NAES Reports on Hispanic Voters

Legacy blog posts The 2004 Race

The National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES) has just weighed in with its massive 81,422 interview rolling survey on the issue of Hispanic voter preference in the 2004 elections. They combined their rolling tracking surveys for the eight weeks before the election and and two weeks after to obtain a sample of 907 Hispanic registered voters. They compared the vote preference to that measured among Hispanic registrants over the same time period in 2000. The money quote:

There has been recent disagreement over how well Bush did among Hispanics. The television network-Associated Press national exit poll taken on Election Day gave him 44 percent of their votes, compared to 35 percent in 2000. Then a study by Ana Maria Arumi of NBC News, aggregating the 51 individual 2004 exit polls conducted in every state for the same sponsors concluded that the Bush share was 40 percent. But Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a research group that deals with political issues, contended an exit poll he conducted showed Bush got only 33 percent. 

The Annenberg data, which gave Bush 41 percent, cannot resolve the dispute. But it suggests strongly that Bush made significant gains whose precise magnitude is uncertain. The margin of error for the 2004 Annenberg data was plus or minus three percentage points [emphasis and links added].

Note the caveat — This is a telephone survey of registered voters, some of whom did not vote:

Through both ten week periods, the degree of Hispanic support for each of the major party candidates remained quite level. But there is no way of knowing which pre-election respondents voted as they expected, or voted at all. Nor are post-election recollections as reliable as what people tell exit pollsters on Election Day; there is usually a tendency for more respondents to say they voted for the winner than actually did so.

Nonetheless, the report makes strictly apples-to-apples comparisons of interviews done over the same period time in its 2000 and 2004 surveys, and this sample has none of the clustering issues inherent in exit polling. The unusually large number of interviews helps show where Bush’s gains (from 35% in 2000 to 41% this year) occurred. For example, those increases were greatest among Hispanic men and those living in the South and Northeast.

Today’s report also includes results from 3,592 Hispanic registered voters interviewed over the course of the year. It provides results for a variety of major issues and political attitudes broken out by national heritage: Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba Spain, Central America, South America. I have not had a chance to do more than skim the tables, but this report provides an unmatched resource.

I am a huge fan of the Annenberg Survey, for reasons I resolve to explain at some point in the New Year. Two things to note: Their sampling and telephone interviewing methodologies are absolutely top notch, and their massive rolling average tracking program is tailor made for exactly this sort of analysis. The report and their methodology page explain it all.

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is political pollster with deep and varied experience across survey research, campaigns, and media. The original "Mystery Pollster" and co-creator of Pollster.com, he explains complex concepts to a multitude of audiences and how data informs politics and decision-making. A researcher and consultant who crafts effective questions and identifies innovative solutions to deliver results. An award winning political journalist who brings insights and crafts compelling narratives from chaotic data.