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The article presents a discussion of the voting model for American Muslims, adapted from "Muslim and American? How Islam Shapes Political Incorporation Among American Muslims," by Matt A. Barreto and Karam Dana. It analyzes the low levels of campaign outreach and the resulting low levels of efficacy that are taken for granted in most studies of turnout. The authors think that their model could be applicable to other groups of voters including other religious and ethnic minorities.

The 2004 presidential election raised a number of questions about how military service is used in political campaigns and how it affects individual-level engagement in politics. Most of this discussion consisted of journalistic accounts, however, and few social scientists have tested theories about the military and politics with survey data or electoral returns. This is especially the case for the political role of military service for minority electorates. This paper therefore examines whether military service and opinions about the war in Iraq are associated with the vote for Bush and Kerry in 2004. The dataset is a pre-election national survey of Latinos that includes questions about political engagement, partisanship, and previous military service. The results indicate that Latino veterans were more likely to support Kerry than were Latino non-veterans. In addition, Latinos who opposed the war in Iraq were less supportive of Bush, and Latino veterans who opposed the war were particularly opposed to Bush. These results help to understand not only the Latino vote in the 2004 presidential election but also the role of veteran status in electoral politics. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Despite limited experience courting the Latino community, both political partiesmade a point to campaign aggressively for Latino "swing" votes through advertisements andget-out-the-vote (GOTV) drives in 2006. While there is a new commitment to Spanishlanguageadvertising and direct contact with Latino voters, no evidence exists that thistargeted outreach has worked. The question remains, does targeted advertising influence thevote choice of Latinos, and, how does this advertising affect the more general population?To address these questions, we implemented an experiment during the 2006 Californiaelection. Latino and non-Latino subjects were randomly assigned to a control or treatmentgroup. Those in the treated groups received a flyer endorsing Arnold Schwarzenegger forgovernor, containing an endorsement from a Latino or an Anglo political figure. Thetreatment ads were further divided into English only or in both English/Spanish. Thus, thegroups were as follows: Anglo endorser English, Latino endorser English, Anglo endorserbilingual, and Latino endorser bilingual. We expect to find that targeted messages shouldhave a stronger influence on vote preference than non-targeted messages among Latinos.Further, the combined effect of a Latino endorser with a message delivered in bothlanguages might have the strongest effects. Finally, non-Latinos should be less receptive tothe Latino-targeted ads, perhaps witnessing a demobilizing effect. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]