Understanding Latino voting strength in 2016 and beyond: Why culturally competent research matters

Author's Biography

Matt Barreto is Co-founder and Managing Partner of the polling and research firm Latino Decisions which he co-founded with Gary Segura in 2007. Barreto is also Professor of Political Science and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. In 2012 Time Magazine called Latino Decisions the ‘gold-standard in Latino American polling’ and Barreto’s research was recognised in the 30 Latinos who made the 2012 election by Politic365. He was listed in the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2012 by the European Politics Magazine LDSP and named one of the top 15 leading Latino pundits by Huffington Post which said Barreto was ‘the pollster that has his finger on the pulse of the Latino electorate.’ In 2015, Barreto was hired by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to run polling and focus groups on Latino voters. In 2010 Barreto implemented the first ever weekly tracking poll of Latino voters during the 2010 election, which LD continued in 2012. Working closely with Segura he has also overseen large multi-state election eve polls, battleground tracking polls, extensive message testing research and countless focus groups. He has been invited to brief the US Senate, the White House, Congressional Committees and has been a keynote speaker at many of the major Hispanic association conferences including NALEO, LULAC, CHCI, NCLR and others. He received his PhD in political science from the University of California, Irvine. Barreto has published more than 40 scholarly research papers and book chapters that examine Latino public opinion, voting behaviour and race politics more generally in America. He is also the author of the two books, Ethnic Cues: The role of shared ethnicity in Latino political behavior published by the University of Michigan Press, as well as Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, published by Princeton University Press. He just completed his third book, Latino America, co-authored with Segura, on the growth and influence of Latino voters in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. In 2008 Barreto was a co-principal investigator (with Gary Segura) of the American National Election Study Latino oversample which included the first ever Spanish language translation of the ANES and first ever oversample of Latino voters. In 2009 he was appointed to the ANES Board of Overseers.

Gary Segura is Co-founder and Senior Partner of the polling and research firm Latino Decisions which he co-founded with Matt Barreto in 2007, and Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. His work focuses on issues of political representation and the politics to America’s growing Latino minority. Among his most recent publications are The Future is Ours: Minority Politics, Political Behavior, and the Multiracial Era of American Politics, (Congressional Quarterly, 2011) and Latinos in the New Millennium: An Almanac of Opinion, Behavior, and Policy Preferences. In 2015 Segura was hired by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to run polling and focus groups on Latino voters. Over the last 18 years he has directed polling research that has completed over 120,000 interviews of Americans of all backgrounds on matters of political importance. He has briefed members of both the House and Senate as well as senior administration officials and appeared on National Public Radio, the News Hour, Frontline, the CBS Evening News, MSNBC and numerous other outlets. Segura served as an expert witness in both of landmark LGBT rights cases in 2013, Windsor versus United States and Hollingsworth versus Perry. He has testified as an expert on political power and discrimination in both voting rights cases and LGBT civil rights cases and has filed amicus curiae briefs on subjects as diverse as marriage equality and affirmative action. Segura is one of three Principal Investigators of the 2012 American National Election Studies, a past President of the Midwest Political Science Association and current president of the Western Political Science Association. In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.