Member Since: 2/2/2014
Posts: 1,865
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Exit poll reports misrepresent Latinos/POC?
In an entry titled 'Lies, Damn Lies, and Exit Polls' political research group, Latino Decisions, argued that exit polls don't accurately represent minorities/people of color:
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In the 36 hours since the results of the Presidential election became clear, a number of “analyses” have emerged suggesting that a surprisingly large share of the Latino vote went to Donald Trump, despite his demonization of Latinos, his attacks on Judge Curiel and Alicia Machado, his blanket hostility to immigrants, and more. The basis of these claims are the National Exit Poll, a survey commissioned by a consortium of media outlets who wish to understand the electorate’s behavior.
The exit poll reports of Latino vote are profoundly and demonstrably incorrect. The methodology used for this poll systematically misrepresents all voters of color and this can be demonstrated with actual precinct-level results and with their practices in the last decade.
The exit poll is not a random sample of all voters. The surveys taken on election day are clustered to a small handful of precincts out of the thousands of possible precincts. Academic papers have documented with evidence that this introduces considerable bias in the minority sample.
The exit poll Latino estimate is WAY off. Skeptics might say that all the polls were off this year, but actually, whatever the reason, the national polling miss was only around 1-2% compared to what the popular vote margin will eventually be. These Latino numbers are off by 10-15%. That requires a plausible explanation.
Actual results from election day confirm the Latino surge and a shift in the Democratic direction. It’s early and lots of results are still being posted, but a careful examination of precincts with lots of Latino voters, drawn from across the country, show an increase in turnout and an increase in Democratic vote share. In none of the actual results data is there anything to suggest Trump out-performing Romney. What is more likely is that the national exit polls interviewed FEW IF ANY Latino voters in areas where many Latinos actually live. For example, in 2014, the Exit Poll didn’t interview a single Latino south of San Antonio, despite this being among the most heavily Latino regions of the US.
VERY IMPORTANT: The people behind the exit poll even admitted a few years ago that their minority samples are not expected to be correct! They wrote in a self-critique that “it is not designed to yield very reliable estimates of the characteristics of small, geographically clustered demographic groups. These groups have much large design effects and thus larger sampling errors.” The letter goes on to say, “If we want to improve the National Exit Poll estimate for Hispanic vote (or Asian vote, Jewish vote or Mormon vote etc.) we would either need to drastically increase the number of precincts in the National Sample or oversample the number of Hispanic precincts.” They have done neither.
The exit poll was never designed to capture sub-populations, like Latinos or African Americans. Instead, it was designed to offer one national estimate, and to help news organizations predict outcomes.
The Exit Poll suggest white support for Trump to be essentially identical to that for Romney four years ago, but meaningful shifts toward Trump among African Americans and Latinos. Does that sound like the story of this election?
Journalists – and especially cable news anchors and producers – please remember that the Exit Poll is just a survey, one never designed to represent the Latino (or other minority group) vote. Unlike our work, and the work of countless other survey researchers, Edison is not transparent in its methods. We have, for several cycles, raised serious questions about clustering, socio-economic bias, Spanish language interviews, and precinct selection. Apart from their admission in 2005, they have remained silent and opaque. But you—and the country—deserve answers to how they collected the data, and how reliable it is. Call them and ask. And let us—all of us—know what they say.
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Don’t believe those exit polls saying 25 percent of Latinos voted for Trump
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The severe limitations of traditional exit polls to properly capture the Latino electorate have long been obvious to scholars. Improper precinct selection, for example, leads to non-representative samples that inflate support for Republicans.
The more nuanced surveys by Latino Decisions, the firm where I work, found that Trump received the lowest level of support among Latino voters on record for any presidential candidate: a mere 18 percent. Clinton, in turn, attracted a record 79 percent of the Latino vote. (The other 3 percent voted for third-party candidates.)
On the one hand, that speaks to just how large the surge in white working-class voters for Trump was — a surge that many have concluded ultimately tipped the balance. But it also suggests that without Latinos, Hillary Clinton might not have won the popular vote, nor come so close to winning the election outright.
Our LD Turnout Predict tool estimates that somewhere between 13.1 and 14.7 million Latinos cast a ballot in 2016, a substantial increase from the 11.2 million Latino votes cast in 2012. With Latino early voting numbers across the nation outpacing our LD Turnout Predict projections, we may even see Latino turnout reach 15 million in 2016 once all the votes are tallied.
This assertion of power at the polls is important, despite Clinton’s loss. It would be pragmatic — not to mention the right thing to do — for newly elected Donald Trump to repair his relations with the Latino electorate. Especially given that the size of the Latino electorate will continue to grow between now and 2020.
In short, Donald Trump achieved victory despite growth in the Latino vote and the lowest level of support among Latino voters on record for any presidential candidate.
What’s clear from our data is that Latinos outperformed expectations in 2016. They helped deny Trump a victory in the popular vote — even though it was not enough, in the end, to swing the election.
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This raises some interesting points. What do you think?
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