Race-Based versus Issue Voting: A Natural Experiment: The 2001 City of Los Angeles Elections Marisa A. Abrajano* New York University Jonathan Nagler† New York University R. Michael Alvarez‡ California Institute of Technology The theory of racially polarized voting suggests that race is a primary determinant of vote choice in elections where a minority candidate is pitted against an Anglo candidate. The spatial model of voting suggests that voters consider the issue positions of candidates and choose the candi- date closest to their own positions. The unique context of the 2001 Los Angeles city election allows us to test these two theories. In each of two races, a Latino candidate competed against an Anglo candidate. In one race the Anglo candidate was considered more liberal, while in the other race the Latino candidate was seen as more liberal. This particular ethnic and ideological composition provides us with a “natural experiment” in which to test the two competing theories. We show that voters relied on issues and ideology as the basis for their vote choice, and that conditioned on these characteristics Latino and Anglo voters did make different choices. We also examine why one Latino candidate was electorally successful, yet not the other. We use counterfactual analysis to suggest that Latino electoral success can be attributed to multi-racial coalitions, where shared ideology and issue interest form the basis for these alliances. And we demonstrate that inferences of the amount of racial voting occurring in elections in a more typical, and thus less varied, electoral context are likely to seriously overstate the amount of racial voting in the electorate. We argue that there is much to be learned from the study of sub-national elections. * PhD Candidate, New York University; † Associate Professor, New York University and corre- sponding author; ‡ Professor of Political Science, California Institute of Technology. We thank Jonathan Steinberg and George Waters for their input in earlier versions of this research. The authors can be reached at maa269@nyu.edu, jonathan.nagler@nyu.edu, and rma@hss.caltech.edu, respectively.