I would love to quantify this, and maybe I will down the line, but my sense is that when We, The Party™, do Hispanic and Latino outreach, we emphasize a Hispanic and Latino identity in that outreach over an American one.

Meanwhile, at least in the 2012 and 2016 ANES, roughly 80% of Hispanics and Latinos indicated that being an American was as important to their identity as being Hispanic.

In 2012, nearly half indicated that being American was more important to their identity than being Hispanic. That declined to a little less than a third in 2016.

I wonder what happened between 2012 and 2016 that led to fewer Hispanics and Latinos prioritizing an American identity over a Hispanic one...

Despite that decline, I think it's worth stressing that it did not result in more Hispanics and Latinos prioritizing a Hispanic identity over an American identity; it just meant that more assigned equal importance to both identities.

As mentioned earlier, in 2016, about four-fifths of Hispanics and Latinos still indicated that being an American was either as or more important to their identity than being a Hispanic.

Moving forward, I think we would be wise to approach our outreach to Hispanic and Latino communities in a way that recognizes them as both Hispanics and Latinos AND Americans.

This might be motivated reasoning on my end, and it's another thing I would love to quantify, but I think Republicans did this well in 2020.

One of my worries here is that in emphasizing a pan-ethnic identity over an American one, we perpetuate an "othering" of Hispanic and Latino voters and subliminally reinforcing an idea that, no matter what they do, we will never see them as "real" Americans.

I could imagine this feeling especially alienating to folks who have renounced citizenship in their countries of birth in order to obtain American citizenship, an act that, in some ways, inherently reflects a prioritization of an American identity.

To give credit where it's due, this paper, which is about much more than I rambled about in this thread, inspired this thread. https://academic.oup.com/poq/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/poq/nfaa048/6205964