cooper, 2018; Edmonson & Lee, 2018). However, in the midst of this furor, little has changed in the way many political scientists and political observers theorize the roles of race and gender in a key element of descriptive representation—​candidate emergence. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity and the tests of it in the preceding chapters of this book remedy this tendency toward siloed thinking about race and gender identities. This framework reflects the complicated realities of the processes leading up to descriptive representation on the ballot and clarifies how race-​gendered identities are connected to and informed by them. Potential candidates are embedded in multiple contexts—​ personal and household contexts, socially salient groups, local communities and districts, and state and national political jurisdictions. Importantly, the processes and pressures that individuals experience are often the result of political and social interactions across these levels of context. The integration of these processes is a key element of the analytical leverage the intersectional model provides, and it sheds light on the shortcomings of more “isolated” approaches to understanding descriptive representation. Explaining minority candidate emergence without considering how individuals come to that specific decision makes little sense, just as a narrow focus on potential candidates’ personal feelings about wanting to run, without addressing whether there is a viable opportunity at hand, waves away strategic realities of our current political world. The relationships between these processes are elucidated, but not flattened or simplified, by the intersectional model. At the national and state level, the array of white-​majority populations across most state legislative districts sharply limits the number of electoral opportunities that women and men of color, and the organizations and elites who support their candidacies, perceive as realistic. Simultaneously, within the relatively few districts where a nonwhite candidate would be seen as having a viable opportunity to run and win, race-​gendered pressures within groups and communities intensify the pressures and constraints that women of color contend with as potential candidates. The analysis in this book tests this model by focusing on the emergence of candidates from the two largest immigrant-​based communities, Asian Americans and Latina/​os. It demonstrates that the result of these intersecting and simultaneous processes is that Asian American women and Latinas, in particular, have often had nowhere to run.

170  Nowhere to Run Another pattern that emerges repeatedly across the chapters is that the nature, character, and accessibility of electoral opportunities is group and context specific. In other words, membership in a particular race-​gendered group may be tied to privileges and advantages in one context or situation and also expose members of the same group to distinct disadvantages in another, possibly at the same time. This specificity is rooted in the dynamism of identities and their salience in social and political situations, as well as in group differences in the factors that tend to push potential candidates away from or toward making the decision to run, or even having the opportunity to run in the first place. Beginning with potential candidates’ own perceptions and opportunity calculus, the data shows that self-​recognition plays a central role in these differences. Most generally, Latinas and Asian American women cited their ties and obligations to a wider community of women, co-​ethnic women, immigrants, and nonwhite groups as key facets of their decision to run more consistently and frequently than Asian American men and Latinos. They (Latinas and Asian American women) tended to view themselves as deeply embedded in these groups and often conceptualized their service as a candidate or elected official as an extension of their roles in advocating for or giving voice to marginalized groups to which they belong. These group affiliations were also salient to Latinos and Asian American men I interviewed, but they played a much less central role in their choice to get on the ballot for the state legislature for the first time. An illustrative example of the race-​gendered differences along these lines was in respondents’ discussions of their ties to “immigrant communities” broadly defined. At the individual level, Asian American women often talked about their sense of obligation to the United States, as children of immigrants who benefited from their parents’ struggles to thrive in a new country with improved economic and social prospects. Latinas tended to raise their sense of responsibility as members of families or ethnic groups that frequently received inequitable or unjust treatment by U.S. institutions as new immigrants. In both of these cases, respondents framed these sensibilities as a central part of their motivation to run for office, often in spite of other significant misgivings. Asian American men and Latinos tended to talk about these dimensions of their identities much less frequently when discussing their decision to run—​strategic opportunities for their political careers were much more of a focus. When they did raise immigrant community ties, Asian American

Conclusion  171 men were most likely to do so in talking about their reluctance to run, because serving in public office fails to satisfy their ethnic group’s or families’ definition of “success.” Latinos were also cognizant of many of the injustices and inequalities Latinas raised, but they did not raise them as among their primary reasons for running at nearly the same scale or frequency. External recognition at the group and local level also evinced clear differences. Latinas and Asian American women reported significant challenges in having their political experience and leadership externally valued and validated by other political elites, while Latinos and Asian American men related a readiness on the part of others to “see” them as viable candidates and officeholders. This visibility is not only a psychological asset or hurdle, but it also often confers access to material resources, networks of important gatekeepers, and other tangible benefits that are vital to a successful campaign. These dynamics provide a new lens for understanding the politics of candidate emergence in majority-​minority districts. Across tens of thousands of elections during the past two decades, nonwhite candidates very rarely appeared on the general election ballot outside of majority-​minority districts. The perceived necessity of a significant majority or even predominantly minority district population for Asian American and Latina/​o candidates of both genders was consistently evident in surveys and interviews. While majority-​minority districts may encompass vital opportunities for the descriptive representation of women and men of color, the intersectional model of electoral opportunity predicts that they will not necessarily have equal access to those opportunities, and that race-​gendered differences in candidate emergence rates are likely. The data in this book support that expectation. In majority-​minority districts with extensive or well-​organized informal institutions and systems designed to develop and support Latina/​ o or Asian American candidates, men from these groups often reported turning to other men as their successors, mentors, and political co-​strategists. Latinos and Asian American male respondents from districts with more ad hoc or recently developed political infrastructure based in co-​racial communities reported similar dynamics. Latinas and Asian American women who had considered or carried out a candidacy in majority-​minority districts often reported having to carefully navigate multiple male-​oriented political networks, including those “within the community.” Many said they had been open to running for office, or

172  Nowhere to Run knew that their own political activism gave them important qualifications for candidacy, but that those factors were discounted or ignored by key male gatekeepers. Latinas in particular reported being openly discouraged from running. Male-​oriented political networks are not unique to Latina/​o or Asian American communities. However, unlike white women or white men, Latinas, Latinos, and Asian American women or men have few other options when in most states, there is a small handful of districts that are considered “Latino” or “minority” seats. Thus, limits on the number of opportunities at the state and national level interact with constraints at the group and local level in a way that tends to place particular pressures on Latinas and Asian American women, even as Latinos and Asian American men face considerable practical, but distinct, restrictions on electoral opportunities as well. The racial composition of districts matters to groups, candidates, elites, and others across the social and political spectrum. As a result, the dominance of white-​majority populations and white male incumbents across most districts and states is a condition that the intersectional model places front and center in our understanding of the reasons why descriptive underrepresentation persists for so many groups. Because white men and white women do not have to account for a majority of constituents who do not share their race in predominantly white districts, the prevalence of that district type in the electoral landscape provides those two groups with a much wider array of opportunities to gain representation on the ballot and in office. In contrast, the presence of Asian American women and men, and Latinas and Latinos, on the ballot in predominantly white districts during the past two decades has been rare. By examining the candidacies of Latina/​os and Asian Americans in these districts, it becomes especially clear that partisanship’s influence on electoral opportunity cannot be easily disentangled from race-​gendered processes. Latinos’ much higher number of candidacies as Republicans or Independents (relative to Latinas, Asian American men, or Asian American women) is one example of this. The distinct scale of their non-​Democratic candidacies has enabled Latinos to run much more often in predominantly white districts (where Republican and Independent candidates tend to fare best) than the other groups that this study focuses on. Even in states where Latinos appear to have made some inroads as Republicans and Independents, Latina candidates from those parties have rarely been on the ballot in those same types of districts.

Conclusion  173 In contrast, while there are clear differences in the frequency of Asian American women’s and men’s candidacies in predominantly white districts, there is no detectable gap in their partisan tendencies as candidates. Race-​ gendered differences in the partisan character of candidacies in these types of districts suggest that for Latinos, a slightly more expansive array of opportunities is being forged. Importantly, even after accounting for the narrow window of electoral possibility that this interaction between partisanship and race-​gendered identities facilitates, most elections in the most numerous types of districts were still characterized by the absence of groups competing for descriptive representation, other than white men. These findings emphasize the limitations of “single axis” (Crenshaw, 1989) analyses, and of ignoring the ways in which institutions and social systems can influence groups’ opportunities for representation in different ways, at different times. For instance, “traditional” heterosexual domestic arrangements and relationships, and the pressures they exert on women, have been a frequent topic in the literature on women’s political ambition. However, the analysis in these chapters shows that “traditional” domestic arrangements can facilitate some men’s candidacies, even as they stifle some women’s. Moreover, Latina and Asian American women respondents related distinctions in the sociocultural signals and punishments women experience. These distinctions were tied to their experiences as immigrants, ethnic group members, and different “types” of women within those group contexts. Expectations from within their own communities weighed heavily, as well as their consciousness of out-​group stereotypes that are explicitly race gendered and at times, nativist. As a result, Latinas’ and Asian American women’s reports of how they understand and navigate their “womanhood” as candidates and public figures are different. Throughout this analysis, the intersectional model has provided a new framework for considering long-​standing, but often unstated, assumptions regarding identity and candidacy in political science—​i.e., “where you run is about race, and whether you want to run is about gender.” Instead, I have shown that the intersection of race-​gendered processes provides a more coherent lens for illuminating the complex processes underlying candidate emergence and ultimately, descriptive representation. Additionally, this approach offers a way forward for studying the political incorporation and representation of emerging communities in the American polity, in addition to other socially salient groups.

174  Nowhere to Run

Immigrant Communities at the Center of American Politics Arguably, all groups in the United States are shaped by immigration in one way or another. Immigration has been a constant force in the nation’s politics and social dynamics throughout its history (Ngai, 1999). This analysis is centered on four groups whose connections to immigration are often threaded through public and private discourse, and whose presence in the polity has been dramatically changed by immigration in recent decades. In a book about Latina/​os and Asian American women and men, immigration and immigrant identities are always animating the analysis, even when they are not the explicit focus. The model that I offer facilitates Asian American women, Asian American men, and Latinas’ and Latinos’ political experiences as informative cases for understanding descriptive representation, without essentializing the multidimensional nature of their identities or reducing the scope of their political work in becoming candidates. Importantly, this approach centers immigrant community members while also keeping socially specific political contexts within the analytical frame. I do this in order to avoid re-​marginalizing immigrant community politics—​none of the informants who shared their time with me aspired to influence “Latino politics” or “Asian American politics” or “women’s politics.” They wanted to be contenders or powerful actors in American politics writ large, or the politics of their city or state. These two things were typically not divorced from each other in their minds. Many respondents recognized that there were distinct political processes within their communities and groups, but they also saw those connected to the “mainstream” political milieu. Thus, my analysis accounts for the ways in which these actors are embedded in multiple contexts, and their ultimate goals for representation. The data reveals that at the individual level, “immigrant” as a dimension of identity intersects with racial and gender group memberships in distinct ways. These distinctions between, for example, Asian American women and Latinos result in different sets of considerations and motivations being top of mind when deciding where and when to run for office. At the elite group level, the interview and survey responses demonstrated race-​gendered processes and dynamics unfolding in distinct ways across immigrant communities. The race-​gendering of electoral competition and opportunity in Asian American and Latina/​ o communities suggests not only differences in

Conclusion  175 the trajectories of incorporation for women and men from these groups, but also race-​gendered access to influence and power that is distinct from that documented by scholars focused on Black women in politics. Black women, Latinas, and Asian American women occupy distinct intersectional positions within the landscape of electoral opportunities in the United States. While the tenure of Asian American and Latina/​o communities in particular jurisdictions varies across the country, their politics are informed by ongoing national debates over immigration and belonging, the racialization and gendering of “foreigner” status, and, in some locales, the continuing growth of populations that are new to the United States and American politics. In many of the districts where Asian Americans and Latina/​os have emerged as political contenders, African American women and men have been prominent figures in local and state political networks for decades. These differences inform the distinctive ways that Asian American women and men, Latinas and Latinos, and Black women and men are race-​gendered in elite political networks. This book’s analysis of pathways to candidacy among women and men from immigrant communities is clearly indebted to the rich extant scholarship on women of color in politics in many respects. The results in this book build on work by scholars who have pushed analyses away from treating dimensions of identity as additive components and urge a conceptualization of the processes underlying candidate emergence and success that is more holistic and reflects the dynamism and simultaneity that they encompass. To this point, informants emphasized repeatedly that they confronted significant institutional and structural barriers and were cognizant at the same time of moments where they perceived opportunities to extract some benefits from what they recognized as a disadvantaged position. This underscores that isolating or compartmentalizing one dimension of identity, or particular moment of the election process, yields conclusions that may occlude important dynamics animating relationships between groups and institutions.

Connections to Understanding Representation Along Other “Axes” of Identity In making the case for why scholars must be attentive to Black feminist thought, even if they do not study Black women, Patricia Hill Collins argued that Black women’s status as a multiply marginalized group, and positioning

176  Nowhere to Run as “outsiders-​within” (via their work as domestic laborers), gave them a critical vantage point on oppression, power, and politics that spoke to the experiences of a wide array of marginalized groups (Collins, 1990). Given the ways in which immigrant communities contend with conditional belonging in the polity, and are frequently racialized and race gendered in political processes and discourse, the study I present in this book aspires to Collins’ call for critical analysis of the marginalized as a vital means for understanding the many. One of the challenges of empirical intersectional studies is that even as the approach recognizes the social hierarchies and power relationships that connect seemingly disparate groups, clear parameters must be drawn around any single analysis in order to allow for the diversity of viewpoints, processes, and experiences within a group to be recognized. In concentrating on four race-​gendered groups within immigrant communities—​Asian American women, Asian American men, Latinas, and Latinos—​this study has frequently required that pressing issues related to in-​group heterogeneity, as well as connections to other groups beyond the focus of this book, be set aside for future inquiry. Among these are issues related to class, and sexuality. While not always at the forefront, or explicit, race-​gendered economic inequality has been a persistent subtext in this book’s analysis of candidate emergence. Arguably, potential candidates for office have cleared a certain economic threshold of financial resources and stability such that they can even contemplate public officeholding. There are several challenges to that assumption that tap directly into the intersectional approach of this analysis. First, the women and men at the heart of this study tend to come from groups that have very distinct average levels of wealth in the general population, as well as race-​gendered patterns in professional occupations that tend to steer Asian American women and Latinas more often toward less lucrative work such as nonprofit and social work, and Asian American men and Latinos toward tech, engineering, and the law. Second, assuming that potential candidates have passed a certain financial threshold tells us little about differences in how much they clear them by. For example, given the occupational patterns discussed in Chapter 3, a Latina and an Asian American man on the same ballot are unlikely to have the same degree of financial cushioning behind them, or access to financial resources to support their regular life expenses in the midst of campaigning and serving. These differences can be consequential to the sustainability of campaigns through rough periods; interview respondents told stories of

Conclusion  177 borrowing from their families, taking out mortgages, and selling real estate holdings as means of shoring up or seeding campaign funds. Third, as I argue in Chapter 3, race-​gendered differences in the demands on funds can also play a role in whether or not a realistic electoral opportunity is even on the table for a potential candidate. Women spoke often about traditional domestic arrangements and expectations, and the need for resources related to child and elder care during a campaign. These issues were absent from nearly every interview with men. These race-​gendered demands for care-​related resources also intersect with class-​based differences in the ways women rearrange their lives to run for office, as those who tend to come from professional or familial backgrounds with greater wealth can more readily commit funding to outsourcing care work. Many others who do not have those backgrounds are still able to run and serve while caring for dependents, but it often requires further disruption to household arrangements, and/​or constant vigilance and creativity. These factors can take an emotional and physical toll on candidates and elected officials. Further study is necessary to evaluate what difference care resource demands make in the sustainability of candidates throughout a campaign or once in office. Sexuality was rarely explicitly raised in interviews and surveys by respondents, and most of the discussions and responses were heteronormative. As a result, I chose to situate my analysis within a heterosexual framework, particularly because “traditional” social expectations about reproduction, household and labor roles, and care work animated many of the concerns and issues that respondents raised. That is a limitation of this analysis. While I was able to interview a small handful of LGBTQ-​identifying former candidates who are Asian American men or Latino, I was not able to speak with LGBTQ women former candidates from the same racial groups. This was due in part to an early decision in the research design process not to attempt to systematically develop data on candidate sexuality and sexual orientation across the elections data in the Gender, Race, and Communities in Elections database (GRACE); I had the expertise and resources available to identify race and binary gender identities only. Thus, LGBTQ-​identifying legislators and other elites were not an explicit part of my sampling frame for interviews and surveys. The interviews I did have with men who identify as gay Asian Americans or Latinos generated several research questions that are salient to the processes of candidate emergence I discuss in earlier chapters. To illustrate, a number of respondents spoke about the importance of networks that included other

178  Nowhere to Run Latinos in their development as candidates. Those same respondents also spoke about being in contact with other gay Latinos engaged in electoral politics (often in other states or regions) and receiving or providing a range of candidate support activities, from encouragement to run to facilitating access to funding networks. Additionally, these respondents also raised a specific set of strategic considerations that they weighed before getting on the ballot, about how they would talk about their sexuality to potential constituents, particularly from their own ethnic communities. Among respondents, there was no uniform approach to this complex issue arc. The openly gay Latinos and Asian American men I interviewed described pathways to officeholding that shared some links with other candidates who identify as heterosexual, as well as some significant departures. Future research that explicitly considers the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality as groups navigate candidacy can shed light on how heteronormativity shapes descriptive representation and politics more generally, as well as how a diverse range of LGBTQ candidates may be reconfiguring some of those processes. The intersectional model is also a relevant framework for understanding the descriptive representation patterns and prospects for white women. The scope of this study did not permit a more in-​depth analysis of this group, but their residential proximity to white men and split partisan tendencies in the electorate engage many of the constraints and opportunities discussed in earlier chapters. One particularly fruitful line of future inquiry might look at how the geography of opportunity is distinct for white women and white men, given their access to party networks, and to the benefits of incumbency. A number of scholars have argued that white women are less successful in and supported by the Republican party (Elder, 2012; Sanbonmatsu, 2002; Pearson & Mcghee, 2013) relative to the Democratic party, and yet many live and run in districts where the Republican party has clear electoral advantages. The findings I present suggest that it is worthwhile to consider further how district populations and partisan contexts create race-​gendered differences in electoral opportunities for white women and white men. Finally, this study has demonstrated the analytic potential that unfolds when we explicitly recognize the overrepresentation of white men, relative to their numeric presence in the population. White men’s ubiquity in elected office is such that their status as a group is invisible to some and treated almost as natural by many observers. When scholars analyze the salient groups that

Conclusion  179 seek political representation, they typically train their eyes on women, racial minorities, or the party out of power. The benefits and power of incumbency are widely recognized (Ansolabehere & Snyder, 2002), but the identical descriptive characteristics of most incumbents—​white and male—​are often taken as a given or normal condition. The pervasiveness of those identical descriptive characteristics is not a given condition; American state legislative seats are not handed down from father to son. They are the subject of public and regular competition in the form of elections in a diverse polity. In most of those elections, white men are, descriptively speaking, the only competitors on the ballot. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity treats white men’s electoral dominance as a key factor in unraveling the persistent puzzle of underrepresentation. The findings in this book suggest that in future research, as we continue to ask of women and minorities in elected office, “Why so few?,” it is essential to also ask of white men, “Why so many?”

