Alan Gomez

USA TODAY

MIAMI — The Hispanic vote was bigger and more influential in the 2016 presidential election, just as predicted, but it also provided one surprise: more support for President-elect Donald Trump than expected.

Hispanics favored Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton 65% to 29%, a 36-point difference that helped her secure winning margins in states like Nevada and Colorado and kept her competitive late into the night in other key battleground states.

But that margin, based on exit polling conducted by Edison Research, was smaller than the 71%-27% split that President Obama won in 2012. And it was smaller than the 72%-21% her husband, former president Bill Clinton, won in 1996.

Hillary Clinton's final tally also ran counter to polls leading up to Election Day that had Trump's support far lower, including a Latino Decisions poll conducted just before the election in eight swing states that estimated Trump's support among Hispanics at just 18%. After a campaign that started with Trump referring to some Mexicans as rapists, calling for mass deportations and proposing a wall along the southwestern border, the final results left Hispanics, immigration advocacy groups and polling experts scratching their heads.

"That's implausible," said Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political science professor who studies public opinion and election voting behavior.

Abramowitz and others figured Trump's support would be minimal.

He said polling experts will spend the next few weeks crunching election data to see if there were flaws in the predictions or the exit polls. In 2004, for example, exit polls showed President George W. Bush winning 44% of the Hispanic vote, which was later revised down to 40% once more detailed voter information came out.

"We're going to see some debate about this question," Abramowitz said.

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Despite the outcome, polling experts say a larger Hispanic margin for Clinton wouldn't have been able to swing the election. Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida, said Hispanics couldn't have offset the massive gains Trump made with white voters from Florida to North Carolina to Pennsylvania.

"You can't lay this on Hispanics," Smith said. "I don't think that's where the election was won or lost. It had to do with white, suburban voters, especially women, breaking much more for Trump than anyone expected."

While pollsters begin sorting through the voting data, Hispanics who voted for Trump say they paid little attention to the polls and pundits anyway.

Denise Galvez, a Cuban American who co-founded "Latinas for Trump," said they all focused too heavily on Trump's bombastic rhetoric and ignored the quiet, growing share of the Hispanic electorate that was willing to understand his platform. Galvez said she never believed that he really wanted to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants or that he felt all Mexicans were rapists and drug dealers.

"I knew and acknowledged his faults," she said. "But everybody took him out of context. How everybody extrapolates that he hates all Mexicans and he hates all Hispanics and he hates all immigrants is absolutely ridiculous."

Instead, Galvez said, Trump pushed a reasonable immigration strategy that would target undocumented immigrants with criminal records, find a solution for those who are working hard in the U.S. and finally gain control of the country's borders.

For Josefina Rocabado, 50, who immigrated to Miami from the Dominican Republic in 1979, Trump's economic policies were more important. The insurance company manager said she felt insulted by the Clinton campaign's "brainwashing" of Hispanics by suggesting those who didn't support the Democrat were betraying their roots rather than being more motivated by other issues.

"Talk to me about what's happening in my house," Rocabado said. "I have three kids, one with special needs. In the past eight years, we went from being in the middle class to the bottom of the middle class. We need to pay bills."

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Antonio Salguero, 18, who was born in the U.S. to Guatemalan parents, said he had reservations about Trump but thought too many Hispanics simply ignored Clinton's flaws. The first-time voter rattled off questions over the candidate's handling of a private email server and her repeated "lies" throughout the election.

"If there was a better option, I would've voted for them," Salguero said. "But (Trump) seemed better than Clinton."

Tuesday's outcome may have upset many Hispanics in the U.S., but Abramowitz said there were signs of hope in the long term as the size of the Hispanic population continues to grow.

The Hispanic share of the national vote rose from 8% in 2004 to 10% in 2012 to 11% in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center and exit polling conducted by Edison Research. Abramowitz said that resulted in diminishing Republican leads in states like Arizona and Texas. He pointed to more Hispanics playing a factor in Southern states like Georgia. And he said the share of the white vote will only continue to fall.

"In the long term, that's a significant thing," he said. "In this election, it wasn't nearly enough to swing those states. But that's a trend that is only going to continue."