Thomas F. Schaller, Political Science, on Sabato’s Crystal Ball

Tom Schaller, professor of political science and an expert on the role of demographic shifts in U.S. elections, has written a guest column for Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a popular blog on U.S. politics. In “The Latino Threshold,” Schaller examines voting patterns among U.S. Latinos in the past several elections and what level of support the Republican Party would need from Latinos to win in 2012. Ultimately, Schaller argues, “the post-2010 bottom line is not much different from what it was before either Barack Obama or the Tea Partiers arrived on the national scene: Republicans don’t need to carry the Latino vote—yet—but in the near term, and particularly in presidential cycles, they need to stay reasonably competitive.”