Looking Ahead: Descriptive Representation in 21st-​Century America The issues and challenges for descriptive representation that this study engages are essential to the democratic project, but as with populations and identities, they are not necessarily fixed or permanent. They are formidable because they are often structural, but political institutions, both formal and informal, do change. One change that is on the horizon is the post-​2020-​census-​based round of redistricting. The racial composition of districts is a critical component of the intersectional model, and theoretically, there could be some significant shift in the array of white-​majority populations across districts in the coming years. These changes may arise from shifts in the racial proportions of states reported in the census, as well as ongoing efforts in a number of states to move to new procedures for drawing district lines. However, at the time of this writing, I would argue that anticipation for a wide-​sweeping change on this front should be measured. Controversies surrounding questions on the census and data collection procedures are a fixture on the news, and social science evidence points to a likelihood that these public debates will dampen participation among the very immigrant communities who have experienced so much growth (Wang, 2019).

180  Nowhere to Run Moreover, even an expansion of the number of majority-​minority districts would fall short of addressing another key aspect of the findings in this book, which are the overlapping constraints that Asian American women and Latinas face in accessing resources and networks within the districts that are considered the most promising for candidates of color. High-​profile coverage of women of color who were on general election ballots in the 2018 midterm elections, particularly at the congressional level, has raised the possibility that these dynamics may be shifting. However, analysis of Latina’s and Asian American women’s candidacies at the state legislative level using an extension of the GRACE dataset that covers elections from 2014 to 2017 (Phillips, 2018), as well as a cooperative dataset that includes the same data for 2018 (Fraga, Juenke, & Shah, 2019; Klarner, 2018), reveals no change in the opportunity landscape; both groups are still largely running in majority-​minority districts, at rates much lower than co-​racial men. Beyond majority-​minority districts, it will be important in future studies to look more closely at whether the opportunity calculus for Asian American women and men, and Latina and Latino, potential candidates may shift in majority-​white districts. The 2018 election captured the imagination of Democratic elites and activists looking to increase the representation of women of color more broadly, and whether momentum to support Latinas and Asian American women in particular as candidates in majority-​white districts continues is worth further examination. As this book has shown, Latinos have been much more frequent candidates in those types of districts over the past two decades than Latinas and Asian American women and men, in part because Latinos run as Republicans and Independents much more often. However, in the 2018 midterm state legislative elections (Fraga et al., 2019; Klarner, 2018), a larger share of Latinas running in open seats were successful in majority-​white districts than Latinos. This result reflects a very small number of elections, 17 and 24 total races, respectively, and does not resolve a larger political dilemma around women’s access to representation in majority-​minority seats. The extent to which this represents a shift in realistic electoral opportunities requires time and more extensive research to uncover. A key facet of that future research should examine whether incumbent status in majority-​white or threshold districts carries the same advantages across different types of candidates. Latina and Latino candidates provide a suggestive example. In threshold districts, there is a clear gap in the

Conclusion  181 “durability” of incumbency between Latinas and Latinos in the GRACE dataset. Between 1996 and 2015, 64 percent of successful Latina candidates (N = 45) in threshold state legislative districts won more than once. The same figure for successful Latino candidates (N = 74) in those types of districts is 76 percent.1 These rates hold even after accounting for partisanship, but the number of observations for Republican or Independent Latinas drops to 10 over this 19 year period. To provide some crude context, the most frequently occurring types of candidates, white women (N = 428) and white men (N = 1,243), win more than once in threshold districts 64 percent and 66 percent of the time, respectively. The question of incumbent durability bears directly on whether or not a particular electoral opportunity seems realistic or a sensible investment of significant time and resources for potential candidates. This may be particularly true in cases and contexts where it is necessary for some groups of candidates to reconfigure their lives outside of electoral politics in order to accommodate running for office to a greater extent than others, or to forge a pathway to candidacy and officeholding as a “first.” Considerable as they are, these challenges also point the way toward reforms that may help to reduce the lopsided nature of descriptive representation. Majority-​minority districts are not, by themselves, detrimental to the representation of women of color. Neither are predominantly white districts, for that matter. Reforms aimed at increasing access to electoral opportunity have to address two overlapping and simultaneous constraints: the narrow band of realistic opportunities, and the informal structures and institutions that develop and support candidates, which tend to be centered around men. The methods that organizations and parties use to calculate electoral risk when deciding where and in whom to invest have contributed to the perceived scarcity of electoral opportunity. Further research on the calculus underlying campaign investment decisions and how organizational resources are deployed would shed light on possible district openings for Latina/​o and Asian American candidates that may have been overlooked. Even if trends toward racial partisan polarization among voters continue to persist, there is a substantial number of white-​majority districts that are Democratic leaning and, therefore, may be more appealing to organizations that are inclined to sponsor Asian American and Latina/​o candidates, who also tend to sponsor Democrats. Candidates of either major party would likely, reasonably, hesitate to take on the risk of being a “first of their kind” candidate in these districts if they thought they would have to go it alone. But with

182  Nowhere to Run organizational support, that calculus could shift. Efforts toward these types of reforms within parties, unions, and other mobilizing institutions would need to keep front of mind the race-​gendered considerations raised throughout this book in order to avoid recreating the intersectional inequalities in access to resources that I have documented. There are some existing examples of ways in which networks and institutions geared toward candidate development can move toward greater race and gender equity. Among these are the emergence of candidate development programs specifically targeting women of color, such as the Higher Heights Leadership Fund for Black Women; the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University’s Ready to Run programs, which include trainings specifically for Latinas, Asian American women, and women of the African Diaspora; as well as the New American Leaders programs for immigrant women of color. These programs recognize from the outset that the intersecting challenges potential candidates from these groups face are distinct, and they have demonstrated success in translating training participants into candidates (Sanbonmatsu, 2012). Other regional programs, such as the LUPE Fund in New Jersey and Hispanas Organizing for Political Equality in California have also focused on developing Latinas’ political leadership, and they place recognition of the overlapping challenges and opportunities they face front and center in the curriculum. Transferring the intersectional accountability and recognition that drives these programs into male-​dominated informal networks and institutions in districts and states that I discuss in this book may be more challenging. However, a number of Asian American women and men, and Latinas and Latinos, that I conducted follow-​up interviews with acknowledged that there was political talent and energy being left on the table, because women in their communities were not being fully incorporated in the candidate development process. Some said they were not sure how to shift their networks in a more inclusive direction, and others said they were trying new approaches to address this issue. The success of these efforts remains to be seen, but it is worth emphasizing again that, like state legislative district populations, the current composition of powerful elite networks is not necessarily permanently fixed either. Many of the issues currently animating American electoral politics—​ racism, gender inequality, sexual harassment and assault, and immigration, among others—​speak to core questions of belonging and incorporation in the polity. Descriptive representation of groups that are most acutely and

Conclusion  183 explicitly affected by these issues serves as an important signal that their voices, perspectives, and experiences have some traction in these debates. The absence of descriptive representation may send the opposite message, at what is arguably a formative time in American politics. Developing a clearer understanding of the constraints and opportunities for representation in American elections has never been more urgent. The model and empirical findings in this book argue for a new way of looking at descriptive representation, as the product of intersecting processes occurring across multiple contexts. By recognizing and accounting for differences in access to power and resources within and across groups, this approach improves the accuracy of our analyses in political science, and their relevance to the complex realities of American life and politics. This is especially true for disciplinary understandings of two immigrant-​based communities—​Asian Americans and Latina/​os—​whose presence in the United States has been integral to the development of our politics for centuries, and who have recently begun to emerge nationally as pan-​ethnic political groups. The race-​gendered processes that shape Asian American women’s and men’s, and Latinas’ and Latinos’, candidacies are connected to the experiences of other marginalized groups, as well as those that hold dominant positions in American politics. In uncovering how multiple dimensions of identity simultaneously facilitate and limit their opportunities for representation, we also expand the array of tools available for safeguarding and improving the democratic character of the republic overall.

Appendices ppendix A. American Leadership Survey A A1. American Leadership Survey Questionnaire A2. ALS Respondents’ Reported Activity in Civic Organizations ppendix B. Gender, Race and Communities in Elections Dataset A B1. GRACE Data Collection Processes B2. GRACE Winner Descriptive Data B3. Histograms of White Population Proportions for Each Iteration of Districts B4. Candidate Success Models (All Eight Race-​Gender Groups) ppendix C. White Men’s Access to Electoral Opportunity A Appendix D. Los Angeles Case Study D1. Overview of State Legislative Candidacies in Los Angeles D2. In-​Depth Interview Protocol for Los Angeles Case Study

Appendix A1:  American Leadership Survey Questionnaire

The American Leadership Survey Questionnaire

[The American Leadership Survey Questionnaire, or ALS, is a reproduction of the survey used for data collection in the book and is laid out in a way that “physically” reproduces the look of the survey.] 1. Did you first reach the office you hold now through winning an election or through an appointment? □ Election □ Appointment

2. What year were you first elected to the state legislature? _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​

3. People run for elected office for many reasons. Other than your desire to serve the public, what was the single most important reason that you decided to run for the state legislature the first time? □ A party leader or an elected official asked me to run. □ I wanted to represent communities that have not traditionally had a strong voice in government. □ I was dissatisfied with the incumbent. □ I wanted to change the way state government works. □ It seemed like a winnable race. □ I wanted to make sure that people like me have a real say in government. □ Other (Please specify) _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ 4. Before you served in the state legislature, what were the three organizations or associations that you were the most involved in? Please write their names below, in any order, and indicate your highest level of involvement with each organization or association. Organization name

Attended Some Events or Meetings

Served on Committees, Boards, etc.

President, Chair, Chief Executive, etc.

□

□

□

□

□

□

□

□

□

Appendix A  187 5. Before you served in the state legislature, had you ever held an elected or appointed position at any level of government? (Please do not include political party positions.) □ Yes □ No

5a. If yes, which level(s) of office did you hold? Please choose as many as apply. □ City or County □ State □ Federal

6. Have you ever attended a candidate training program or workshop? □ Yes (Who sponsored the training?)_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ □ No Now, we would like you to think about the time when you were making the decision to run for the state legislature for the first time. 7. Which of the following most accurately describes your decision? □ It was entirely my idea to run. (Skip to Question 8). □ I had already thought seriously about running when someone else suggested it. □ I had not seriously thought about running until someone else suggested it. 7a. Which individual or individuals suggested that you run? Please select as many choices as apply. □ My spouse or partner □ A friend, co-​worker or acquaintance □ A union official □ A family member other than my □ An elected or appointed officespouse or partner holder, other than the incumbent □ The incumbent office holder for the □ A member of an organization that office I hold now I was active in, other than my party □ Other (Please specify) _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ □ A leader or official from my party _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ 7b. Which of these individuals was the most influential in your decision to run for the state legislature for the first time? _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ 8. Was there an organization that played an important role in encouraging you to run the first time for the state legislature? What type of organization was that? □ Labor Union □ Neighborhood Association □ Parents’ Association □ Community Based Advocacy Group □ Cultural or Ethnic Association □ My Political Party □ Women’s Advocacy Organization □ Other_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ □ Immigrant Rights Group □ No, there was not an organization □ Chamber of Commerce or Small that played an important role in enBusiness Organization couraging me to run. □ Profession-​based Organization 9. When you were making your initial decision to enter the race, did anyone try to discourage you from running? □ Yes □ No

188  Appendix A 10. Who tried to discourage you? Please choose as many as apply. □ My spouse or partner □ A leader or official from my party □ A union official □ A friend, co-​worker, or acquaintance □ An elected or appointed officeholder □ The incumbent for the office □ A member of an organization in my I hold now community □ Other _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ □ A family member other than my spouse or partner 11. In addition to a desire to serve the public, other legislators have often said that several other considerations had an effect on their decision to run. Other than your desire to serve the public, which of the following considerations had an effect on your decision to run for the state legislature the first time? Please select up to 4. □ Having sufficient financial resources to conduct a campaign. □ Approval of my spouse or partner. □ Ensuring that I have time to meet my family commitments. □ Having sufficient financial resources to support my family. □ Having an occupation that would allow me the time and flexibility to run for office.

□ Having a shared racial, ethnic or cultural background with many of my constituents □ Making sure that people like me have a strong voice in government. □ Being able to address a key public policy issue. □ Other_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​

Now we would like to ask you a few questions about your first campaign for the state legislature. 12. What situation best describes your very first race for the state legislature? □ Incumbent of my party was seeking □ It was a race for an open seat. reelection □ Not applicable, multimember □ Incumbent of other party was district. seeking reelection 13. In your first run for the state legislature, were you opposed by one or more serious candidates within your own party in the primary? □ Yes □ No 14. Which of the following types of organizations supported your first campaign for state legislature? You can select more than one. □ Labor Union □ Profession-​based Organization □ Parents’ Association □ Neighborhood Association □ Cultural or Ethnic Association □ Community Based Advocacy Group □ Women’s Advocacy Organization □ My Political Party □ Immigrant Rights Group □ Other _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ □ Chamber of Commerce or Small Business Organization

Appendix A  189 14a. Of the organizations listed above that supported you, please circle the one that played the biggest role in your campaign’s success. 15. During your first campaign for the state legislative seat you now hold, what do you think were the three biggest challenges that you faced? Please write them below, in any order. ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ 16. If you had the necessary political support and the right opportunities, are there other elective or appointive political offices at any level of government that you would eventually like to hold? □ Yes □ No 17. What is the highest office you would like to hold in the future? ______________________________________________________________________ Please answer the following background questions to complete the survey. Remember, all of your answers are confidential. 18. Generally speaking, how would you describe your political views? □ Very Liberal □ Liberal □ Moderate Leaning Liberal □ Moderate □ Moderate Leaning Conservative □ Conservative □ Very Conservative 19. What is or was your occupation outside politics? ______________________________________________________________________ 20. Do you have any children under 18 living at home? □ Yes □ No 21. What year were you born? _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ 22. What is the highest level of formal education that you have completed? □ High School □ Some College □ Bachelor’s Degree □ Graduate or Professional Degree

190  Appendix A 23. Are you: □ Female □ Male 24. What race and/​or ethnicity do you consider yourself? Please indicate one or more that you would use to describe yourself. □ African American □ Asian American □ Latino/​Hispanic □ White/​Anglo □ Other_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ 25. Were you born in the United States? □ Yes □ No 26. Were your parents born in the United States? □ Yes, both parents were born in the U.S. □ Yes, one parent was born in the U.S. □ No, neither parent was born in the U.S. 27. Thank you for your participation. Would you be willing to consider being contacted for a short follow-​up interview? □ Yes □ No Thank You. Please return this Questionnaire in the enclosed, postage paid envelope.

Appendix A  191

Appendix A2: ALS Respondents’ Reported Activity in Civic Organizations Distinctions in the occupational backgrounds of race-​gender groups also bear on the civic profiles of potential candidates (Table A2). Profession-​based organizations are among the top four types of civic activities legislators reported spending the most time on before running for office. The other three were school or education-​related organizations, religious organizations, and ethnic or cultural organizations. Approximately one-​quarter of Asian American men reported being very active with profession-​based associations. For candidates who work in professions that facilitate recognition, being active in profession-​ based associations may amplify that benefit. One of the most concentrated reports of civic activity among all groups is involvement with cultural or ethnic associations among Latinas. Many of the locally based cultural associations that Latina legislators named in the survey were not typically oriented toward electoral politics. In interviews, a number of Latina candidates remarked that these types of civic work did not facilitate recognition as a political contender in the same way that explicitly political work and other types of civic activities might.

