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American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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More #post-election info: 28% Latino poverty rate

Latino Poverty Rate Climbs to 28%

The numbers released Wednesday

a week after the election

by the Census Bureau are part of a newly developed supplemental poverty measure. Devised a year ago, this measure provides a fuller picture of poverty that the government believes can be used to assess safety-net programs by factoring in living expenses and taxpayer-provided benefits that the official formula leaves out.

Based on the revised formula, the number of poor people exceeded the 49 million, or 16 percent of the population, who were living below the poverty line in 2010. That came as more people in the slowly improving economy picked up low-wage jobs last year but still struggled to pay living expenses. The revised poverty rate of 16.1 percent also is higher than the record 46.2 million, or 15 percent, that the government’s official estimate reported in September.

Again, after the election, we’re told that

Hispanics and Asians also saw much higher rates of poverty, 28 percent and 16.9 percent, respectively, compared with rates of 25.4 percent and 12.3 percent under the official formula.

Oh, We Forgot to Tell You …

Related,
Hispanic Straw Men

Cross-posted at Liberty Unyielding.

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My friend Pete goes to the diner

Pete Ingemi – Da Tech Guy – and I were talking about micro-pollsters the other day, and I’m not alone in finding the sample size, em, lacking, to put it midly,

I took a look at the poll and it didn’t take long to notice some ….interestingissues to wit:

This is the sixth release of an 11-week tracking poll of Latino registered voters. Each week impreMedia and Latino Decisions will release a new rolling cross-section of 300 completed interviews with Latino registered voters across all 50 states. Battleground interviewers are combined across all six weeks and are 267 completed interviews, with Florida accounting for the largest share of battleground states.

So the battle ground figures in this poll are actually mini samples taken over six weeks while opinions might be changing. That’s bad enough but consider one more thing:

Battleground states: FL, NV, CO, AZ, OH, NH, NC, VA, IA, MO (all 7 points or smaller margin in current presidential polls)

Forget the insanity of trying to extrapolate the latino vote over fifty states based on a 300 person sample. Let’s look at the 10 battleground states 267 answers over 10 states.

Pete illustrates his point,

As I mentioned the other day, the Pew Hispanic Center reports that 23.7 million Latinos are eligible to vote in the USA (myself included).

Small sample? Huge margin of error?

Yes. Yes.

And we are to assume that is a significant enough ramdom sample?

Cross-posted in The Green Room.

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Like micro-breweries, micro-pollsters?

Doug Mataconis posts, Poll: Obama Has 52 Point Lead Over Romney Among Latinos, claiming it as evidence of “the depths to which the popularity of the Republican Party has sunk among Latino voters”.

Bear in mind that the Pew Hispanic Center reports that 23.7 million Latinos are eligible to vote in the USA (myself included).

Now, if you actually look at the poll,

About the Poll
This is the sixth release of an 11-week tracking poll of Latino registered voters. Each week impreMedia and
Latino Decisions will release a new rolling cross-section of 300 completed interviews with Latino registered voters across all 50 states. Battleground interviewers are combined across all six weeks and are 267 completed interviews, with Florida accounting for the largest share of battleground states. Interviews are conducted in
English or Spanish, at the preference of the respondent, all conducted by bilingual interviewers at Latino Decisions calling center, Pacific Market Research. The survey averaged 10 minutes in length, and has an overall margin of error of 5.6% on results that approach a 50/50 distribution. All respondents confirm that
they are Hispanic or Latino and currently registered to vote. This third wave of the survey was fielded Sept 21-Sept 27, 2012

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I interpret this to mean that they talked to a total of 267 people in 10 states, and after a 10 minute call (the ones at work couldn’t come to the phone), 194 said they prefer Obama over Romney, give or take 10 people.

And that is supposed to be evidence of “the depths to which the popularity of the Republican Party has sunk among Latino voters”?

Meanwhile, a poll with a sample size of 160 people and an 8-point margin of error is brought to you by the Washington Post-ABC pollsters.

Like micro-breweries, micro-pollsters?

UPDATE,
THE PARADE OF BAD POLLS, CONTINUED

For what it’s worth,
Margins of error range from 2% to 4% in national polls, with six out of the seven Real Clear Politics uses on their average staying in the 2% to 3.5% range. An overall margin of error of 5.6% is huge.

