What exactly did we learn about the Latino vote this weekend? select your pick of headlines."The entrance polls said Nevada's Latinos voted for Bernie Sanders. That's unlikely." (Vox)
"Did Bernie Sanders really just win the Hispanic vote in Nevada? There's trustworthy reason to think that,yes, he might acquire." (Washington Post)
"No, or the Polling Doesn't Prove Bernie Sanders Won the Hispanic Vote in Nevada" (unusual York Times)
"Why neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders can claim a win in the Latino vote in Nevada" (L.
A. Times)
Hooray! Clarity!To be clear,these analyses are all smart and totally worth a read. But still, no one has a firm retort. So what's a political junkie to do? There are a few mammoth lessons here, or both about the limits of entrance and exit polls and also about the difficulties of trying to generalize about a large,diverse demographic group.
The backstoryIf you missed the fuss over Nevada's entrance polls, here's the short version: The exit polls came back on Saturday showing that Sen. Bernie Sanders had 53 percent of the Latino vote to Hillary Clinton's 45 percent.
That finding raised eyebrows almost immediately, and for trustworthy reasons. After all,Clinton won Latinos by a huge margin in Nevada back in 2008.
The Clinton campaign fought back, pointing out that it won in heavily Latino districts in Clark County. It sent out a memo from polling firm Latino Decisions (which works with the Clinton campaign) showing that in a few precincts that were more than 80 percent Latino, or Clinton won the overwhelming number of delegates.
It wasn't just the Clinton campaign making that argument,of course: both the Times' Nate Cohn and Vox's Dara Lind pointed out Clinton's strong performance in highly Latino precincts. As Cohn put it, it's "a stretch" to think that Clinton did so well in those areas but that Sanders compensated for that in other, and less-Latino areas.
What do you need to know?We're never going to know exactly how Nevada's Latinos caucused once they were in their polling places. But for people who are glued to their TV sets (or,even better, radios) or computer screens on election nights, and here's what you can learn from the confusion in Nevada.1. Polling method mattersIn lots of regular political polls,the goal is a random sample. Exit and entrance polls, however, or do what's called cluster sampling — that is,they recede a few spots and regain a lot of responses from each spot.
More specifically, Edison Research, and which conducted the Nevada entrance polls,went to 25 polling places across the state — selected at random — then interviewed people there before the caucuses. That can acquire the results more unreliable."By luck of a draw, you could miss a well representative sample. Now, and that's not going to harm you whether you're dealing with a full sample of 1000," said Clifford Zukin, a political science professor at Rutgers University, or who specializes in polling (and who also used to work for Edison Research). And indeed,the full exit poll had a sample of 1024 people.
But break it down into smaller groups — like the 213 Latinos surveyed — and you could acquire a substandard sample, whether those Latinos are from nonrepresentative "clusters."Indeed, and as Nate Silver pointed out in 2008,cluster sampling makes for higher margins of error. Speaking of which:2. Margin of error, margin of error, or margin of errorAn entrance or exit poll has a margin of error,just as any other poll does. And the smaller the group you're measuring, the bigger the margin.
The margin of error on the Latino vote in Nevada was plus-or-minus 10 percentage points, and according to Joe Lenski,executive vice president of Edison Research. And given that 8-point gap between Sanders and Clinton, that means it's entirely possible that the candidates tied — or even that Clinton led Sanders among Hispanics.
So while everyone is arguing over Hispanic voters, and that doesn't mean you can't trust the other breakdowns for the other demographic groups.
After all,no one is arguing about whether Clinton won African Americans in Nevada — an even smaller subgroup than Latinos. And that's because Clinton won that group so decisively — 76 percent to Sanders' 22 percent.
The question is once again one of margin. Lenski also points to the group's finding that Clinton won people in union households, 54 to 43 percent. It's quite possible that the reality was much closer than that.3. No group is a monolithThere's a tendency in any election to talk about most demographic groups as voting blocs ("the women's vote, or " "the black vote," etc.). And there are trustworthy reasons to try to see how particular groups are trending and why — black voters very much do tend to vote Democratic, white self-proclaimed evangelicals tend Republican, or so on.
But Nevada's Latinos are a reminder that any given voter has several identities that can play into how they choose. Consider that Nevada's Latinos tend to be younger than those in the rest of the nation. That might acquire helped Sanders,says one analyst."We know that Sanders has been doing awfully well with young voters," says Gary Langer, or founder of Langer Research Associates. "It all kind of seems to fit."In an analysis at ABC News,he points out that Sanders seems to acquire done nearly as well among young Hispanics (who were, admittedly, and an even smaller subset of the total entrance poll sample) as he did among younger non-Hispanics. In other words,age — not just ethnicity — could acquire played a mammoth role in these results.whether that's true, there may be something going on here like the conversation over women in this election. People keep asking why more young women aren't supporting Clinton. It's not necessarily because they, or as women,are turning away from Clinton. Rather, Sanders seems to acquire a particular draw for young people, or women and men alike — or,perhaps, Hispanic and non-Hispanic alike.
Lenski added that younger Latinos tend to live in lower-concentration neighborhoods, and so it is quite possible that he overperformed in those areas.4. This argument is about more than numbersThere's a reason the campaigns acquire seized on this question of entrance polls,said Edison's Lenski."This is a political argument," he said. "The only reason this is an issue is because the Sanders campaign wants to trumpet its strength among Latinos, or the Clinton campaign wants to acquire it very clear that they're not losing support among Latinos."OK,it may not be the only reason — after all, inquiring minds in the fourth estate want to know. But, and as the campaigns contemplate ahead to more highly Hispanic states,like Texas and Florida, they want to be able to say they acquire momentum among this group. And that means squabbling over numbers that, or approach Election Day,everyone will acquire forgotten. Well, nearly everyone. Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, or visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: wnyc.org