Table A2.  Types of Civic Activities of ALS Respondents, Percent Religious

Professional

African American Women

17

8

African American Men

15

Asian American Women

0

Asian American Men Latinas

Education

Cultural

25

8

25

5

10

9

18

18

7

24

28

14

0

10

14

29

Latinos

12

12

10

10

White Women

11

16

17

12

White Men

16

23

13

3

All

13

19

14

8

Appendix B1: GRACE Data Collection Processes The Gender, Race, and Communities in Elections (GRACE) dataset includes state legislative general election information from across 49 states, from 1996 through 2015, including candidate names, party, incumbency and vote totals gathered from the State Legislative Election Returns Database (Klarner, 2018). As noted in the main text of this study, this time frame coincides with important changes in the legal and political terrain of redistricting and representation. Additionally, this time frame facilitates a multi-​step process of data collection that has enabled me to develop a dataset that is first of its kind in scope. Information regarding racial identities for each candidate falls into two categories: that of winners and that of people who have never won (never-​winners). While limited, the information available on winners is relatively more complete and accessible on a national basis than that of never-​winners because there are nonprofit and academic organizations in existence for whom tracking elected officials from certain minority groups and/​or women is a central component of their mission. These include the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (African Americans), the National Association of Latino Appointed and Elected Officials (Latina/​os), the Center for American Women and Politics, Rutgers University (women), and the National Asian Pacific American Political Almanac series (Asian Americans). Lists compiled by these organizations were used as a starting point for coding the race and gender of winners in the GRACE dataset. From there, I worked with a team of researchers to confirm those identifications and code individuals who had not been previously identified by the organizations listed. I relied on Internet research, as well as brief phone calls to legislative staff members, in order to identify false positives and make new identifications. For never-​winning candidates, I utilized a process that was initiated by automatic name matching (Juenke, 2014). The consensus across several disciplines (Elliott et al., 2009; Lauderdale & Kestenbaum, n.d.; Mateos, 2007; Harris, 2015) is that while challenges remain, automatic name matching is most effective for identifying Asian Americans and Latina/​os, and less accurate for African Americans and whites. I used the U.S. Census Bureau list of Hispanic surnames that have a 70 percent or higher match rate from the 2000 census (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d. ), and a list of surnames and given names developed by Lauderdale and Kestenbaum for public health research on Asian Americans (Lauderdale & Kestenbaum, n.d.). After the auto-​matches, I used the list of winners with Latina/​o and Asian American racial identifications as one method for assessing the accuracy of the auto-​match. The Hispanic surname accurately matched 75 percent of Latina/​o winners, and the Asian American surname and given name matches accurately matched 58 percent of Asian American winners. Following the auto-​match, I hand-​checked for false positives among the matched candidates using Internet research. I also identified several false negatives among the winning candidates by doing an auto-​match with more expansive name lists, and hand-​ checking each positive result. For African Americans and whites, surnames are insufficiently accurate for use in auto-​matching, and thus the only racial identifications of never-​winning candidates are for Asian Americans and Latina/​os.

Appendix B  193 A key challenge of building a dataset of this scale is in minimizing errors related to the ethnic and racial diversity that is central to its design. Selection bias in candidate racial identifications may occur in several respects. Asian Americans, Latina/​os, and African Americans are identified by organizations that compile lists based on word of mouth, media coverage, Internet research, and phone calls. I used similar methods to confirm or identify false positives among the auto-​matched candidates. Candidates who are not identified by local media outlets as being members of a minority group, or who choose not to explicitly discuss their ancestry in public, are more likely to be miscategorized as false negatives in this dataset. In a related fashion, white or African American women who marry someone with a frequently occurring Asian American or Latina/​o last name, or candidates whose parents include a white or African American father, are also more likely to be miscategorized. One possible result of this selection bias is that there may be an under-​or overcount for Asian Americans and Latina/​os in particular. If there is an undercount, those who are missed are likely those who have left the lightest “public” trail of their identity as an Asian American or Latina/​o. This is not to say that they have not lived their lives or experienced society and political life, as an Asian American or Latina/​o, but only that their public, political identity has not been explicitly tied to their racial heritage. If there is an overcount, the false positives are most likely comprised of women who have married Asian Americans and Latina/​os and changed their surnames, or individuals whose families have lived in the United states for multiple generations (e.g., candidates who identify as white in New Mexico, with Hispanic surnames). An identification challenge that is particular to the Asian American case combines two issues—​the ethnic categories that are included in the designation “Asian Americans,” and the geographic concentration of a significant number of Asian American candidates in Hawaii. For the purposes of this study, I use the term “Asian Americans” to include people whose ancestry is rooted in Asia, but not those whose ancestry includes Pacific Islands but not Asia. There are often vast differences in the political and social experiences of immigrants from across these ethnic groups (Wong et al., 2011; Lien, 2001), but there is also growing evidence that there is a tendency for members of these groups to share some core political characteristics as well (Phillips & Lee, 2018). Furthermore, for many Asian Americans in Hawaii whose families have multigenerational roots in that state, their ancestry includes both Pacific Islander and Asian heritage. This may also help to explain the lower rate of matching winners’ names from the Lauderdale-​Kestenbaum list—​that list is based on studies of Asian Americans in the continental United States from the six largest Asian American ethnic groups. Thus, names that are more common among those with Pacific Islander heritage may occur less frequently.1 To minimize errors in this vein, I also hand-​checked the lists of candidates from Hawaii for names indicating either Asian or Pacific Islander heritage. Finally, whites and Native American/​American Indians represent opposite poles of descriptive representation in American state legislatures. Whites (particularly men) have historically been and continue to be the modal candidate. The National Caucus of Native American State Legislators reports that Native American/​American Indians currently hold 71 seats in total.2 This project’s empirical focus did not permit an extensive coding and analysis effort that included Native Americans or whites. Thus, while Native Americans/​American Indians are a vocal political minority in numerous states, they are excluded from this analysis. For all winning candidates not identified as belonging to any of the previously discussed racial groups, I assume that they are white. Among

194  Appendix B never-​winning candidates, I only clearly identify the racial group memberships of Asian Americans and Latina/​os. Thus, analyses of the GRACE dataset based on winning candidates are based on all four of the largest racial groups in the United States, while analyses encompassing non-​winning candidates are based only on Asian Americans and Latina/​os.

Gender In a fashion similar to the protocol for coding race, I employed distinct processes to code winning and never-​winning candidates’ genders. I use a binary construction of gender across the data and assume that if someone is not identified as a woman, then that person is a man. For winning candidates, I used two procedures to code for gender. First, I relied on the Center for American Women and Politics’ lists of female elected officials (Center for American Women and Politics, Eagleton Institute, Rutgers University, 2014) to initially identify women and men. Second, I ran an auto-​match of all winners with a list of female names from the United States Social Security Administration (U.S. Social Security Administration, n.d.). To accommodate a wide age range of candidates, I compiled the Social Security Administrations’ (SSA’s) annual lists of applicants’ first names from 1930 forward and ran an auto-​match with every name that had more than 750 female applicants at any time during that period (U.S. Social Security Administration, n.d.). In checking the results of the raw auto-​match against the gender coding of winners, it yielded 86.5 percent positive matches. I then hand-​checked the names of winners who had been identified as women through both processes and found a small handful of false negatives. For never-​winning candidates, I initiated the process with an auto-​match of the female names list from the SSA. I then hand-​checked candidates whose names also frequently occur on the SSA’s list of male names (Charlie, Michael, Joshua, e.g.) using Internet research. The SSA lists are less reliable in identifying first names common among Asian Americans and Latina/​os, so I also individually checked the Asian American and Latina/​o lists of never-​winning candidates to code for gender.

Note on Population Data The GRACE spans three different rounds of census-​based redistricting. The U.S. Census Bureau asked states to submit their state legislative district boundary information for the first time following the 2000 census. While a number of states complied, two states central to this study—​California and Texas—​did not.3 For the 2010 census, all states complied. Thus, the district demographic data—​income, education levels, unemployment rates, and proportions of Asian Americans, African Americans, Latina/​os, and Whites—​has been collected from three separate sources. For data from 2011 forward, I downloaded 2010 census data from the National Historical Geographic Information System maintained by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota (Mason, et al., n.d.) For election years reflecting post-​2000 census redistricting, I utilized census data tabulated by Eric Juenke at Michigan State University from census block districts (Juenke, n.d.) and data in the CQ Press Almanac of State Legislatures(Lilley, DeFranco, & Bernstein, 2007). Finally, for election years reflecting redistricting following the 1990 census, I used data

Appendix B  195 collected by Eric Juenke and Rob Preuhs from the CQ Press Almanac of State Legislatures (Lilley, DeFranco, & Bernstein, 1998). Since each state, and in many cases, each legislative chamber, has a unique timeline for implementing new district boundaries following the Census (due to statutory requirements, data availability, and legal challenges), I used Justin Levitt’s All About Redistricting website to create a directory of the months and years in which each of the 99 legislative chambers switched from one set of district boundaries to the next following each census (Levitt, n.d.). I then used that directory to match district demographic data to each candidate, in each election year. Using citizen voting age population (CVAP) data, instead of resident populations from the census, would be another way to assess the link between communities and the individuals elected to represent them and is a common practice in the Latina/​o politics literature in particular. There is ample evidence in the race and ethnic politics literature of systematic differences between the size of the electorate and the size of the resident population. Studies of Latina/​o and Asian American voter behavior have highlighted the importance of accounting for racial differences in citizenship status and access to mediating institutions like parties (Arvizu & Garcia, 1996; Geron & Lai, 2002; Griffin & Newman, 2007; Hajnal & Lee, 2011; Lai et al., 2002; Leighley & Vedlitz, 1999; Lien, 2015; Preuhs & Juenke, 2011b; Segura & Woods, 2006), within immigrant-​based communities. African American politics scholars have argued that the effects of policy-​based disenfranchisement are widespread enough that they may tangibly affect election outcomes (Uggen & Manza, 2002; Weaver & Lerman, 2010). This body of scholarship suggests that careful consideration must be applied in assessing the relationship between a group’s presence in the population and their political influence via descriptive representation. While this caution is warranted, the potential benefits of analyzing the relationship between population and elected descriptive representatives outweigh the limitations in this case. The very limited availability of CVAP data at the state legislative–​district level would drastically shrink the number of states and years that could be included in this study. One of the chief limitations facing previous scholarship on race and gender in descriptive representation is embedded in the research subject itself—​there are relatively few women and minorities elected in a given state in a given year. By using resident population data, I am able to leverage the rich variation in institutions and outcomes across states and evaluate the effects of particular populations at different points in time. The use of resident population data on the right side of the analytical equation facilitates a more robust dataset on the left side. Finally, the use of population data instead of CVAP does not undermine the central theoretical points of the argument I advance in this analysis. If I were to use CVAP instead of population data, the distribution of white versus nonwhite populations would appear even more skewed toward white majorities. Thus, using population data is likely a conservative means of assessing the opportunity landscape for candidates of color. In formulating the processes that result in women of color being positioned further from political influence than men of color, white women, and white men, distinctions in the population’s voter eligibility are not centrally relevant.

196  Appendix B

Appendix B2: GRACE Winner Descriptive Data Tables B.2A and B.2B provide an overview of the data on election wins that underlies the figures in Chapter 1.

Table B.2A.  Number of State Legislative General Election Wins by Race-​Gendered Group 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 African American Women

117

133

125

161

145

183

148

186

171

184

African American Men

226

281

228

280

236

288

266

282

262

270

Asian American Women

11

17

17

26

22

30

31

38

31

35

Asian American Men

47

48

42

54

51

60

54

59

70

74

Latinas

54

53

58

61

65

63

63

63

84

83

Latinos

124

124

136

151

155

163

161

160

186

186

White Women

1331 1374 1328 1216 1256 1347 1346 1335 1362 1325

White Men

4069 4124 3968 3905 3858 3994 3742 3984 3771 3835

Total

5979 6154 5902 5854 5788 6128 5811 6107 5937 5992

Table B.2B.  Percent of All State Legislative General Elections Won by Race-​Gendered Group 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 African American Women

2.0

2.2

2.1

2.8

2.5

3.0

2.5

3.0

2.9

3.1

African American Men

3.8

4.6

3.9

4.8

4.1

4.7

4.6

4.6

4.4

4.5

Asian American Women

0.2

0.3

0.3

0.4

0.4

0.5

0.5

0.6

0.5

0.6

Asian American Men

0.8

0.8

0.7

0.9

0.9

1.0

0.9

1.0

1.2

1.2

Latinas

0.9

0.9

1.0

1.0

1.1

1.0

1.1

1.0

1.4

1.4

Latinos

2.1

2.0

2.3

2.6

2.7

2.7

2.8

2.6

3.1

3.1

White Women

22.3

22.3

22.5

20.8

21.7

22.0

23.2

21.9

22.9

22.1

White Men

68.1

67.0

67.2

66.7

66.7

65.2

64.4

65.2

63.5

64.0

Appendix B  197

Appendix B3: Histograms of White Population Proportions for Each Iteration of Districts 1996–2000

2001–2010

2011–2015 30,269

30

Total Number of State Legislative Candidacies (In thousands)

23,465

20

14,148 11,914 10

0

1,092 1,092 Q1

4,521 2,478

1,794 1,627

Q2

Q3

6,426

5,922

5,256

2,167 2,440 873

Q4

Q5

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

Q5

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

Q5

White Proportion of District Population by Quintile

Figure B3.  White Proportions of State Legislative Election District Populations, by Census-​Based Redistricting Period.

198  Appendix B

Appendix B4: Candidate Success Models (All Eight Race-​Gender Groups) While this study is focused on candidacy, a key outcome of candidacy is, of course, ultimately winning the election. The race-​gendered relationships I point to in the main text between populations and candidacy also hold when turning to the question of ultimate success on the ballot and are suggestive for understanding the factors underlying descriptive representation of all four of the largest racial groups. Table B4 reports the results of separate probit regression models of the relationship between racial group proportions in the district and likelihood of electing a particular type of descriptive representative. To aid in interpretation of the results for Table B4 and assuage concerns about the relationship between these models, I present the predicted probabilities in Figure B4, which underscore that there is no single dimensional summary (i.e., population proportions perform in X manner for minorities, or Y manner for women) of the relationship between population proportions and likelihood of election that is accurate across all groups. In the types of districts where African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latina/​os have been elected most often, increases in the size of the co-​racial proportion of the population are related to higher probabilities of electing men than women. Among all three nonwhite racial groups, the gaps get wider as the co-​racial population becomes a larger proportion of the district. The tables in this section yield substantially similar results to those presented in the main body of the book. While a number of alternative modeling strategies have been discussed in other scholarship estimating the relationship between populations and descriptive representation (Juenke 2014; Shah, 2014), the repeated conclusion has been that the substantive result changes little, if at all, when a regression model that allows for sample selection, like a sequential probit, is utilized (instead of a probit, logit, or even ordinary least-​squares model). I also found that to be the case when preparing this analysis.

Multimember Seat

Open Seat

Republican Strength

Leg. Professionalization

Term limits

Latina/​o Pop. Percent

AsAm Pop. Percent

AfAm Pop. Percent

0.657*** (0.1)

(0.1)

(0.1)

0.511***

0

(0.0)

(0.0)

(0.0)

0.079*

–​0.363***

(0.1)

(0.1)

–​0.357***

0.303**

(0.0)

(0.0)

–​0.417***

–​0.032

(0.1)

(0.1)

0.085*

0.926***

(0.1)

(0.2)

1.343***

0.983***

(0.1)

(0.1)

1.030***

4.172***

β/​se

β/​se

3.749***

AfAm Men

AfAm Women

(0.1)

0.587***

(0.1)

0.158**

(0.0)

-​0.105*

(0.2)

0.585**

(0.1)

–​0.098

(0.1)

–​0.002

(0.2)

4.147***

(0.3)

–​0.141

β/​se

AsAm Women

(0.1)

0.396***

(0.0)

0.048

(0.1)

–​0.187***

(0.1)

0.238*

(0.0)

0.091**

(0.2)

–​0.345

(0.2)

5.523***

(0.2)

–​0.395

β/​se

(0.1)

0.591***

(0.0)

0.071*

(0.0)

–​0.182***

(0.1)

–​0.151

(0.0)

0.178***

(0.1)

3.213***

(0.2)

0.957***

(0.1)

0.012

β/​se

AsAm Men Latinas

Table B4.  Probit Regression Model of Likelihood of Winning State Legislative General Election

(0.0)

0.202***

(0.1)

0.052

(0.0)

–​0.142***

(0.1)

–​0.167

(0.0)

0.07

(0.1)

4.192***

(0.3)

–​0.518*

(0.1)

–​0.537***

β/​se

Latinos

(0.0)

0.517***

(0.0)

–​0.015

(0.0)

–​0.190***

(0.1)

–​0.400***

(0.0)

0.129**

(0.1)

–​0.368***

(0.1)

–​0.800***

(0.1)

–​1.057***

β/​se

White Women

Continued 

(0.0)

0.348***

(0.0)

–​0.059***

(0.0)

0.270***

(0.1)

0.288***

(0.0)

–​0.134***

(0.1)

–​1.997***

(0.1)

–​1.708***

(0.1)

–​2.152***

β/​se

White men

53971

(0.1)

(0.1)

53971

–​2.926***

0.0

(0.0)

–​3.506***

–​0.001

(0.2)

–​0.001

0.165

(0.4)

0.0

0.423

–​0.006***

0.0

(0.0)

0.001

0.026

(0.0)

β/​se

β/​se

0.049***

AfAm Men

AfAm Women

* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001

N

Constant

District Unemployment

District Education

District Income

Candidates per Seat

Table B4. Continued

53971

(0.2)

–​3.545***

(0.0)

0.027

(0.4)

–​1.258***

0.0

0.012***

(0.0)

–​0.044

β/​se

AsAm Women

53971

(0.1)

–​3.017***

(0.0)

0.012

(0.4)

–​1.738***

0.0

0.011***

(0.0)

0.011

β/​se

53971

(0.1)

–​3.161***

0.0

–​0.015**

(0.2)

–​0.071

0.0

0.002

(0.0)

0.029

β/​se

AsAm Men Latinas

53971

(0.1)

–​2.969***

(0.0)

–​0.014*

(0.4)

0.184

0.0

0.004*

(0.0)

0.023

β/​se

Latinos

53971

(0.1)

–​1.126***

(0.0)

–​0.014

(0.4)

0.756

0.0

0.005*

(0.0)

0.046*

β/​se

White Women

53971

(0.1)

1.260***

(0.0)

–​0.004

(0.4)

–​1.470***

0.0

0.003

(0.0)

0.027*

β/​se

White men

Appendix B  201 1.00

African American

Asian American

Latino/a

White

0.75

Probability of Election Win

0.50

0.25

0.00 1.00

0.75

0.50

0.25

0.00 0.00

0.25

0.50 0.75 1.00 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 Average Population Proportion for Each Racial Group

1.00

Gender Man Woman

Figure B4.  Predicted Probability of Winning State Legislative General Election on Co-​Racial Population.