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Politico on the Latino vote: “Theatrics won’t woo Latinos”

IF (big “if”), if there is such a thing as a “Latino vote”, which I completely doubt, Alfonso Aguilar writing at Politico says Theatrics won’t woo Latinos

Can the administration’s Latino strategy work? Judging from the response from Latinos, I don’t think so. His trip to Puerto Rico was criticized for being too short and empty of substance. The most recent Gallup Poll shows Latino support for Obama plummeting to an average of 52 percent for June, down from 74 percent at the beginning of his term.
…
Latinos surely remember that President George W. Bush sent two top Cabinet members to the Hill in ’07 to negotiate an immigration reform plan with the Democratic leadership, not knowing if he had the necessary votes to pass it. Though Bush failed, they recognize he showed presidential leadership in trying to find a solution to this complex problem. Why can’t Obama do the same now?

With Puerto Rican voters in Florida, the strategy most likely won’t work either. They don’t care as much about immigration as other Latino groups. But like most Americans, Latinos are frustrated with the administration’s economic policies. They see unemployment stuck at about 9 percent, with Latino unemployment considerably higher, at roughly 12 percent. It’s going to take more than a trip to Puerto Rico to get their vote.

Obama had his chance. He raised the hopes of Latinos and then didn’t deliver.

This doesn’t mean that the majority of Latinos are going to vote Republican. But it does mean that many will consider voting for the Republican candidate. If the GOP nominee gets at least 40 percent of the Latino vote — and can win states like Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico — Obama could possibly be defeated in 2012.

Is there such a thing as a “Latino vote”, when you have millions of people from two dozen countries, many languages, every social/educational/cultural background, and every ethnicity known to mankind?

Cross-posted at The Green Room.

UPDATE
Linked by Bettina. Thanks!

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The spin: Republicans should pander to Latinos

Drew at Ace’s looks at the Post-Election Spin: Republicans Better Suck Up To Hispanics Or They Are Doomed! DOOMED! and finds,

There’s a lot of this going around but this story in Politico is as good a representative of the genre as any other.

Hispanic voters saved the Democratic Party Tuesday — buoying Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, keeping California blue, playing an outsize role in preserving the party’s Senate majority and demonstrating a partisan loyalty Democrats didn’t exactly earn in two years of inaction on immigration policy.But that support is anything but certain for 2012, and both parties face difficult and immediate choices when it comes to the Latino vote as they position themselves for the presidential election. Democrats face open demands from Hispanic leaders for a reward for their votes. President Barack Obama could erect a Western bulwark for his reelection campaign by — as Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) suggested to POLITICO — pressing for broad immigration reform in the lame-duck session. But immigration could also prove, like health care, a polarizing, impolitic detour from the economic issues preoccupying voters.

Republicans, meanwhile, were carried to power by a conservative base that is, if anything, even less open to compromise on immigration — or anything else — than was the last Congress. And they head into the 2012 election cycle risking the same pattern that sunk Meg Whitman in California: a primary campaign that drags candidates to the right on immigration, only to find that they can’t plausibly return to ask for the support of Hispanics in November.

Ok, let’s take a look at those two races cited in the story…

Sharon Angle didn’t lose because she didn’t get enough Hispanic voters, she lost because she didn’t get nearly enough white and women voters. She vastly underperformed with those groups compared to winning GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Sandoval.

Sandoval easily won his race against Rory Reid 53-41%. He won whites 62-32 and women 50-46. He lost Hispanics to Reid 64-33 (even though Sandoval is of Hispanic heritage himself).

Now take a look at Angle who lost to Harry Reid 50-45%. She won whites 53-41 over Reid but that significantly underperformed Sandoval’s 30% margin. She lost women to Reid 53-32, again under-performing Sandoval by a significant margin.

When it came to Hispanic voters, she lost to Reid 68-30. Angle was more or less in the neighborhood of Sandoval’s vote with that group and in line with the 34% of the Hispanic vote Republicans won nationally.

What was more fatal to Angle, the white vote or the Hispanic vote?

Why no stories about how Democrats in Nevada have a ‘white voter problem’?

Drew points out that

assuming Hispanics are motivated solely by talk of ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ is myopic at best and at worst simply wrong.

During my travels last week I was pondering the paternalistic/populist mindset in Latin America. If a sizeable number of immigrants (legal or otherwise) expect a paternalistic/populist USA, the Dems will forever appeal to that segment of the electorate.

However, if the new immigrants – regardless of educational or economic background – are go-getters who are bursting with entrepreneurial spirit and are self-reliant, the Republicans better get their message across to them.

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