Progressive Media Advocates
Dr. Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2007 during which time she was a National Science Foundation Fellow. DeFrancesco Soto was recently named one of the top 12 scholars in the country by Diverse magazine.
Victoria’s research analyzes how human thought and emotion shapes political behavior. Her academic work focuses on: campaigns and elections, political marketing, race and ethnic politics, and immigration. Her academic research has been widely published in scholarly journals and edited volumes. In 2008, Dr. DeFrancesco Soto was Northwestern University’s principal investigator for the Big Ten Battleground Poll, a public opinion survey of voters for the 2008 Presidential election. She is currently working on a book manuscript that analyzes the emergence of conservative feminism.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The issue trifecta of Benghazi, the IRS audits, and the AP investigations has resuscitated the near moribund Tea Party. While each of these issues deals with different agencies and actors they share the common denominator of heightening distrust in the government.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The correlation between the GOP’s Latino communications and outreach strategy is linear. The harsher and more racially negative the messaging, the fewer Latinos will stand by your label and vote for you. It’s not a complicated concept.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The last thing we should do is keep banging our heads against the D.C. wall or just sit around strategizing for the 2014 or 2016 election. If immigration reform fails at the federal level then the emphasis must move to our state capitals and city councils.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Whether we want to admit it or not, any discussion revolving around the U.S. and Mexico must start and end with drugs. However, these next two days President Obama and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto will do everything in their power to dance around the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The most rational response to the domestic terror attack is to push forward immigration reform—policy that makes us safer by better tracking those immigrants who are here and who are seeking to enter.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The current immigration legislation holds out the opportunity for only good coming out of the reform. However, unintended consequences can and do arise.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Whether it’s salsa or gun legislation, there are some things Americans may not embrace from the Big Apple. Michael Bloomberg’s $12 million gun violence ad campaign is a case in point.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Rubio’s two-stage strategy of showing the GOP he’s conservative while signaling to the general population that he is also compassionate is the reason for his recent coyness on the issue of immigration.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The right to a free and fair vote is in danger. At the state level, most recently in Virginia, we see the enactment of a poll tax. And perhaps more seriously, at the federal level there may no longer be a mechanism to prevent voting from once again becoming a taxable good.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: At the national level there is much discussion of Bush fatigue. With talk of P./47’s father, Jeb Bush, jumping in the race, the question is whether enough time has passed for Americans to forget about the foreign and domestic failures of George W. Bush.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: It was cute of the Senators’ to point out the filibuster’s shared date with the battle of the Alamo. But beyond a shared date and colorful personalities the battles are fundamentally different in that the Tea Party movement will not be able to rally for an ultimate win.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Voters and candidates fall into neat categorizations as being Latino, Black, White, Evangelical, Jewish, etc. But as next week’s mayoral race in Los Angeles shows, politics has gone outside the box.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Everyone is the same the moment we cast our ballot. However, that equality depends on equal access to the ballot, something which regrettably is not automatic and that must be actively protected.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: “Suicide conservatives” are the folks that will not support any sort of compromise even among their own party. Not only are these conservative partisans willing to go down, but they’ll take down those around them.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: What do Evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons all have in common? And no, this is not the beginning of a joke. The growth of all three faiths is being fueled by the Latino population.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: For immigration reform to become a reality it must be passed by the end of July before Congresses’ summer recess. If it is not passed by then, consider immigration reform as good as dead.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Would you prefer Obama’s first term administration with two Latino cabinet members but no immigration reform and lingering economic hardship for Latinos, or a second term with no Latino cabinet members but an immigration overhaul and improvement in the economic situation of Latinos?
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Senator Rubio’s recent change in position to favor a path to citizenship puts him in a corner–he will not get the base of his party to join him and his immigration advocacy will never be as good as that of the Democrats.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has broken a cardinal rule three times in the last week. TMZ, the celebrity gossip site has actually bestowed the title of Mayor Suave upon Villaraigosa.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Most of the real action, when it comes to guns and firearm violence, takes place in our state capitals and in some instances our city councils.
Vicotria Defrancesco Soto: The GOP’s split mindset regarding Latinos and immigration is what will likely prevent the president from crossing off immigration reform from his 2013 to-do list.
Victoria Defranceso Soto: Latinos aren’t the first group that comes to mind in a discussion about unions, especially with regards to a rust-belt state such as Michigan. But it turns out that Latinos are disproportionately affected, and not in a good way, by the diminishing strength of unions.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Rubio’s Tea Party relations put him in a particularly tough spot since if the GOP moderates over the next couple of years he will have that undeniable linkage.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The STEM jobs act would essentially staple green cards to the diplomas of 55,000 foreign students. But, the legislation does not help the millions of undocumented immigrants, mainly of Latin American descent already in this country.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Can the die-hard group hanging out in the kitchen keep the party going? Can Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, and the state-level Tea Partiers keep the music playing and the drinks flowing?
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Why did Latinos not only support, but support in such overwhelming numbers a candidate who has overseen such a troubling time for Latinos?
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Latino support for President Obama had grown by a full ten percentage points in the last two months of the general campaign.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: With close to three-quarters of the Latino electorate indicating that they trust President Obama and the Democrats to make the right decisions to improve our economic conditions the message is clear–Latinos have said adiós to Romney.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The tale of the two Latino candidates for the Arizona and Texas Senate races highlights the diversity of Latinos in this country.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: It’s like Romney is that guy at a party who’s chatting up a lady and his wingman—let’s call him Senate candidate Richard Mourdock—saunters up and, instead of saying something smooth, offends the lady with whom Romney was hoping to close the deal.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
Steve Hochstadt: The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s finally made an issue of fathering. If women were going to get out of the house and into the workplace, men had to change their roles, too.
The Frying Pan: A successful mayor and council cannot be satisfied with merely coping as issues arise, but must be able to anticipate and define the city´s needs for the next four years. As our newly elected leaders prepare for their roles, we´ve asked writers to share their thoughts about what lies ahead for Los Angeles.
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