202  Appendix B

Appendix B5: Full Results: Likelihood of Republican or Independent Win in Predominantly White Districts

Table B5.  Likelihood a Republican or Independent Candidate Won General Election (Full Results) Republican or Independent Winner β/​se Latino Republican/​Independent

–​0.229 (0.15)

Term Limit

0.405*** (0.07)

Legislative Professionalism

–​1.373*** (0.26)

Candidates per Seat

–​0.042 (0.03)

District Income

0.015** 0.00

District Education

–​2.035*** (0.35)

District Unemployment

–​0.014 (0.01)

District Republican Strength

6.698*** (1.44)

Constant

0.512* (0.22)

N * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001

8644

Appendix C: White Men’s Access to Electoral Opportunity Asian American women and men, Latinas, and Latinos are not becoming candidates and running for state legislature in a vacuum. While white men are not the focus of this study, the impact of their structural advantages on the landscape of electoral opportunities for emerging groups must be accounted for in order to understand the persistence of their overrepresentation. On suggestive datapoint from the GRACE dataset that requires further research is the success white men have had running in majority-​minority districts. Table C1 reports the raw number of open-​seat election victories in majority-​minority districts across all of the years of this study. In total, there were 1992 open-​seat opportunities in these types of districts over nearly 20 years. A quarter of those opportunities were won by white men, who were also the largest single group of winners. This tally of success by white men in districts that have long been discussed by media and political elites (as well as political scientists) as a key to the representation of racial minorities underscores the need for further research on over-​as well as underrepresentation in elected office.

Table C1.  Open-​Seat Election Victories in Majority-​ Minority Districts, 1996–​2014 Number of Wins African American Women

312

African American Men

449

Asian American Women

44

Asian American Men

79

Latinas

131

Latinos

279

White Women

209

White Men

489

Appendix D1: Overview of State Legislative Candidacies in Los Angeles The Overall Win rate in Table D1 refers to the percent of primary candidates from each race-​gender group who go on to ultimately win the seat in the general election. The data in this table covers six election cycles between 2006 and 2016. The primary candidate data is most reliable for that period. However, the general election candidate and winner data is available for 1996–​2016 and exhibits the same general pattern.

Table D1.  Primary and General Election Candidates in State Legislative Races, 2006–​2016, Percent Primary Candidates

General Election

Overall Win Rate

African American Women

5

4

33

African American Men

8

7

40

Asian American Women

1

1

43

Asian American Men

6

6

38

Latinas

8

7

35

Latinos

22

22

42

White Women

14

14

21

White Men

36

38

30

Appendix D  205

Appendix D2: In-​Depth Interview Protocol for Los Angeles Case Study The following is the instrument I used to interview individuals who had run for office in Los Angeles County. It is largely similar to the instrument I used in national interviews, with a few exceptions: in the national set of interviews, I did not reference Asian Americans or Latina/​os in the introduction or questions, and I omitted the final section focused on Southern California. 1. Introduction to the Project and Confidentiality Statement. a. This interview is for a study of politics in Southern California, which focuses on Asian American and Latina/​o communities. The questions I am going to ask are about your experiences running for office and overall impressions of how elections and politics work in this part of the state. All of your answers are completely confidential. If I use any direct quotes from your responses later, they will be anonymous, and not identifiable as coming from you. Does that all sound okay with you? 2. Background Questions. a. What year did you first run for the state legislature/​Congress? b. What was your occupation when you ran that first time? c. Had you held any elected office before your first campaign for the state legislature/​Congress? d. Were you involved in politics in other ways? e. What other organizations were you involved in? 3. Deciding to Run the First Time. a. How did you first decide to run for your seat? b. Did anyone suggest that you run? Who suggested it? c. Other candidates/​elected officials I’ve talked to have said that there was a mix of considerations they worked through before they decided. i. What were some of the things that either pushed you to run when you did, or made you think twice about running at that time? ii. Could you see yourself running in any other district that first time? 4. Campaign. a. What organizations or individuals made a real difference in your first campaign for the state legislature/​Congress? b. Did the party play any role? c. Were there any aspects of the election that you felt were working in your favor? d. Anything that you felt required an extra effort by your campaign to overcome? e. What percentage of your time on the campaign would you estimate that you spent fundraising? 5. Impressions of Politics in Southern California.

a. Taking a step back to look at politics in Southern California more generally, what would you say is the biggest challenge facing Asian Americans/​Latina/​os running for office in Southern California? b. Do you think those challenges are different for different ethnic groups? i. Men or women?

Notes Chapter 1 1. Among other depictions, Lopez was repeatedly described as “poised to make history” (Yu, 2016), and her election was characterized as a sign of hope for Democratic party leaders attentive to minority populations in Georgia and a signal of “the growing political strength of Georgia’s booming minority population (Wickert, 2016).” 2. This study is oriented around a binary construction of genders—​all subjects are either men or women. This choice is empirically motivated. In collecting data on the ways in which thousands of state legislators presented themselves to the public from 1996 to 2015, I elected to defer to the public presentation of candidates’ identities. If, for example, a legislator had a grandparent who was ethnically Filipino but did not discuss that aspect of their identity in public nor had repeated public accounts of that heritage, I did not code that person as Asian American. In this regard, it was very rare to encounter state legislative candidates or elected officials who identified publicly as nonbinary or transgender. As a result, I limited the analysis to a binary framework of women and men but recognize that this aspect of the research design may be different in coming years as potentially more candidates who are nonbinary identifying run for office, or in a study that is more focused on mass publics, where the incidence rate of nonbinary identification is relatively higher. One aspect of the book that reflects this set of choices is the language I use to talk about Latina/​o elected officials and populations. I use Latina/​o, Latina, and Latino throughout. I discuss these research design choices around categories in more detail in Chapter 2. 3. Two similar datasets show a continuation of two patterns in the GRACE through 2018: (1) women-​of-​color candidates tend to come from majority-​minority districts in the preponderance of instances of candidacy, and (2) their representation on the ballot is far less than that of co-​racial men. These datasets are my own GRACE II: Sitting State Legislators from 2014 to 2017 (Phillips, 2018) and the Candidate Cooperative dataset for 2018 by Fraga, Juenke, and Shah (2019). 4. Ongoing debates over empirical operationalization of intersectional approaches include questions of whether looking at multiple groups is in keeping with the historic focus of intersectionality in political science on Black women or serves to reify categories of difference that diminish the texture and granularity of experience that intersectionality was developed to bring to light (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013; Jordan-​Zachery, 2013; McCall, 2005; Simien, 2007). As a growing literature, I contend that there is ample research space and necessity for continued intersectional research on the inner workings of groups whose members are marginalized in relation

208 Notes to more than one dimension of their identity, like Black women or LGBTQ Latinas. I return to a more extensive discussion about the research design of this study and how it relates to other intersectional empirical work in Chapter 2 but will note for now that the methodology I employ is intersectional in its “analytic sensibility” (Cho et al., 2013) in that it is driven by a focus on simultaneity, context, dynamism, and unequal power relationships between groups. 5. The GRACE does not include data for Louisiana. 6. It has also long been asked of Black women (Darcy & Hadley, 1988; Gay & Tate, 1998; Tate, 2003). 7. Explicit specifications for a number of salient groups in American politics, notably American Indians and Indigenous groups and Black immigrant communities, are absent from this analysis. I would expect that the intersectional model of electoral opportunity can help to explain these groups’ experiences to some extent, but the data collection required for empirical tests of that premise are beyond the scope of this study. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity is informed in part by extant empirical research and my own data on Black women and Black men as candidates; thus, they are explicitly included in the model. However, their inclusion is not intended to suggest that the experiences of electoral politics among Black women and Black men are not themselves diverse. 8. The findings supporting this aspect of the race-​gendered model in this study build on a rich literature focused on Black and Latina/​o communities that has produced similar conclusions. See Cohen, 1999; Gallagher, 2007; Hardy-​Fanta, 1993; Pardo, 1998; and Takash, 1993; among others. 9. Importantly, this is not to imply that racialized ideas and structures alone “connect” white women and white men’s social and political positioning and power. There is extensive research documenting the extent to which “white heteropatriarchy” (Strolovitch et al., 2017) has animated and empowered white political and social dominance in the United States (Strolovitch et al., 2017; Frasure-​Yokley, 2018; Macrae, 2018). 10. A number of studies have found that, particularly among white voters, the band of voters who are sensitive to candidate gender in their vote choice behavior is fairly narrow (Bejarano, 2013; Lawless, 2015). However, other studies utilizing intersectional research frames have also argued that voters evaluate a candidates’ identity characteristics simultaneously—​Black women are evaluated as Black women, not as Black or women, for example (Philpot & Walton, 2007; Gay & Tate, 1998; Strolovitch et al., 2017; Phillips, 2018). There are also a number of “single axis” studies that demonstrate that a woman or a member of a minority racial group on the ballot may increase engagement or participation among voting members of the public who belong to the same groups (Barreto, 2007; McConnaughy et al., 2010; Gay, 2001; Burns, 2001; among many others). In this vein, there are a growing number of intersectional studies of the link between descriptive representation and participation that are suggestive of a positive relationship (Stokes Brown & Dolan, 2010; Medenica & Fowler, 2020).

Notes  209

Chapter 2 1. This is a pseudonym. All other interview respondent names in this book are also pseudonyms. 2. The historic population data in this table is from a report by D’Vera Cohn at Pew Research Center on the ways in which immigration is changing the demographic composition of the United States (Cohn, 2015). The future projections are from a more recent set of calculations by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2018 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018). Both calculations utilize the single racial group identifications in the census, distinguish Non-​Hispanic Whites for the White category, and combine Asian origin and Pacific Islander populations for the Asian American category. Other uses of the Asian American category in this book denote individuals with Asian origin ancestry and do not include Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander ancestry individuals. 3. These choices are specific to my work on political elites, because I think it is the most accurate reflection of how most people I interviewed and studied in that group refer to themselves. In work focused on mass publics, I prefer to use the term “Latinx,” as a way of including nonbinary gender–​identifying individuals in the analysis. For more on these terms and their meanings, see L. Torres, 2018; Montoya & Seminario, 2020. 4. Respondents I spoke with for this study often used these terms interchangeably. However, as Nadia Brown notes in her 2014 book, Sisters in the Statehouse (Brown, 2014b), Black legislators who identify as Afro-​Caribbean or Dominican, for example, may not subscribe to this interchangeability. In related research with Paru Shah, we have identified 21 Black legislators serving in the past decade who identify as immigrants or members of immigrant communities, lending further complexity to this set of descriptive identifications among elites. 5. A number of legislators who are identified in this analysis as Latina or Latino also identify themselves as belonging to an indigenous or native group, or as members of a particular nation or tribe. Their inclusion as Latina or Latino is not intended to disregard their Native identities, or suggest that identifying as a Latina and Native person, for example, is the same as identifying as Latina. 6. This includes individuals who trace their Latina/​o ancestry back to areas that are currently U.S. states, for example, those whose families have lived in what is now Texas since a period predating the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. 7. The district level data for Louisiana was inconsistently available, and thus Louisiana is omitted from the GRACE. 8. The list of data provided by states for the 2000 census is available at the U.S. Census’ website: https://​w ww.census.gov/​geographies/​reference-​f iles/​t ime-​s eries/​geo/​ tallies.2000.html 9. For data from 2011 forward, I downloaded 2010 census data from the National Historical Geographic Information System maintained by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota (Mason et al., 2019). For election years reflecting post-​2000 census redistricting, I utilized census data tabulated by Eric Juenke at Michigan State University from census block districts (Juenke, n.d.). Finally, for election years reflecting redistricting following the 1990 census, I used data collected

210 Notes by Eric Juenke and Rob Preuhs from the CQ Press Almanac of State Legislatures (Lilley et al., 2007). 10. I used Justin Levitt’s All About Redistricting website to create a directory of the months and years in which each of the 99 legislative chambers switched from one set of district boundaries to the next following each census (Levitt, n.d.). I then used that directory to match district demographic data to each candidate, in each election contest. 11. According to the National Conference of State Legislators, there were 69 members of the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators in 2015. 12. The Gender and Multicultural Leadership project included a relatively small sample of state legislators, including 4 Asian American women, 14 Asian American men, 10 Latinas, and 29 Latinos (Hardy Fanta et al., 2016). 13. For each Asian American and Latina/​o member of a legislative chamber, I randomly selected one Republican and one Democratic member (excluding Asian Americans and Latina/​os) within that chamber to include in the stratified sample. The stratified sample included legislators from every state except: Alabama, Iowa, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, and South Dakota. 14. For weighted responses, I multiplied the probability of an individual member of a group’s selection by that group’s share of the actual sitting legislator population, divided by the group’s share of the survey sample. All respondents but two answered racial identification questions; those two were omitted from the data. 15. The distribution of membership between lower and upper chambers of state legislatures among ALS survey respondents is approximately even among men and women within each racial group. The reported patterns do not change substantially when the data is separated by legislative chamber.

Chapter 3 1. In a fashion similar to Patricia Hill Collins’ arguments about Black feminist theory, these respondents’ perspectives on larger systems tied to race and gender from candidates were not merely “theoretical” but rooted in their own experiences of surviving and thriving in formal and informal institutions dominated by white men and co-​racial men (Collins, 1990). 2. The sample sizes for African American women and men were quite small in the ALS, and the results for these groups are reported for purposes of completeness. While the results do not necessarily contradict findings in earlier literature on Black women and men in politics, the focus of this analysis is on Latina/​os and Asian American women and men. 3. Given that they are the modal category of candidate for the state legislature and reported not thinking of running until someone else suggested it least often, white men are a useful reference category for assessing whether groups of women are more likely than men to have some “deficit” of self-​generated ambition to run. 4. Hardy-​Fanta and coauthors (2016) take a stronger stance on the idea that the act of “asking more women” will lead to more equitable descriptive representation, by saying that it is a notion that needs to be “put to rest.”

Notes  211 5. This comports with earlier findings based on studies of white candidates (Bianchi et al., 2000). 6. Given documented language and race of interviewer effects in scholarship on voter behavior, some readers may wonder whether the absence of the narratives of disruption, constraint, and, at times, sacrifice that figure so centrally in interviews with Latinas and Asian American women is related to a social desirability bias tied to gender. The interviews were all conducted by myself, a female presenting researcher, and encompass open-​ended questions about the most important concerns candidates had when deciding to run. In the survey, which is conducted privately, the answer choices may stimulate a different set of considerations than an open-​ ended question. The men I interviewed may have been less comfortable than female respondents in sharing concerns about their domestic arrangements and personal lives with a woman. However, Huddy et al.’s study of gender of interviewer effects (1997) suggests that they are most salient in evaluating the responses of younger, less well-​educated survey respondents, which generally does not describe most of the people I interviewed. Studies of this question since then have returned somewhat mixed results, but those that do find some evidence of gender-​of-​interviewer effects show that they tend to be context dependent and rely on questions specifically about sensitive, explicitly gendered topics like reproductive health services (Flores-​Macias & Lawson, 2008). Perhaps more importantly, I have not come across evidence of male candidates discussing these concerns to this degree in prior research on candidate emergence that was conducted by men. 7. There has been little research to date on how the class and wealth backgrounds of groups of candidates shape their emergence. Nick Carnes has analyzed “working class” representatives among candidates, but without focused attention to differences in the composition of those “working class” individuals in terms of gender and/​or race (2018). Additionally, data on wealth and earnings also suggests that (as is the case with other issues, such as partisanship) dynamics in the general population do not directly inform the pool of individuals and groups thinking about running for office. To illustrate, Asian American men earn more on average than white men, Latino men, and Black men, but a smaller share of the Asian American male population has run for state legislative office than shares of other groups of men. Asian American women earn more on average than all other groups of women, and all groups of men other than Asian Americans, yet they run and serve in elected office at the lowest rates (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). More research that examines wealth and candidacy intersectionally is needed to parse this relationship more thoroughly. I discuss the implications of these group-​level differences in socioeconomic measures more in Chapter 8. 8. Of course, this motivation stemming from self-​recognition is not universal among Latinas and Asian American women, nor would we expect it to be. However, even when candidates themselves do not think their racial, immigrant, or gender identities or communities are particularly salient to their candidacy, they often cannot escape others situating or stereotyping them as part of those groups. For example, two of the Latina Republican legislators I interviewed spoke about how they did not

212 Notes run because of their ties to these groups, but that they faced criticism and expectations from others that stemmed from their group memberships. In one instance, a respondent described being told by another legislator who is Latino that she was not “Mexican enough” to represent her Latina/​o heavy district. She said she “looked at him and I said I’ve never questioned your heritage, please don’t question mine, I do believe I know . . . where I came from.”

