ABSTRACT
Scholarship in political science on race and its impact on political preferences has undergone substantial transformation in the last quarter-century. Once defined racially by black and white, today the U.S. population is characterized by a multiplicity of racial and ethnic group divisions. Hispanics are now the largest minority population in the U.S., followed by African Americans and then Asian Americans and Native Americans.1 The “multi-racial” population-a category formed by counting more than one racial group and allowed by the census since 2000-is among the fastest-growing groups.2 The vast majority of the newest Americans are no longer from Europe as they once were in the nineteenth century. Instead, today’s immigrants come primarily from Latin America and Asia. While black migrants from Africa and the Caribbean constitute a much smaller share of new immigrants, their presence creates important diversity within the racial category of black.3
