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Monday, November 5, 2012

Daily Kos: Predicting the Latino vote

Daily Kos: Predicting the Latino vote:


Predicting the Latino vote

By now, most denizens of this site realize that most polls, both national and state, do not accurately include Latinos in their models.  For one things, Latinos heavily rely upon cell phones, and those polls which use automatic dialers cannot call cell phones (which may mean they under-sample young people as well).  While some automated pollsters attempt to adjust their models to account for this, not all do.
Further, there is a significant percentage of pollsters who do not offer a bilingual option for those Spanish speaker who are not comfortable being interviewed in English.  We have known for some time this result in (1) under-reporting Latinos as a share of the voting electorate, and (2) possibly tilting the distribution of those Latinos participating as inclined to vote for Republicans.
Latino Decisions has been running a poll for 11 weeks with bi-lingual interviewers, and since it does not auto-dial not needing the adjustment for cell phones, which are included.  You can see the cumulative results here 
A couple of things to note:
1.  Rate of Hispanic participation they expect a total participation rate of 77% or more -  in this blog post they