Chapter 4 1. This result is robust across all eight race-​gendered groups but takes distinct forms. See appendices. 2. One key signal that the racial composition of a district sends to potential candidates and other political elites is related to partisanship. Since states began redrawing legislative district lines following the 2010 census, 241 cases contesting some aspect of the new lines have been filed in state and federal courts. Forty-​one of those cases have made their way to the Supreme Court of the United States (the Court). This ongoing, resource intensive litigation is a testament to the widely perceived import of the racial composition of each district for partisan concerns. The extent to which a district’s racial makeup can serve as a factor in drawing district lines has been, and continues to be, hotly contested (Thornburg v. Gingles; Shaw v. Reno; Evenwel v. Abbott), and legal-​institutional mechanisms for combating attempts to dilute racial minority voting strength have been sharply reduced since the Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder in 2012. While the explicit use of race as a primary factor in redistricting has seen ups and downs in the past two decades, the use of partisanship as a factor in those processes has reached new heights. The Court effectively declined to weigh in on the use of “political considerations” in 2004 (Vieth v. Juliberer) and sidestepped the issue again in 2018 in Gil v. Whitford, barring evidence of an “extreme” use of partisanship in line drawing. Arguably, that extreme use has come to pass. Technological advances in the methods used to draw district maps and analyze the populations contained therein have enabled a new level of precision in shaping districts according to the wishes of the party in power in state governments (Royden & Li, 2017). In most states, for most of the years of this study, that has been the Republican party. At the same time, voter behavior scholarship analyzing recent presidential elections points to an increasingly close relationship between an individual’s racial and partisan proclivities (Green, Palmquist, & Schickler, 2002). Historic partisan divides between whites and nonwhites in presidential elections held steady for most of the period of this study, and the share of whites leaning or affiliating as Republicans has increased since Barack Obama’s election in 2008 (Doherty & Weisel, 2015). In a related vein, feelings of racial resentment and animosity toward immigrants, which are most widely held among whites, have become an increasingly reliable predictor of partisan voting behavior (Enders & Scott, 2019; Major, Blodorn, & Major Blascovich, 2017; Tesler & Sears, 2010). As a result of these dual patterns of increasing partisan

Notes  213 distinctiveness among racial groups and in district configurations, redistricting for partisan wins is often concurrent with racially lopsided districts. These trends magnify the weight that racial composition plays in defining electoral opportunities, particularly for nonwhite potential candidates. 3. For many Latina/​o and Asian American women and men potential candidates, particularly Democrats, a minority-​white population plays a central role in their evaluation of whether a state legislative district is a realistic electoral opportunity. In the next chapter, I address the possibility of “crossover” candidacies, wherein a person of color represents a majority-​white district, extensively in the context of race and gender identities and partisanship. For now, it is worth noting that they were an occasional, but largely hypothetical, topic of discussion among Latina/​o and Asian American women and men political elites I interviewed. However, nearly 20 years of elections data, and the consistent thread of the importance of majority-​minority districts across interview respondents, indicates that the actual frequency of candidates (and the organizations that support them) taking the “crossover” risk is still relatively rare. 4. I explore how race and gender interact with partisanship to shape electoral opportunity more explicitly in Chapter 5. 5. Two-​thirds of all district elections included in this analysis were held in districts that were 75 percent or more white at the time. One-​third of all districts were 90 percent white or more. The mean Asian American population proportion within districts is 3.2 percent; the mean Latina/​o population proportion in 8.9 percent. The mean African American population proportion is 10.4 percent. 6. The roots of this racially lopsided configuration are an active subject of debate within the discipline (Canon, 1999; Feng, Aoki, & Ikegami, 2002; Levitt, n.d.) and require a broader discussion of redistricting processes than is possible here. While there have been a handful of high-​profile forays into reforming redistricting processes, independent redistricting commissions and other nonpartisan processes not controlled by state legislators are used in only a few states, such as Arizona, California, and Michigan, though there has been growth in the removal of the power of state legislators to redraw the lines in several states with ballot propositions (USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, 2020). 7. Given the nature of the dependent variable, different levels of aggregation in the contextual variables, and that the data is not a true panel because the underlying geographic populations of districts change, I have also performed this analysis using alternative models, preprocessing the data with matching studies and other specifications. These additional analyses include models of Latina/​o’s and Asian American women’s and men’s likelihood of ultimate election, conditional on whether a candidate from that group was on the ballot. There was no substantive difference in the pattern of results for racial population coefficients. Another concern about this approach to modeling the likelihood of election may be that comparing coefficients across models with distinct dependent variables overlooks the relationship between the outcome variables in the underlying data-​generating process. However, earlier studies have used this comparative approach in order to avoid the theoretical pitfalls of assuming that a single reference category is equally, or homogenously, relevant for all groups, or using interaction

214 Notes terms to stand in for distinct social dynamics across groups (García Bedolla & Scola, 2006). Furthermore, as Long, 2009, argues, utilizing predicted probabilities is a sound test of whether a comparison of coefficients is confounded by residual variation across models. I include predicted probabilities in the main text of this analysis for precisely this purpose and find no difference in the substantive result. For further details, please see Appendix B4: “Candidate Success Models.” 8. District Republican Strength is a measure developed by Eric Juenke that attempts to provide a meaningful indication of district partisanship that can be calculated across states and districts, and that also reflects state variations in partisan intensity. This variable is calculated by subtracting the mean Republican vote share in the relevant state legislative chamber from the election winner’s Republican vote share in that election. Legislative Professionalization scores are drawn from Peverill Squire’s updated index, which accounts for a range of factors such as a legislator salary and benefits, time demands of their service and paid staff and other resources (Squire, 2017). Term limits have been a frequent focus of study in research examining women’s and minorities’ underrepresentation. After term limits were enacted in many states in the 1990s, evaluations of their effect on the demographic character of legislatures returned mixed results (Carey et al., 2006). In the 15 states that have had term limits in place over the last two decades, the share of seats held by whites is quite similar to national figures. Between the late 1990s and 2014, 26 percent of non-​incumbent winners in state legislative general elections were women, a share similar to those reported for all elections in Chapter 1. During the same period, 77 percent of non-​ incumbent winners are white—​somewhat lower than the proportion of white winners over all elections. While this suggests that there may be race-​gendered differences in the effects of incumbency, the current literature on term limits provides little insight into why. The Term Limit states are currently: Maine, California, Colorado, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Louisiana, and Nevada. Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming had term limits in place in the late 1990s. 9. Shading around each line indicates 95 percent confidence intervals. The local polynomial regression allows for an analysis of the relationship between population size and likelihood of election that is not restricted by statistical assumptions about the underlying distribution of the data (Cleveland, 1979). Moreover, it reflects a basic, popular conception in mass politics and the discipline—​that the larger a racial group population in a jurisdiction, the greater the likelihood that a member of that racial group is elected as the representative. 10. Of the 6,344 general elections for state legislature held in 2012, 36 were for seats representing a district with more than 50 percent Asian Americans. 11. Another notable pattern across all three groups of men of color is the sudden shift in the plots’ trajectories in very high-​density co-​racial population districts. This is generally due to the very small number of observations going into the local polynomial regression models at the extreme right end of the x-​axis, and how they are grouped in the plot. For Asian Americans, the area where the slope becomes negative for men

Notes  215 encompasses eight total elections in Hawaii, in which three different people were elected. Two of those people were Asian American women. The Latina/​o area of the plot that becomes negative for men includes 60 observed elections, of which Latinas won 8. Those eight wins, however, are clustered in three datapoints, for districts that have 92, 93, and 94 percent Latina/​o proportions of the population. To illustrate, there were 19 elections included in the plot point for a 93 percent Latina/​o proportion, including one Latina incumbent who won four times (Assembly Member Norma Chavez, D-​El Paso) and one Latina who won in the same district twice (Assembly Member Naomi Gonzalez, D-​El Paso). Asian American women have a similar downward trajectory at the same points along the x-​axis, but the change in slope is much smaller, and the number of districts that fit the criteria of having more than 60 percent Asian Americans is quite small. Latinas and African American women have higher maximum probabilities of winning and share some similarity in the downward trajectory of their plot lines when the co-​racial population proportion is between the mid-​60s to nearly 80 percent. Along that same stretch of the x-​axis, Latino and African American men’s probabilities are the opposite image and exhibit sharp upward slopes. One interpretation of this pattern that merits further empirical study is that in districts with a substantially large African American or Latina/​ o population, where both candidates in the general election are from the majority racial group, it is less likely that one of those candidates is a woman than in other types of districts. For the Latina/​o case, race-​gendered patterns of partisanship may also be playing a more central role. In the plot range wherein women’s likelihood of success exhibits a negative trajectory—​districts that are between 70 and 78 percent Latina/​o of the population—​three-​quarters of the observed elections (N = 299) took place in four states: California, Texas, New Mexico, and Florida. Latinas are a much smaller share of the total number of Latina/​os elected in this subset of districts than in other types in the dataset (24 percent of Latina/​o winners vs. 42 percent of Latina/​o winners overall). While Latinos are Democratic candidates most of the time, Latinos run and win as Republicans much more often than Latinas, and that gap widens in this range of districts in the election data. This suggests that the drop in Latinas’ share of candidacies in these states may be in large part due to the interaction between Latinas’ and Latinos’ race-​gender identities and their differences in access to both Republican and Democratic partisan networks, which is explored in depth in Chapter 5. 12. Moncrief et al., 2001 (the originators of this question), labeled those who select “I had already thought about running when someone else suggested it” as the “encouraged.” 13. This pattern has often been interpreted as a signal that women wait longer than men to run for office for the first time, due to feelings of inadequacy regarding their capacity to successfully run or serve, or suspicion that voters hold them to a higher standard (Fulton et al., 2006; Lawless & Fox, 2005; Lawless & Pearson, 2008; Pearson & McGhee, 2013). The analysis in this study also suggests that elites whose support may be seen as necessary to make a run for office viable may also be signaling that women need to be “more qualified” before they will be recognized as possible candidates.

216 Notes 14. Due to the small number of Asian American women serving in 2015, and the wide array of occupation response options, the survey responses for this group on occupation were supplemented with Internet research and represent the occupational breakdown of the entire population of Asian American women serving in state legislatures in 2015. 15. The logic of much of this research has been that since most male members of Congress worked in the fields of law, business, and politics (and to a lesser extent, education), women’s increasing presence in those fields may boost their presence in elected office (Burrell, 1996; Fox & Lawless, 2014; Gertzog, 2002). However, recent research focused on women of color in elected office has shown that while the “traditional” fields that make up the eligibility pool in earlier studies is fairly accurate for white women and men, their relevance to understanding the emergence of candidates from other race-​gendered groups varies (García Bedolla, Tate, & Wong, 2005; Hardy-​Fanta et al., 2016). Occupation reports from ALS respondents support the latter view. Hardy-​Fanta et al. (2016) have a more extensive discussion of the ways in which earlier studies of the “eligibility pool,” such as the Citizen Ambition Study by Lawless and Fox, may suffer from selection bias, because of their failure to account for race-​gendered variation in the types of occupations that foster candidacy. 16. In a related vein, the presence of Asian American women and Latinas in professions that have been considered part of the “traditional” candidate pipeline does not necessarily mean that the degree to which they are visible to political elites is equal to that of men. Within each of these industries, there is extensive documentation that women of color face greater barriers to advancement and discrimination than similarly situated men of color (Acker, 2006; Alston, 2000; Vallejo, 2009). To illustrate, a recent national study of Asian American attorneys revealed that the ratio of partners to associates among Asian Americans was the lower than that of all other racial groups, with the lowest ratio among Asian American women specifically. In the same study, Asian American women also reported higher rates of racial bias in relation to career advancement than co-​racial men (Chung et al., 2017). While the Attorney/​Law field was the single largest occupation reported by Asian American women and men respondents, that shared professional background may not engender visibility to the same extent for both groups. 17. It is plausible that this scarcity also intensifies race-​gendered dynamics in candidate emergence within and among African American communities as well, but directly testing that question is beyond the scope of this study.

Chapter 5 1. Candidates are not produced via a random draw from the population, as discussed in other parts of this book. Even if they were, the higher frequency of Latino candidacies in comparison with Latinas, and Asian American women and men, is not readily explained away by variation in presence in the population. While Asian American women and men make up a smaller percentage of the U.S. population than Latinas and Latinos, a comparison of the number of candidacies relative to the population indicates that in the first round of elections in each state after 2010 census–​based

Notes  217 redistricting, Latinos ran at slightly higher rates per capita than Asian American men (11.6 candidacies per million residents, and 9.7 candidacies per million, respectively), and much higher rates than Asian American women and Latinas (4.4 candidacies per million residents and 4.1 candidacies per million residents, respectively). The real-​world implications of these ratios for Asian American women and Latina voters are stark and echo a number of findings in this study—​they are much less likely to have a descriptive representative of their own gender to vote for in a state legislative election than co-​racial men, even though they live in the same districts and make up similar shares of the population. 2. Scholarship on race and ethnic politics has long emphasized that partisanship, of elites and voters alike, is intertwined with racial group identities (Green, Palmquist, & Schickler, 2002; Frymer, 2010; Hajnal & Lee, 2011, among others); thus, treating a candidates’ partisan status as a standalone or sui generis phenomenon makes little analytical sense here. 3. The much smaller number of African American women and men who won as Republicans and Independents in these quintiles suggests that Latinos are likely the most numerous of any group of candidates of color in these types of districts. 4. The full results of these models are reported in the appendices. I also modeled this data using all state legislative elections, including multimember districts, and the results were substantively the same.

Chapter 6 1. The New York Metropolitan area, which encompasses counties from four states, has an Asian American population that is estimated to be fairly close in size to that in the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. 2. In collecting and preparing the elections data for this case study, I used local media and government reports and information from interview subjects to augment the information in the GRACE. I also used summary tables from the Loyola Marymount University Center for the Study of Los Angeles Top 100 Elected Officials database to cross-​check and identify legislators. 3. A key part of this discussion is focused on where and how Asian American and Latina/​o political elites and potential candidates fit into the Democratic coalitions currently in power. There are several high-​profile women among these racial groups of elites, so I will occasionally refer to Latina/​os and Asian Americans in this chapter as political groups without specifying gender. But it is important to note that these women are arguably far outweighed, in elected number and collective power, by their male co-​racial counterparts. 4. By the 1930s Mexican migrants were the core immigrant workforce powering many of Los Angeles’ key industries, including agriculture, food packing, and canning (Torres, 2005). During that period, predominantly Mexican-​American neighborhoods were established in downtown and Eastside neighborhoods (Sanchez, 1995). In the wake of the Great Depression, amid rising tides of nativism and xenophobia, deportation and “voluntary” repatriation efforts by the federal government targeted Los Angeles residents of Mexican descent, citizens or not. One frequently

218 Notes cited statistic in historical accounts of this period illustrates the extent to which the entire community was targeted: 60 percent of children from Los Angeles who were “repatriated” to Mexico were U.S. citizens (Torres, 2005). By some estimates, the area lost a third of its Mexican immigrant population (Sanchez, 1995) as a result of these programs. The Latina/​o population continued to grow in the postwar period as unauthorized migrants and former Bracero program participants sought better jobs in Los Angeles and other California destinations. Latina/​os, still predominantly of Mexican heritage, also began moving to neighborhoods farther from downtown, in the San Gabriel Valley and Glendale (Saito, 1998), in part due to economic discrimination and racial housing covenants. When housing restrictions were abolished under the Open Housing Act in 1968, Latina/​os also established new enclaves in mostly white suburban areas like Long Beach, the San Fernando Valley, and El Monte (Wong, 2008). 5. The anti-​Chinese and anti-​Japanese exclusion movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to limit the number of Asians entering the United States, while still allowing for a steady supply of low-​cost laborers. Policies and laws enacted during this period restricted immigration from particular Asian countries (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Immigration Reform Act of 1924, the Tydings-​Mcduffie Act, and others) and formalized limits on land ownership and the sanctity of restrictive housing covenants against individuals of Asian heritage already in the United States (California Alien Land Laws). In Los Angeles, Asian immigrants from China, Japan, and the Philippines typically lived in Chinatown or Little Tokyo, near downtown, or in smaller communities made up of farmers and gardeners such as Sawtelle and Gardena. Many of the moves Asian Americans made during this period were prompted by social and economic exclusion propagated by Whites, and they often established new neighborhoods alongside Latina/​os and African Americans seeking to escape the same restrictions. The internment of Japanese Americans left an indelible mark on Asian Americans as a community in Los Angeles. Families rushed to sell off property, belongings, and businesses at a severe loss before being forcibly removed. The central civic organization for Japanese Americans, the Japanese American Citizens League, suffered lasting damage to its ability to unify and provide leadership within the community, after encouraging cooperation with the internment order (S. Kurashige, 2010). Over a brief period following Pearl Harbor, the economic and social infrastructure that Japanese Americans had erected in Los Angeles was nearly eradicated. After the release of Japanese Americans from Manzanar and other internment camps, many chose not to return to Los Angeles, or the West Coast, given the high levels of anti-​immigrant and racist rhetoric, as well as terrorist attacks against individuals perceived to be Japanese (S. Kurashige, 2010). Those who did—​a small fraction of the original population—​found that while they were gone, African Americans and Latina/​os had established their own communities in many of the areas that were previously dominated by Japanese residents. These conditions set the stage for parallel multiracial processes: Asian Americans often worked with and supported the efforts of African Americans and Mexican Americans for civil rights and housing

