Donald Trumps win in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election caught many by surprise. To sort out how various demographic groups voted, close observers turned to the national exit poll by Edison Research, a staple of election night reporting and analysis.
The exit poll dished up another shocker: It said Hillary Clinton picked up 66 percent of Latino votes, and Donald Trump earned 28 percent. What was so surprising about these figures?
For starters, it meant that Clinton fared 5 points worse than Obamas 71 percent showing among Latinos in 2012. It also meant that after a year of Trump slighting Latinos claiming a judge could not be impartial because of his Mexican heritage, insulting the famous Latino reporter Jorge Ramos, fat-shaming Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, and labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists and bad hombres and promising to build a border wall to keep them out he still had a better showing than Romney in 2012, by 1 percentage point.
Beyond that, the exit poll figures ran counter to the general trend in American partisan dynamics. Since the 1990s, Latinos have increasingly distanced themselves from the Republican Party and offered their votes to Democrats. Could it be that in 2016, Latinos were thinking twice about lending their muscle to the Democratic Party?
The answer is no. Close inspection of Latino voting patterns across several states including Arizona, California, Florida, New York, and now Nevada reveals that the exit poll credited Donald Trump and Joe Heck, the Republican candidate for Nevadas U.S. Senate, with many more Latino votes than either actually received.
Here is how we reached this conclusion in Nevada. First, we gathered official 2016 election results for 1,703 precincts across the following Nevada counties: Carson City, Churchill, Clark, Douglas, Elko, Lyon, Nye, and Washoe. (Nevada has 1,853 precincts. 98 percent of the states voters live in the precincts we examined.) Next, we compared these actual votes to election results for the same set of precincts in 2012. Then, using information provided by Catalist, a proprietary campaign data vendor, we sorted these comparisons by the known demographics of voters who live within each precinct. Finally, enlisting a statistical technique called ecological inference (developed by Harvard Professor Gary King), we calculate a reliable estimate of how Latinos voted.
Why do we consider our results more accurate than the exit poll, which is a state-by-state survey conducted by Edison Research? Because the poll is based on a sample of voters in select precincts that are targeted for fast data collection to report on election night. Like all other polling efforts, the exit poll is subject to error because the sample may not represent the whole and because people dont always tell the truth about how they voted. Our numbers reflect the actual ballots of 98percent of Nevada voters.
As we said above, the Edison exit poll reported that 60 percent of Latinos backed Clinton, and 29 percent gave their support to Trump in Nevada. The numbers from our analysis are quite different: 88 percent for Clinton, and 10 percent for Trump.
