Latinos vote at a polling station in El Gallo Restaurant on November 8 in Los Angeles, California. | Getty Latino groups argue exit polls were too generous to Trump

Hispanic political groups are vigorously disputing the exit poll data showing increased Latino support for Donald Trump.

It was one of the most counterintuitive findings in a shocking election: 29 percent of Latino voters cast their ballots for Trump, according to the networks’ exit poll. After starting his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, promoting a “deportation force,” and appealing to white nationalists, had Trump actually done better among Latinos than Mitt Romney?


Nope, contended a coalition of Latino groups this week. They’re placing their faith in a poll conducted the night before the election by Latino Decisions, a firm that specializes in studying Hispanic Americans that found 18 percent of Latinos voting for Trump.

That’s a “record low” for a GOP presidential candidate, said National Council of La Raza president Janet Murguía at a press conference with other Hispanic leaders on Thursday. “It is an insult to us as Latinos to keep hearing the media ignoring the empirical data that was presented by Latino Decisions.”

Exit polling has been a longstanding point of frustration for Latino groups. They say that exit polls were never designed to analyze demographic preferences, but the media have run with the crosstabs anyway to assess Latino voting behavior. They point to 2004, when the exit polls said 44 percent of Latinos voted for President George W. Bush. The figure was widely criticized by other polling analysts, including the Pew Research Center, and the groups behind the election poll later acknowledged that crunching their own numbers differently put the figure more at 40 percent support for Bush.

This time, activists fear that candidates will think they can get away with rhetoric that scapegoats Latinos if it looks like Trump did relatively well with the community anyway.

“I think that some folks may try to excuse… or be emboldened by that approach of division if they thought that it made no difference,” said Clarissa Martinez, who heads up advocacy at NCLR. “But it did.”

Latino Decisions’ Election Eve poll (in the field Nov. 4-7) found that 79 percent of Latinos backed Clinton, compared to 18 percent for Trump. The survey of 5,600 Latino voters had a national margin of error of 1.8 percentage points. Its findings were in line with a handful of other large national polls of Hispanics leading up to the vote.

Latino Decisions Co-Founder Matt Barreto said in an interview Friday that it’s not that the exit poll is a bad survey, it just shouldn’t be used to analyze the electorate after the voting’s over.

Since the exit polls were designed to help news broadcasts call the elections, they tend to focus on bellwether precincts, rather than a random sample.

“Most Americans, especially most minorities, do not live in these 50-50 tossup precincts, so they’re not getting the true vote reflection of minorities,” Barreto said.

Joe Lenski, an executive vice president at Edison Research – the company that conducts the exit poll for a consortium of news organizations – stood by its finding in an interview. He said the exit poll better reflects the opinions of Hispanic voters nationwide than the Latino Decisions survey.

"Look at where they do the polling," Lenski said, charging that Latino Decisions does a higher intensity of calls in heavily Latino areas. "They are speaking to Hispanics solely in high-density Hispanic areas. We are speaking to Hispanics all over the country."

“I think what they are missing is a disconnect between Hispanics who live in high-density Hispanic areas and might be more likely to be Spanish-speaking and might be more likely to be first- or second-generation immigrants,” Lenski added, “and those who don’t live in high-density Hispanic areas, who might be third- or fourth-generation, less likely to be Spanish-speaking and more assimilated.”

Barreto said Lenski’s description of Latino Decisions’ methodology was “100% untrue.” At the very least, Barreto said, Lenski was confusing their pre-election survey with a subsequent study of actual votes the firm does to test their conclusions.

Barreto said Latino Decisions does speak to Hispanics all over the country – respondents are randomly drawn from a representative statewide sample, then weighted to match Census demographics in a particular state – so there are more respondents from states like Florida and Texas. (He further outlined his findings and methods in a Washington Post op-ed.)

Barreto said his firm does look at the actual results in heavily Latino precincts, which he said is the “best way in the short run” to verify the results of pre-election and exit polls. They found no evidence of an uptick in support for Trump in precincts that are 90 percent Latino.

“If the exit polls were right, we should have seen that trend in Latino areas,” Barreto said. “Trump was in the single digits in all of these heavily Latino precincts.”

Even if the exit polls were accurate, said Martinez, Trump should hardly be thrilled.

“We’re still talking about seven out of 10 Latinos” opposing him, she said, “which is an overwhelming majority.”