Notes  219 rights, because they were occurring in their own neighborhoods. Simultaneously, efforts within the Japanese American community to close the door on discussions of the internment stifled activists’ attempts to build solidarity out of shared experiences of racism. The inability of Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latina/​os to extract justice from the government and white political power structure often resulted in tensions within multiracial communities. These pent-​up frustrations were evident in events, like the Watts Rebellion in 1965, that left lasting scars within and among the racial groups living in close proximity in the central areas of Los Angeles (S. Kurashige, 2010). Some activists emerging from these eruptions were central to the Asian American Movement of the late 1960s and ’70s and worked in solidarity with leaders of the Black freedom struggle. However, this was a point of departure from other parts of the Asian American community, as other segments of the population followed whites out of the city, and away from what they perceived as the danger of living as minorities in African American–​dominated neighborhoods (S. Kurashige, 2010). In the 1960s and ’70s, Asian immigrants living downtown (as well as Latina/​os) sought greater housing affordability and availability in smaller communities, in Eastside neighborhoods and a cluster of “ethnoburbs” in the San Gabriel Valley (Li, 1998). At the same time, following the 1965 Hart-​Cellar Immigration Act, inflows of new immigrants from Asia also began arriving and settling in the same areas (Saito, 1998; Wong, 2008). From that point, the internal diversity of Los Angeles’ large Chinese and Taiwanese communities grew along several lines. Those arriving and moving directly to the San Gabriel Valley, for example, did not experience living alongside African Americans during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s to the same extent as other Asian Americans who had been in the city since World War II. The two main venues for immigration under the 1965 reforms—​family reunification and professional applications—​also ushered in distinct economic and politically oriented groups of immigrants from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (Wong, 2008). 6. Similarly, the redistricting battles fought over Koreatown following the 2010 U.S. Census also created a moment of opportunity to build political capacity, while also putting a spotlight on internal political divisions over the best way to build Korean political influence in mainstream politics. Asian American and Latina/​o political elites had successfully worked as a coalition to produce a redistricting plan for the San Gabriel Valley’s assembly seats following the 1990 census, though not without challenges along the way (Saito, 1993a). The Citizens’ Redistricting Commission process following the 2010 census had included many of the groups and activists from those earlier negotiations and established new district lines for the state and congressional seats by the end of 2011. However, in the City of Los Angeles, Korean American activists had grown increasingly concerned that Koreatown was split among four different city council districts and often attributed the city’s negligence during the 1992 uprising to this “cracking” of the community (K.W. Lee Center for Leadership, 2011). Many of the public faces of the effort to bring Koreatown under one city council district were younger, second-​ generation Korean Americans, who publicly

220 Notes accused older, first-​generation Korean business owners of supporting the city council leadership’s efforts to keep the status quo in order to maintain friendly political conditions for their enterprises. As one young leader said during a city redistricting commission hearing, “I would like to welcome you to the political awakening of Koreatown. We are not going to be the quiet group that just hands out money without representation!” (Aron & Stewart, 2012). Ultimately, the city’s redistricting commission stated that their final plan reduced the fracturing in Koreatown, but activists and many constituents saw the continuing split of the community across three districts as a defeat (Vargas, 2012). In the process, second-​generation Korean American activists began developing their own political skills and public profiles. Additionally, the mobilization of community members at hearings, rallies, and protests was noted by Asian American organization leaders and candidates I interviewed as holding a promise of future political engagement. As I was conducting interviews, the ramifications of the Koreatown redistricting controversy were continuing to play out: one of the Korean American members of the city’s redistricting commission, Robert Ahn (who many respondents viewed as coming down on the wrong side of the Asian American community), had just been propelled to a runoff election for a congressional seat against an establishment Latina/​ o candidate—​based largely on the turnout of Asian American voters in Koreatown. Most leaders, donors, and consultants that I interviewed said that getting into the runoff was an important success (even though they doubted that Ahn would ultimately win) because it demonstrated that Asian Americans were willing to mobilize to elect one of their own. 7. According to exit poll data, 77 percent of Latina/​o voters opposed the measure (Tolbert & Hero, 1996). Voter turnout among native-​born and newly naturalized Latina/​os increased during elections in the wake of Prop. 187, leading many to conclude that the ballot initiative and overall political environment motivated Latina/​o residents to participate in politics at higher levels (Pantoja, Ramírez, & Segura, 2001; Ramakrishnan & Espenshade, 2006; Tolbert & Hero, 1996). García Bedolla finds that responses to Prop. 187, in terms of interest in politics or naturalization, tend to vary with dimensions of identity and the social context (García Bedolla, 2005). Even with heightened interest in politics among at least some Latina/​os, turnout rates among Latina/​o registered voters were well below those of registered voters overall during elections in the late 1990s/​early 2000s (Barreto, 2005). 8. As the geographic boundary for studying the emergence and success of Asian American and Latina/​o candidates, Los Angeles County encompasses several advantages over a political jurisdiction, such as a state legislative district. Chief among them is the ability to account for the “vertical” activities of Asian American and Latina/​o political elites and candidates across districts and levels of office. Term limits and high barriers to entry for most seats in the city, county, and state levels create the conditions for what is commonly referred to in Los Angeles as “musical chairs:”: politicians typically move from an Assembly seat, to a City Council seat, to a county Supervisor seat, and so on. Thus, while individual districts and the communities they include and divide are important, looking only within one or

Notes  221 two would be akin to explaining the movement of a bicycle by only looking at the pedals. 9. Several respondents noted that some seats in Los Angeles County are more prized than others (City of Los Angeles or county seats are particularly coveted). In terms of perceived prestige among elites, state legislative seats are located in the middle of the top tier, and more numerous than City of Los Angeles, county, or federal offices. Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles’ dataset tracking elected officials across the “top 100” seats in the county also places state legislative seats near the middle below city, county, and federal offices in terms of prestige and desirability (Center for the Study of Los Angeles, 2016). 10. State legislative election data suggests that this success is in part because white men are running at higher rates than other groups, in more types of districts. Thirty-​six percent of all state legislative primary candidates in the last decade in Los Angeles County were white men. They have among the lowest rates of ultimate success, but white men are on the ballot so frequently that their share of overall wins is disproportionately large compared with their presence in the population. This highlights another race-​gendered distinction that would benefit from future research: white women have run less often than white men, but more often than all other groups except Latinos, and win relatively infrequently. For more on the comparative rates of candidacy and success in Los Angeles, please see Appendix D1: “Overview of State Legislative Candidacies in Los Angeles.” 11. California State Assembly District 49, created after the 2010 census round of redistricting, is the first Asian American–​majority legislative district in California, and one of two currently in the continental United States (the other is in New York State Senate District 16). 12. At the state legislative level, term limits have been in place since the early 1990s. State assembly members elected before 2012 are permitted a total of six years in that body, State Senators are allowed a total of eight. Revisions to term limits for the state legislature were enacted in 2012, and legislators may now serve a total of 12 years in both chambers, in any combination. City of Los Angeles elected offices are term limited as well. The impact of term limits on descriptive representation has been the subject of extensive academic debate, and 20 years into the widespread adoption of term limits, most empirical work has uncovered minimal effects (Cain & Kousser, 2005; Carroll & Jenkins, 2001; Schraufnagel & Halperin, 2006). The findings in this chapter suggest that for political newcomers in Los Angeles, or those operating outside of an organized political network, term limits do little to ease access and may increase the number of bargaining chips that powerful elites are working with as they negotiate with potential candidates. 13. One other respondent argued that the trust component of the coalition is derived from a broader desire among elite players to maintain a minimum level of African American descriptive representation in Los Angeles, given the area’s history and the ongoing challenges faced by African American residents. This person described that sensibility this way: “It wouldn’t be a good thing for civic dialogue; it wouldn’t be a good thing for political incorporation of any of the groups, so let’s avoid

222 Notes that . . . [Political leaders are like] ‘It won’t be good for L.A. to have very little Black representation.’ ” 14. Within the subset of districts and offices that have been understood or “claimed” as “Latino seats” in Los Angeles County, Latina/​o leaders facilitate a tightly controlled process for signaling favored candidates—​sometimes years in advance of an open-​ seat election. One key factor, whose weight is magnified by the level of voter mobilization resources required in many Los Angeles districts, is the stabilizing force that organized labor plays in elections. Labor’s effectiveness in making “the union difference” in elections sends a signal to potential candidates throughout the Latina/​ o political community that one candidate described as “a reality for L.A . . . If Labor’s not supporting you, you’re not going to win . . . That was just the rule of thumb.” Given the number of term-​limited offices, the long tenure of many Latina/​o Democratic leaders in public life, and the scope of Los Angeles County, processes of candidate selection and discouragement facilitated by “the leadership” have been repeated many times. Part of the reason that so many potential candidates continue to invest in it, and “check the boxes,” is because the potential payoff is a seat, and possibly a career, in public office. Labor unions help to maintain that high level of certainty in the payoff by mounting large, successful campaigns for those candidates they endorse. Labor’s influence on who runs in which elections is well integrated with that of the Latina/​o Democratic leadership—​most respondents vacillated when I asked whether Latina/​o leaders were following labor’s lead or the other way around. Some believe that labor’s informal power stems from the Los Angeles County Fed’s ability to act as a central conduit for information and endorsements across several branches of the Democratic coalition—​liberal whites, African Americans, Latina/​os, and to some extent, Asian Americans. When I asked union and labor organization leaders how they would characterize labor’s role, most tended to describe it in pragmatic terms. They often emphasized that their main interest was ensuring that officials who have a demonstrated commitment to workers and immigrants are elected and advancing the right policies. Sometimes, as they and others described it, that means getting in and making a big electoral push for a candidate, and other times, it may mean staying out of a race because, as one director put it, “anyone who wins is good for us.” Because labor’s support, or neutrality, can make a significant difference in outcomes, labor leaders also play an important role in “convincing” potential candidates that “it’s not their turn.” Most of the union officials I interviewed stated a variation of the idea that their job is not to tell people whether they should run, but to give potential candidates the lay of the land, and a blunt picture of what they could face if they are not willing to “wait their turn.” The close relationship between the current group of key Latina/​o Democratic leaders in Los Angeles and labor unions stabilizes the leadership’s capacity to develop candidates and be on the winning side of many elections. It has also facilitated organized labor’s ability to raise the bar for candidates hoping to get an endorsement, in terms of support for their policy priorities and demonstrated commitment to workers and workplace organizing. Several respondents described that they themselves, or

Notes  223 other candidates, had to be a “labor warrior” in order to have a chance of getting official support from unions. Among those who did not meet that standard, but who had some signals of support from legislative leaders, several former candidates told me that they considered it a small, but crucial, victory when they were able to at least neutralize labor and convince them not to actively campaign against them. 15. When people talk about “the west side” in Los Angeles, they are typically referring to largely white, fairly affluent communities in Santa Monica, Venice, Westwood, Culver City, and other similar neighborhoods. These neighborhoods have grown increasingly racially diverse over time but are still frequently identified by these generalizations. 16. A recent example of this occurred in 2016. Veteran Assembly Member Warren Furutani ran against another former Assemblyman, Steve Bradford (who is African American), for State Senate District 35, but did not pick up the same degree of support from organized labor as in the past and lost. John Choi’s race for city council in 2013 created a tangle of atypical endorsements: his former boss, Antonio Villaraigosa, endorsed a Latino running against Choi, even as Maria Elena Durazo and organized labor poured extensive resources into what was ultimately Choi’s losing campaign.

Chapter 7 1. This study is concentrated on East Asian communities of political elites—​primarily Chinese and Korean Americans in Los Angeles County. I chose to limit the study in this way for two reasons, despite the previously discussed ethnic diversity of the Asian American population in Los Angeles. First, these are the only two Asian national origin groups that have yielded elected officials at the state legislative, city, and federal level. Second, while I interviewed women and men across racial and ethnic groups in Los Angeles, those who spoke about Asian Americans tended to agree with each other that Chinese and Korean Americans have the most extensive political organizational capacity in Los Angeles at the time of the study. As with many other dynamics related to immigrant communities, these concentrations of political influence may change as the composition of the Asian immigrant communities in Los Angeles also shift toward other national origin groups in the future. 2. This internal diversity is not limited to cross-​ethnic comparisons. Shifts in immigration policies and home country economic and political conditions have led to cohorts of migrants from within the same country who are demographically distinct (Lien, 2008; Wong, 2008). The Chinese community is the most prominent, but not the exclusive, example of this dynamic. The Migration Policy Institute reports the difference in household income between Chinese immigrants generally, and that of immigrants from Hong Kong (most of whom arrived before 2000). Chinese immigrants as an overall group have a 19 percent poverty rate, which is above the United States’ national native-​born rate (15 percent). Immigrants from Hong Kong, however, have a higher average household income than Chinese immigrants overall, and a 10 percent poverty rate (Hooper & Batalova, 2015).

224 Notes 3. Educational differences are also evident, but do not translate directly, in the income distributions of Asian ethnic groups in Los Angeles. Whites in Los Angeles have a higher per capita income than any Asian ethnic group. The percentage of Taiwanese, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian Angelenos living in poverty is lower than that of whites, but Tongans, Bangladeshi, Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese have poverty rates above or similar to those of African Americans and Latina/​os (Asian Americans Advancing Justice—​Los Angeles, 2011). 4. These patterns mirror a number of findings in the literatures on Asian Americans in politics and immigrant political incorporation, including work by Lee and Ramakrishnan (2020) showing that South Asians are less likely to be labeled as Asians than East Asians, Leland Saito’s study of the racial, ethnic, and immigrant coalitions that shaped politics in the San Gabriel Valley in (1993), and Pei-​Te Lien’s study of Asian American political participation (2001). 5. Wong notes that the Chinese community’s economic and generational differences intersect with their dispersion across different parts of the county, with lower-​ income Chinese immigrants based in and around Chinatown, and higher-​income immigrants living in parts of the San Gabriel Valley (Wong, 2008). 6. This is a pseudonym. 7. This respondent’s assessment of the support of African American male political elites for Black women candidates contrasts sharply with work such as Hawkesworth, 2003, and Chisholm, 1970, that document these types of exclusionary practices. 8. These elite processes occur in a complex context of Latina/​o voter mobilization. Latina/​os’ share of the electorate has remained smaller than their share of registered voters in every election since 2000—​with the exception of Villaraigosa’s first mayoral win in 2005 (Culbert et al., 2014). A wide array of civic and labor organizations devote substantial resources to the mobilization of Latina/​o voters during elections (Michelson & García Bedolla, 2012; Wong, 2008). However, Latina/​os in Los Angeles face persistent challenges to political participation and incorporation (García Bedolla, 2005; Ochoa & Ochoa, 2005; Pardo, 1998; Sonenshein & Pinkus, 2002; Wong, 2008), even after accounting for residents who are ineligible to vote. When the media turns its attention to Latina/​o underrepresentation in elected office, journalist accounts often turn to low rates of voting first (Linthicum, 2015). Elected officials’ public statements and efforts related to Latino representation often mirror this emphasis (Moreno, 2016; California Latino Legislative Caucus, 2015). The current analysis does not discount the importance of voter participation. Instead, I argue that for Latina/​os in Los Angeles, voters’ choices when they do make it to the polls are highly circumscribed by race-​gendered processes of candidate development. 9. This is a pseudonym. 10. The exception is Assembly District 61, which was held by Latinas for most of the late 1990s and 2000s and then was eliminated from Los Angeles County following the 2010 census round of redistricting. 11. This is reflected in the electoral fortunes of several recently successful Latina candidates for the state legislature. Blanca Rubio won her seat with some unions’ support, but not all, and in spite of what one respondent called “a tiff ” with the teachers’

Notes  225 unions. Christina Garcia split the support of organized labor with her opponents, who were part of a political dynasty in the area, and emerged the victor. Patty Lopez won her first election in part because there was little concerted voter mobilization against her, and the raft of endorsements held by the incumbent apparently did not deter the voters in a particularly low-​turnout election. 12. In District 39, Assembly Member Cindy Montanez left to run for a State Senate seat, lost, and a long series of Latinos held the seat until Patty Lopez’s single term in 2014. Montanez has since left electoral politics. Gloria Romero replaced Diane Martinez in District 49 in 1998, and when she moved up to the State Senate in 2000, she was replaced by Judy Chu. Following Martha Escutia’s election to the State Senate in 1998, Marco Firebaugh held her former Assembly seat for three full terms until his death. He was a longtime associate of Polanco, and his own staffers have gone on to hold legislative offices, including Assembly District 50. No Latina/​os have held Jenny Oropeza’s former seat in District 55 since her death in 2004. Sally Havice (District 56) and Grace Napolitano (District 58) were both succeeded by Latinos for five cycles or more.

Chapter 8 1. In predominantly minority districts, there is no significant incumbent “durability” gap between these two groups of candidates.

