Matt Barreto

Professor of Political Science and Chicana/o and Central American Studies
Department: Political Science
barretom@ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Politics, Latinos in the US

Matt A. Barreto is Professor of Political Science and Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA and the faculty director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. His research and teaching focuses on voting rights, expert witness reports and social science methodology.

Prof. Barreto received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine in 2005, and had been on the faculty at the University of Washington for 10 years before joining UCLA in 2015. He has published three books, and more than 70 peer review journal articles, and is one of the leading scholars and pollsters on Latino public opinion and voting patterns. In 2016 Barreto was hired by the Clinton presidential campaign to manage polling and focus group research among Latinos, and in 2020 he joined the Biden presidential campaign to oversee Latino messaging research.

He is the author of the book, Ethnic Cues: The Role of Shared Ethnicity in Latino Political Behavior, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010. In 2013 Barreto co-authored a book with Christopher Parker, Change They Can't Believe In: the Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, with Princeton University Press, which was awarded the American Political Science Association Best Book Ward for Race, Ethnicity Politics in 2014. In 2014 he co-authored the book Latino America: How America's Most Dynamic Population is Poised to Transform the Politics of the Nation with Gary Segura, which was featured on MSNBC's Morning Joe and NPR's The Brian Lehrer Show in 2014.