Appendices 1. I have also run this process with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Asian Pacific Islander surname list, with similar results. 2. See http://​w ww.ncsl.org/​research/​state-​t ribal-​institute/​national-​caucus-​native-​ american-​state-​legislators.aspx 3. https://​www.census.gov/​geographies/​reference-​files/​time-​series/​geo/​tallies.2000. html

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Index Note: Tables and figures are indicated by t and f following the page number African American men ALS data on, 42t, 43t, 49t, 86f, 191t discouragement consequences, 81–​82, 82t election data from majority-​minority districts, 203t electoral opportunities for, 13, 37–​38 GRACE data on, 196t intersectionality study of, 9 partisanship and race data, 98t in politics, 7f, 84t, 217n3 self-​generated desire to run, 50, 54t, 60t, 81t in state legislative elections, 118f, 119f, 121f, 122t, 127, 163f, 204t threshold district data on, 103t African Americans descriptive representation and, 5, 6 race-​gendering descriptive representation, 5–​6, 36–​44, 41t, 42t, 43t racial coalition politics and, 123–​128 slavery history, 19, 23 success in politics, 77 underrepresentation in elected office, 19 African American women ALS data on, 42t, 43t, 49t, 86f, 191t Black women in politics, 175, 217n3 discouragement consequences, 81–82, 82t election data from majority-​minority districts, 203t electoral opportunities for, 13, 37–​38 empirical focus on, 18–​24 GRACE data on, 196t intersectionality study of, 9, 20 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 partisanship and race data, 98t

in politics, 7f, 84t, 217n3 recognition of professional qualifications, 87 self-​generated desire to run, 50, 54t, 60t, 81t sociopolitical positioning of, 19 in state legislative elections, 118f, 119f, 121f, 122t, 127, 163f, 204t threshold district data on, 103t African Diaspora, 182 agency at individual level, 25, 67 Ahn, Robert, 219n6 Alatorre, Richard, 136 ambition criticism over, 90, 139, 150 descriptive representation of Latinas, 31 emergence of candidacy and, 48–​51, 49f gender differences/​roles, 90, 156, 210n3 household-​level concerns and, 47, 173 individual-​level decision to run and, 11, 21, 66 ambivalence and group empowerment, 65–​66 American Indians, 38, 208n7 American Leadership Survey (ALS) ambition and emergence of candidacy, 49–​50, 49f, 53 defined, 10 group-​and individual-​level data, 41–​43, 42t, 43t questionnaire sample, 186–​190 representation-​related reasons to run, 81, 81t, 86–​87, 86f respondents’ activity in civic organizations, 191, 191t analytic sensibility, 32 anti-​immigrant ballot propositions, 116

248 Index Arizona political organizing in, 80, 100t, 105t, 106t redistricting processes, 213n6 term limits, 214n8 Asian American men ALS data on, 42t, 43t, 49t, 86f, 191t candidacy studies on, 10–​12 election data from majority-​minority districts, 203t GRACE data on, 196t Independent candidacies by, 101 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 partisanship and race data, 98t political disadvantages of, 31 in politics, 7f, 84t, 217n3 self-​generated desire to run, 50, 54t, 60t, 81t self-​recognition and, 59–​60, 60t in state legislative elections, 118f, 119f, 121f, 122t, 127, 163f, 204t threshold district data on, 103t Asian American Movement, 218n5 Asian Americans. See also race-​gendering candidate development/​emergence, 139–​147, 143f in Congress, 2 “crossover” candidates in Los Angeles, 128–​133 Democrat candidate pipeline, 131–​133 descriptive representation and, 5, 6 electoral opportunities for, 27, 113–​137 empirical focus on, 18–​24 expansion of immigrant groups, 32–​36, 33t, 35t leveraging general election candidacies, 94–​97, 95t, 96t, 97t success in politics, 77, 79 in threshold districts, 102–​106, 103t, 104t, 105t, 106t underrepresentation in elected office, 18 Asian American women ALS data on, 42t, 43t, 49t, 86f, 191t candidacy studies on, 10–​12 “crossover promise” for, 92 descriptive representation of, 179–​183 discouragement consequences, 81–​82, 82t

disruption in candidacy considerations, 51–​59 election data from majority-​minority districts, 203t emergence of candidacy, 43–​44, 47–​51, 49f empirical focus on, 18–​24 future of candidacy and representation, 167–​183 gender expectations of candidates, 57, 67, 113 GRACE data on, 196t group consciousness/​identity, 8, 63–​65 group empowerment, 65–​66 identity experiences, 8 intersectionality study of, 9, 20, 27 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 in legislature, 47 partisanship and race data, 98t political disadvantages of, 31 in politics, 7f, 84t, 217n3 race-​gendering descriptive representation, 5–​6, 36–​44, 41t, 42t, 43t self-​generated desire to run, 50, 54t, 60t, 81t self-​recognition and, 25, 59–​63, 60t, 69, 211n8 social desirability bias, 211n6 sociopolitical positioning of, 19 in state legislative elections, 118f, 119f, 121f, 122t, 127, 163f, 204t threshold district data on, 103t underrepresentation on Los Angeles ballots, 147–​151 asymmetries in domestic life, 9, 16, 32, 52 ballot/​s absence of competition, 36 anti-​immigrant ballot propositions, 116 in general election candidacies, 94–​97, 95t, 96t, 97t presence, 3–​4, 51, 76t, 77, 82, 95, 101, 105, 159, 167 representation, 8–​9, 22, 109, 168–​169, 172, 203, 207n3 Barragan, Nanette, 127

Index  249 Beltràn, Cristina, 37 binary construction of genders, 207n2 Black feminist thought, 175, 210n1 Black freedom struggle, 218n5 Black women in politics. See African American women Braun and Associates, 42 bundle of processes, 22 Butler, Judith, 37 California. See also Los Angeles Asian American populations in, 35t, 136, 221n11 Asian Americans in, 34 census-​based redistricting, 194 ethnic caucuses in, 134 immigrant-​based communities in, 40 Latina/​o populations in, 34, 134, 152, 217n4 majority white districts, 73–​74 partisanship demographics in, 129–​130, 132 political organizing in, 80, 100t, 105t, 106t Proposition 187 initiative, 115–​116 redistricting processes, 213n6 term limits, 214n8 women’s likelihood of success, 214n11 Cambodians in Los Angeles, 114 candidacy of Asian American men, 10–​12 of Asian American women, 10–​12, 43–​44, 47–​51, 49f, 51–​59, 167–​183 children/​childcare considerations, 47, 53–​58, 63–​64, 167, 177 constraints in considerations of, 52–​57, 54t crossover candidate, 26 descriptive representation and, 39 discouragement from, 11, 81–​82, 82t, 158, 222n14 disruption in considerations, 45, 51–​59, 52–​57, 54t, 177, 211n6 domestic life and, 53–​55, 59 electoral opportunities in white districts, 97–​102, 98t, 99t, 100t, 167–​183 encouragement over, 82, 178

financial risk of, 58 future of candidacy and representation, 167–​183 individual-​level decision to run and, 43–​44, 47–​51, 49f individual vs. structural and group level factors, 9, 11 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 of Latinas, 10–​12, 43–​44, 47–​51, 49f, 51–​59, 167–​183 of Latinos, 10–​12, 156–​157 LGBTQ candidates, 177–​178 membership in marginalized group, 3 of non-​incumbents, 103, 103t, 104–​106, 104t, 105t, 106t occupation and, 21, 64–​65, 86f, 87, 115, 176, 191, 216n14–​216n16 open-​seat elections, 3, 71t, 93, 99, 151, 180, 203, 203t overview in Los Angeles, 204, 204t political experience, 4–​5, 47–​48 realistic opportunity of, 12, 14, 27, 91, 140, 181 resources in considerations, 51–​59 social expectations, 48, 57, 59, 63, 67, 112, 150, 157, 177 study of, 10 “women’s pathway” to, candidate development/​emergence (see also Los Angeles, candidate emergence) informal processes, 139–​140 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 168–​173 male patronage, 4, 158–​159 networks, 139–​147, 143f, 171–​172 overview of, 43–​44, 47–​53 political infrastructure, 26–​27, 112 racial coalition politics and, 123–​128 candidate success models, 198, 199t–​ 200t, 201f caretaking responsibilities of candidates, 53 Caribbean immigrants, 33 Cedillo, Gil, 130 Center for American Women in Politics, 182 Central American migrants, 114

250 Index Chang, Ling Ling, 133 changing electorate and descriptive representation, 4–​8, 6f, 7f Chen, Phillip, 133 children/​childcare considerations, 47, 53–​58, 63–​64, 167, 177 Chinese in Los Angeles, 114, 144–​145, 223n1–​223n2 Choi, John, 131, 145 Chu, Judy, 129, 130–​131, 145, 147–​148 Citizens’ Redistricting Commission, 219n6 civic organizations, 87, 89, 141, 146, 191, 191t civic ostracism, 115 civil unrest, 115 coalition politics, 111–​112, 136–​137 collective discipline, 125 Collins, Patricia Hill, 175–​176, 210n1 competitiveness, 84, 90, 164–​165 complexity of group consciousness, 8, 63–​65 Connecticut, 100t, 101–​102, 105t constraints in candidacy considerations, 52–​57, 54t diversity and, 70 geography of electoral opportunity, 71 on immigrants/​immigrant groups, 111–​113 Contreras, Miguel, 164 crossover candidates, 26, 92, 128–​133 risks with, 213n3 threshold districts, 102–​106, 103t, 104t, 105t, 106t “crossover promise,” 92 decision to run. See also individual-​level decision to run encouragement for, 81t, 82 factors shaping, 11, 36, 53, 57, 60–​67 impact of, 47, 49, 49f, 167–​170 political opportunities in, 154 self-​recognition and, 25, 59–​63 democratic governance, 3 democratic processes, 22, 27–​28 Democrats Asian American candidate pipeline, 131–​133 coalition politics, 111–​112 descriptive representation and, 42, 181

election opportunities, 1, 103–​106 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 26 Latina/​o candidate pipeline, 111–​113, 130–​131, 154–​160 leveraging general election candidacies, 94–​97, 95t, 96t, 97t nonwhite candidacies in white districts, 97–​102, 98t, 100t presidential elections, 18, 212n2 race-​based coalitions in, 141, 217n3 running against African Americans, 125 in threshold districts, 102–​106, 106t deportation concerns, 114 descriptive representation of African Americans, 5, 6 analysis of, 22, 27 of Asian Americans, 5, 6 of Asian American women, 5–​6, 36–​44, 41t, 42t, 43t, 179–​183 changing electorate and, 2–​3, 4–​8, 6f, 7f Democrats and, 181 electoral politics and, 2–​3, 4–​8, 6f, 7f future of, 179–​183 GRACE data on, 22, 38–​40, 41t, 180 Independents and, 181 intersectionality theory and, 31 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 5–​6, 36–​44, 41t, 42t, 43t of Latina/​os, 5–​6, 36–​44, 41t, 42t, 43t, 162, 179–​183 in Los Angeles, 120, 162 mainstream political influence, 13 in majority minority districts, 179–​183 of marginalized groups, 2–​3 political elites and, 180 race-​gendering of, 5–​6, 36–​44, 41t, 42t, 43t Republicans and, 181 discouragement over candidacy, 11, 81–​ 82, 82t, 158, 222n14 disruption, 45, 51–​57, 54t, 177, 211n6 District Republican Strength, 214n8 districts. See also majority minority districts; majority white/​ predominantly white districts; threshold districts “opportunistic” districts, 82

Index  251 plurality districts, 109, 131–​132, 135, 160 redistricting processes, 10, 40, 72, 106, 120–​121, 133, 145, 179, 192, 194–​195, 197t, 209n9, 212n2, 213n6, 219n6 diversity constraints on opportunity and, 70 descriptive diversity, 2, 25 empirical intersectional studies, 176 internal diversity, 136, 142, 146, 218n5, 223n2 intragroup diversity, 19, 32, 223n2 linguistic diversity, 141 of political experiences, 17 racial diversity, 118, 193, 223n1 of underrepresented groups, 44 domestic life. See also household responsibilities asymmetries for women, men, 16, 52 asymmetries impact, 9, 16, 32 candidacy and, 53–​55, 59 childcare, 47, 53–​58, 63–​64, 167, 177 household responsibilities, 47, 53–​58, 63–​64, 155–​156, 167, 177 marriage, 53, 63 shapes, 14 dominant subgroups, 16 donors, 47, 69, 80, 86–​88, 91, 112, 131, 144, 151 Decline to State (DTS) vote, 132 Durazo, Maria Elena, 153–​154 dynamism data, 9–​10, 17, 53, 65 economic achievement, 16, 148 economic opportunities, 114, 142, 144 electoral opportunity. See also Los Angeles, election opportunity for Asian Americans, 27 candidacy and, 97–​102, 98t, 99t, 100t, 167–​183 future of candidacy and representation, 167–​183 for immigrant representation, 111–​113 intersectional model of, 12–​17 majority minority districts, 22, 25–​26, 91–​92 of marginalized groups, 16, 19 politics of recognition, 80–​87, 81t, 82t

race-​gendering and geography of, 70–​79, 71t race-​gendering and partisanship, 97–​102, 98t, 99t, 100t, 107–​109 “strength in numbers” framework, 69, 74–​79, 76t, 77t, 79f in threshold districts, 102–​106, 103t, 104t, 105t, 106t in white districts, 97–​102, 98t, 99t, 100t, 107–​109 white men’s access to, 203, 203t electoral politics descriptive representation, 2–​3, 4–​8, 6f, 7f for group empowerment, 65–​66 intersectionality of, 9 overview of, 8–​12 in US, 1–​2 elite networks, 23, 88–​91, 109, 112, 139, 182. See also political elites embeddedness, 11, 13, 48, 167, 169–​170, 174, 195 encouragement over candidacy, 82, 178 Ethiopian immigrants, 33 ethnic caucuses, 134 ethnicity/​ethnic groups. See also race candidate development/​emergence, 139–​147, 143f group consciousness/​identity, 8, 63–​65 pan-​ethnic groups, 27, 112, 137, 139, 141, 144, 164, 183 plurality districts, 131 in politics, 5, 30, 125 ethnoburbs, 218n5 exclusion movements, 218n5 family life/​roles, 47, 53–​58, 63–​64, 155–​156, 167, 177 “feeder” industries, 87 feminism analysis of politics, 20 Black feminist thought, 175, 210n1 conceptualization of self-​recognition in, 25, 61 group identity creation, 37 naming of identity, 37–​38 Filipinos in Los Angeles, 114 financial risk of candidacy, 58 first-​generation immigrants, 33, 132, 219n6

252 Index Florida Latina/​o populations in, 34, 101 political organizing in, 80, 100t, 105t, 106t term limits, 214n8 women’s likelihood of success, 214n11 Furutani, Warren, 145, 223n16 Gender and Multicultural Leadership Study, 9, 21 gender differences/​roles ambition and emergence of candidacy, 48–​51, 49f binary construction of genders, 207n2 in candidate development/​emergence, 139–​140 exclusivity impact, 89 future of candidacy and representation, 167–​183 GRACE data collection processes, 194, 196t, 197f related advantages, 15 representation, 30 social expectations of candidates, 57, 67, 113 general election candidacies, 94–​97, 95t, 96t, 97t geographic opportunity in Los Angeles, 142, 144 majority white/​predominantly white districts, 70, 71–​74, 72f, 73f, 73t politics of recognition, 80–​87, 81t, 82t race-​gendering and, 70–​79, 71t for Republicans and Independents in white districts, 100–​102 of state legislative districts, 220n8 “strength in numbers” framework, 69, 74–​79, 76t, 77t, 79f Georgia General Assembly, 1–​2, 27 Global Gender Gap Index (WEF), 35 GRACE (Gender Race and Communities in Elections Dataset) collection processes, 192–​195, 196t, 197f descriptive representation, 22, 38–​40, 41t, 180 leveraging general election candidacies, 94–​97, 95t, 96t, 97t

overview of, 2, 5, 10 race-​gendering and, 70–​71, 78 women of color study, 207n3 grassroots mobilization strategies, 116 gratitude in candidacy considerations, 57–​59 Great Depression, 217n4 group consciousness, 8, 63–​65 groups “belonging” to, 31 consciousness/​identity of, 8, 63–​65 dominant subgroups, 16 empowerment of, 65–​66 guilt and group consciousness, 8, 63–​65 intersectionality theory and, 8 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 organization/​infrastructure of, 140–​141 out-​group representation, 173 pan-​ethnic groups, 27, 112, 137, 139, 141, 144, 164, 183 patterns of recognition in, 45 social groups, 3, 5, 11, 17, 27–​28 Guatemalan enclaves in Los Angeles, 114 Hall, Isadore, III, 127 Hart-​Cellar Immigration Act (1965), 33, 39, 218n5 Hawaii Asian Americans in, 34, 193 as immigrant gateway, 33 majority white districts, 73–​74, 120 Native Hawaiians, 38 Pacific Islanders, 38 political organizing in, 80, 100t, 105t, 106t Hawkesworth, Mary, 8 Higher Heights Leadership Fund for Black Women, 182 Hispanas Organizing for Political Equality in California, 182 household responsibilities, 47, 53–​58, 63–​64, 155–​156, 167, 177. See also domestic life identity. See also race-​gendering among immigrant groups, 21–​25 group consciousness/​identity, 8, 63–​65

Index  253 group identity, 8 intersectional identity, 101 intersectionality theory and, 8 naming of, 37–​38 race-​gendering of, 175–​177 women’s and men’s candidacies, 5 Illinois, 34, 100t, 105t, 106t immigrants/​immigrant groups anti-​immigrant ballot propositions, 116 Asian Americans, 32–​36, 33t, 35t ballot/​s and, 116 candidacy of, 174–​175 community expectations/​growth, 9, 17, 31, 33–​34 constrained opportunity for representation, 111–​113 educational differences, 224n3 electoral opportunity, 111–​113 expansion of, 32–​36, 33t, 34t, 35t first-​generation immigrants, 33, 132, 219n6 future of candidacy and representation, 174–​175 identities among, 21–​25 intersectionality theory, 32–​36, 33t, 34t, 35t Mexican workforce, 217n4 non-​habitual immigrant voters, 146 racialized immigrant-​based communities, 22 resources of, 61–​63 second-​generation immigrants, 33, 219–​220 self-​recognition and, 61–​63 traditional gateways, 33 underrepresentation in elected office, 18 Independents candidacies of, 96 descriptive representation and, 181 geographic opportunities for, 100–​102 nonwhite candidacies in white districts, 97–​102, 98t, 99t, 100t, 172, 202t in threshold districts, 102–​106, 105t Indigenous North Americans, 38, 208n7 individual-​level decision to run, 11 candidacy and, 43–​44, 47–​51, 49f group consciousness in, 8, 63–​65 group empowerment and, 65–​66

representation-​related reasons, 80–​87, 81t, 82t self-​recognition and, 25, 59–​63, 60t individual-​level dynamics, 25, 41 informal institutions, 10, 67, 101, 108–​113, 122, 134, 139–​141, 164, 171, 210n1 insider outsiders, 19 institutional invisibility, 80 internment issues, 114, 218n5 intersectional identity, 101 intersectionality theory defined, 8, 36 descriptive representation and, 31 research designs, 22, 25, 31–​32, 38, 177 expansion of immigrant groups, 32–​36, 33t, 34t, 35t Latina/​os, 29–​30 model of, 24–​27 ongoing debates on, 207n4 operationalizing in empirical research, 30–32, 33t, 34–36 intersectional model of electoral opportunity candidate emergence and, 168–​173 descriptive representation and, 5–​6, 36–​44, 41t, 42t, 43t introduction to, 12–​17 in Los Angeles, 111–​113 overview of, 24–​27, 208n7 race-​gendering and, 8, 12–​17, 168–​173 intragroup diversity, 19, 223n2 Japanese Americans, 135, 218n5 King, Mae C., 19 King, Rodney, 115 Korean Americans in Los Angeles, 114, 115, 144, 219n6, 223n1 labor unions, 26, 112, 127, 132, 153, 157, 159, 222n14 landslide races, 128 Latina/​os. See also race-​gendering candidate development/​emergence, 139–​147 “crossover” candidates in Los Angeles, 128–​133 Democrat candidate pipeline, 111–​113, 130–​131, 154–​160

254 Index Latina/​os. (cont.) descriptive representation and, 5, 6, 162, 179–​183 electoral opportunities in Los Angeles, 113–​137 empirical focus on, 18–​24 expansion of immigrant groups, 32–​36, 34t, 35t intersectionality study of, 9 intersectionality theory in empirical research, 29–​30 leveraging general election candidacies, 94–​97, 95t, 96t, 97t partisanship and race data, 98t political infrastructure, 26–​27 race-​gendering descriptive representation, 5–​6, 36–​44, 41t, 42t, 43t racial coalition politics in Los Angeles, 123–​128, 124f success in politics, 77, 79 in threshold districts, 102–​106, 103t, 104t, 105t, 106t underrepresentation in elected office, 18 underrepresentation on ballots, 151–​164 voter mobilization, 224n8 Latinas ALS data on, 42t, 43t, 49t, 86f, 191t candidacy studies on, 10–​12 “crossover promise” for, 92 discouragement consequences, 81–​82, 82t disruption in candidacy considerations, 51–​59 election data from majority-​minority districts, 203t emergence of candidacy, 43–​44, 47–​51, 49f empirical focus on, 18–​24, 29–​30 future of candidacy and representation, 167–​183 GRACE data on, 196t group consciousness/​identity, 8, 63–​65 group empowerment, 65–​66 intersectionality study of, 9, 20 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 in legislature, 47 partisanship and race data, 98t

as political outsiders, 158–​164, 163f in politics, 7f, 84t, 217n3 self-​generated desire to run, 50, 54t, 60t, 81t self-​recognition and, 25, 59–​63, 60t, 69, 211n8 social desirability bias, 211n6 sociopolitical positioning of, 19, 31 in state legislative elections, 118f, 119f, 121f, 122t, 127, 163f, 204t threshold district data on, 103t underrepresentation on Los Angeles ballots, 151–​164, 152t Latinos ALS data on, 42t, 43t, 49t, 86f, 191t candidacy studies on, 10–​12, 156–​157 discouragement consequences, 81–​82, 82t election data from majority-​minority districts, 203t GRACE data on, 196t intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 political backgrounds of, 152t in politics, 7f, 84t, 217n3 self-​generated desire to run, 50, 54t, 60t, 81t self-​recognition and, 59–​60, 60t in state legislative elections, 118f, 119f, 121f, 122t, 127, 163f, 204t threshold district data on, 103t León, Kevin de, 136 leveraging general election candidacies, 94–​97, 95t, 96t, 97t LGBTQ candidates, 177–​178, 207n4 Lieu, Ted, 129 linguistic diversity, 141 Liu, Carol, 129 Lopez Romero, Brenda, 1–​4, 9, 12, 27 Los Angeles, candidate emergence Asian American women underrepresented on ballot, 147–​151 competitive conditions in, 164–​165 elite networks and, 139–​147, 143f Latinas as political outsiders, 158–​164, 163f Latina underrepresentation on Los Angeles ballots, 151–​164, 152t overview of, 43–​44 Los Angeles, election opportunity

Index  255 of Asian Americans, 113–​137 candidacy overview in, 204, 204t constrained opportunity for immigrant representation, 111–​113 “crossover” candidates, 128–​133 historical view of, 134–​137 institutional barriers to, 117–​122 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 26–​27, 111–​113 interview protocol for, 205 of Latina/​os, 113–​137 racial coalition politics, 123–​128, 124f state legislature election wins, 117–​122, 118f, 119f, 121f, 122t Los Angeles City Council Districts, 142 Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, 117 Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, 154 Los Angeles County Labor Federation, 127 LUPE Fund, 182 majority minority districts Asian American districts, 133 descriptive representation in, 179–​183 electoral opportunities, 22, 25–​26, 91–​92 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 172 lack of recognition in, 88–​91 Los Angeles and, 136 overview of, 5, 15 race-​gendering in, 70 in state legislatures, 213n3 majority white/​predominantly white districts, 70, 71–​74, 72f, 73f, 73t. See also partisanship and race-​gendered opportunities, in white districts MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund), 144–​145 male-​centered race-​based network, 112 male-​oriented political networks, 171–​172 marginalization/​marginalized groups of Asian American women, 150 candidacy studies, 10–​12 descriptive representation in, 2–​3 electoral opportunities of, 16, 102–​106

overlap with privilege, 31 secondary marginalization, 16, 19 underrepresentation and, 4, 30 marriage impact on candidacy, 53, 63 McCall, Leslie, 13 men. See also African American men; Asian American men; Latinos; white men careers of Congress members, 216n15 co-​racial men’s egos, 167 domination in elite networks, 91 lifetime goals of, 90 male-​centered race-​based network, 112 male-​oriented political networks, 171–​172 patriarchy, 17, 31, 208n9 running for office, 215n13 Mexican Americans, 127, 217n4, 218n5 Michigan, 213n6, 214n8 Migration Policy Institute, 223n2 Miller v. Johnson (1995), 39 Mohanty, Chandra, 37 Molina, Gloria, 163 Montanez, Cindy, 225n12 motherhood considerations, 47, 53–​58, 63–​64, 167, 177 multidimensionality identity research, 9–​10, 17, 32 naming of identity, 37–​38 National Council of State Legislatures, 39 National Historical Geographic Information System, 209n9 Native Americans, 38, 193 Native Hawaiian, 38 networks in candidate development/​emergence, 139–​147, 143f elite networks, 23, 88–​91, 109, 112, 139, 182 male-​centered race-​based network, 112 male-​oriented political networks, 171–​172 political mobilization networks, 113, 116, 140 New Mexico majority white districts, 73–​74, 193 partisan politics in, 105t, 106t women’s likelihood of success, 214n11

256 Index New York Asian Americans in, 34, 35t, 120, 217n1, 221n11 majority white districts, 73t partisan politics in, 100t, 105t political organizing in, 80, 100t, 105t, 106t Nigerian immigrants, 33 non-​habitual immigrant voters, 146 non-​incumbents, 103, 103t, 104–​106, 104t, 105t, 106t nonwhites candidacies in white districts, 97–​102, 98t, 99t, 100t, 172–​173 transition to a majority-​nonwhite population, 33 women in politics, 6 Núñez, Fabian, 136 obligation and group consciousness, 8, 63–​65 occupation and candidacy, 21, 64–​65, 86f, 87, 115, 176, 191, 216n14–​216n16 open-​seat elections, 3, 71t, 93, 99, 151, 180, 203, 203t “opportunistic” districts, 82 oppression, 14, 19, 31, 176 out-​group representation, 173 overrepresentation, 8, 28, 168, 178, 203 Pacific Islanders, 38 pan-​ethnic groups, 27, 112, 137, 139, 141, 144, 164, 183 parliamentary-​level officeholding, 35 partisanship and race-​gendered opportunities, in white districts electoral opportunities, 97–​102, 98t, 99t, 100t, 107–​109 geographic opportunities, 100–​102 leveraging scale of, 94–​97, 95t, 96t, 97t overview of, 93–​94 threshold districts and crossover candidates, 102–​106, 103t, 104t, 105t, 106t patriarchy, 17, 31, 208n9 plurality districts, 109, 131–​132, 135, 160 Polanco, Richard, 116, 159

political activism, 62, 83, 150, 165 political coalitions, 88, 115, 132, 142 political decision-​making, 2–​3 political elites descriptive representation and, 180 in Los Angeles, 113, 125–​126, 136 Los Angeles candidate emergence and, 139–​147, 143f, 223n1 male networks, 91 networks of, 89–​90 race-​gendering and, 69 political exclusion, 114, 165 political “gatekeeping,” 89 political mobilization networks, 113, 116, 140 political organizations, 88 politics of recognition, 80–​87, 81t, 82t populations Asian American populations in California, 35t, 136, 221n11 changes in racial composition, 10, 39, 67, 69–​74, 109, 122, 137, 172, 179, 212n2 distinct gender composition, 92, 149 distinct racial composition, 8, 14, 37, 60, 97, 112, 149, 173–​174, 191, 221n10 distinct voter eligibility, 195 GRACE data collection processes, 194–​195, 196t, 197f historic data on, 209n2 internal diversity of, 136, 142, 146 large-​scale population changes, 2, 33 Latina/​o populations in California, 34, 134, 152, 217n4 Latina/​o populations in Florida, 34, 101 Latina/​o populations in Texas, 34 population seats relationship, 71t transition to a majority-​nonwhite population, 33 United States declines, 2 presidential elections, 18, 168, 212n2 privilege, 13–​15, 31, 140, 170 professional qualifications, 12, 16, 83–​87, 84t, 86f Proposition 187 initiative, 115 Qualtrics, 42

Index  257 race. See also ethnicity/​ethnic groups coalition politics of Latina/​os, 123–​128, 124f composition changes, 10, 39, 67, 69–​74, 109, 122, 137, 172, 179, 212n2 composition distinctions, 8, 14, 37, 60, 97, 112, 149, 173–​174, 191, 221n10 group representation, 30 intersectional identity and, 101 male-​centered race-​based network, 112 partisanship and race data, 98t race-​gendering. See also partisanship and race-​gendered opportunities in Congress, 2–​3 defined, 8–​9 demographics of, 69–​70 descriptive representation and, 5–​6, 36–​44, 41t, 42t, 43t domestic roles and, 59 future of candidacy and representation, 167–​183 geographic opportunity and, 70–​79, 71t of identity, 175–​177 of informal institutions, 10 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 8, 12–​17, 168–​173 majority white/​predominantly white districts, 70, 71–​74, 72f, 73f, 73t multidimensionality data on, 32 politics of recognition, 80–​87, 81t, 82t recognition of professional qualifications, 83–​87, 84t, 86f social structures in, 8, 14, 16, 52, 82 “strength in numbers” framework, 69, 74–​79, 76t, 77t, 79f underrepresentation and, 3, 4, 62 racial diversity, 118, 193, 223n1 realistic opportunity of candidacy, 12, 14, 27, 91, 140, 181 real politics, 20 recognition consequences from lack of, 87–​91 lack in majority minority districts, 88–​91 politics of, 80–​87, 81t, 82t of professional qualifications, 83–​87, 84t, 86f self-​recognition, 25, 59–​63, 60t, 69

redistricting processes, 10, 40, 72, 106, 120–​121, 133, 145, 179, 192, 194–​195, 197t, 209n9, 212n2, 213n6, 219n6 reflective affirmation, 50–​51 Renald, Luis, 158 representation. See also descriptive representation; underrepresentation on the ballot, 8–​9, 22, 109, 168–​169, 172, 203, 207n3 out-​group representation, 173 overrepresentation, 8, 28, 168, 178, 203 in state legislatures, 117–​122, 118f, 119f, 121f, 122t substantive representation, 3 Republicans descriptive representation and, 181 election opportunities, 1, 103–​106 geographic opportunities for, 100–​102 leveraging general election candidacies, 94–​97, 95t, 96t nonwhite candidacies in white districts, 97–​102, 98t, 99t, 100t, 172, 202t presidential elections, 18, 212n2 in threshold districts, 102–​106, 105t research design dynamism, 30 gender diversity and, 207n2, 207n4 intersectional, 22, 25, 31–​32, 38, 177 multilevel, 9 racial diversity and, 193 sexuality and, 177 simultaneity, 19, 32, 175, 207n4 residential segregation, 114 Rojas, Daniela, 47 Romero, Gloria, 163 Roybal, Ed, 116 Rutgers University’s Ready to Run programs, 182 Ryu, David, 129, 131, 132–​133 Salvadoran enclaves in Los Angeles, 114 Sanbonmatsu, Kira, 108 secondary marginalization, 16, 19 second-​generation immigrants, 33, 219–​220 self-​recognition, 25, 59–​63, 60t, 69, 211n8 sex discrimination, 19 Shaw v. Reno (1993), 39

258 Index silence in candidacy considerations, 57–​59 simultaneity in research design, 19, 32, 175, 207n4 slavery history, 19, 23 social desirability bias, 211n6 social expectations of candidates, 48, 57, 59, 63, 67, 112, 150, 157, 177 social groups, 3, 5, 11, 17, 27–​28 social hierarchies, 9, 12, 18, 31, 51, 176 social interactions, 8, 169 social structures in race-​gendering, 8, 14, 16, 52, 82 social work, 87, 176 socioeconomic measures, 23, 148, 211n7 sociopolitical positioning, 13, 15, 19, 31, 151, 153 Solis, Hilda, 163, 164 Somalian immigrants, 33 Soto, Nell, 162 special elections, 130 spousal support considerations, 53–​55 state legislatures candidacy of immigrants/​immigrant groups, 174–​175 candidacy overview in Los Angeles, 204, 204t civic activities in, 87 descriptive representation in, 179–​183 election wins in Los Angeles, 117–​122, 118f, 119f, 121f, 122t electoral opportunities in, 109 future of candidacy and representation, 167–​183 majority minority districts in, 213n3 racial coalition politics and, 123–​128 “strength in numbers” framework, 69, 74–​79, 76t, 77t, 79f underrepresentation on Los Angeles ballots, 151–​164, 152t stereotypes, 4, 17, 61, 85, 173, 211n8 “strength in numbers” framework, 69, 74–​79, 76t, 77t, 79f strict scrutiny application, 39 structural challenges in groups, 140–​141 individual vs. structural and group level factors, 9, 11 political infrastructure, 26–​27, 112

social structures in race-​gendering, 8, 14, 16, 52, 82 substantive representation, 3 sui generis phenomenon, 107, 146, 217n2 Taiwanese in Los Angeles, 114 term limits, 214n8, 221n12, 222n14 Texas census-​based redistricting, 194 immigrant-​based communities in, 40 Latina/​o populations in, 34 political organizing in, 80, 100t, 105t, 106t women’s likelihood of success, 214n11 Thai in Los Angeles, 114 threshold districts, 102–​106, 103t, 104t, 105t, 106t Torres, Al, 128, 134, 136 Torres, Art, 116, 136 Torres, Norma, 162 underrepresentation African Americans, 19 Asian Americans, 18 Asian American women, 147–​151 disruption in candidacy considerations, 51–​59 diversity of groups, 44 of immigrant groups, 18 Latina/​os, 18, 151–​164 Latinas, 151–​164, 152t in Los Angeles candidate emergence, 151–​164, 152t of marginalized groups, 4, 30 race-​gendering and, 3, 4, 62 self-​recognition and, 60–​61 in state legislatures, 151–​164, 152t of women, 3, 4, 51–​59, 215n13 of women of color, 4, 51–​59 uniformity of experience, 23 union candidates, 154 United States. See also individual cities; individual states case studies of elected officials in, 21 citizenship, 1 electoral politics, 1–​2 expansion of immigrant groups, 32–​36, 33t, 34t, 35t

Index  259 intersectional empirical work on representation in, 32 population declines, 2 white constituency in, 14 women in U.S. labor force, 35 U.S. Census Bureau, 40 U.S. House of Representatives, 2 U.S. Supreme Court, 39 viability, 14, 103 Villaraigosa, Antonio, 116 Virginia, 80, 100t, 105t, 106t voter turnout, 69, 220n7 votes/​voters demographics of, 129 distinct voter eligibility, 195 DTS (Decline to State) vote, 132 evaluations of candidates, 9 Latina/​o voter mobilization, 224n8 non-​habitual immigrant voters, 146 partisanship of, 108–​109 stereotypes in, 4 Watts Rebellion (1965), 218n5 white, 14, 120, 193 white districts. See majority white/​ predominantly white districts white men access to electoral opportunity, 203, 203t contiguous terms of, 162 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 running for office, 5, 50–​51 social and political positioning/​ power, 208n9 state legislative election data on, 117–​122 white supremacy, 17, 31

white women intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 recognition of professional qualifications, 87 running for office, 5, 50 social and political positioning/​ power, 208n9 Williams, Melissa, 2 Wilson, Pete, 115–​116 within-​racial-​group opportunities, 101 women. See also African American women; Asian American women; Latinas descriptive representation of, 3 individual-​level decision to run, 11 nonwhite women in politics, 6 participation in higher education, 32–​34 relative deficit in office, 47 success in politics, 2, 47, 77 underrepresentation in elected office, 3, 4, 51–​59, 215n13 in U.S. labor force, 35 women of color disruption in candidacy considerations, 51–​59 emergence of candidacy, 43–​44, 47–​51, 49f GRACE study of, 207n3 intersectionality study of, 20 intersectional model of electoral opportunity, 12–​17 in politics, 2 representation-​related reasons to run, 81, 81t underrepresentation of, 4, 51–​59 women’s politics, 30, 174 women’s solidarity, 139 Woo, Mike, 128, 130 World Economic Forum, 35 Young, Iris Marion, 37