Latino Decisions: Latinos’ Support for Obama Solid in Florida

10/30/2012

With the election less than two weeks away there has been a great deal of speculation about the Latino community’s support for President Obama, particularly in Florida. Most recently, an Interactive Voice Response survey, or “robo-poll,” conducted on October 10-11 by Florida International University showed that 50.7% of Latinos in Florida who identified themselves as likely voters would vote for President Obama, with 44.2% supporting Governor Romney. With a margin of error of 3.65%, this puts the race at dead even in Florida.

These figures are probably not accurate for two reasons (hat-tip to Marc Caputo of the Miami Herald). One is that the FIU poll did not include cell phones. There is a growing consensus that omitting cell phones biases polling results in favor of the Republican Party. Latino Decisions surveys include cell phone only households in their samples.

Another issue is that the FIU figures do not accurately account for the political attitudes of Cuban Americans. For a variety of reasons, antipathy for leftist politics arguably at the top of the list, Cuban Americans are unique among Latinos because they are generally supportive of the Republican Party. For example, as seen in Figure 1, data collected by Latino Decisions from registered Latino voters in Florida on September 22-28 show that Cuban Americans are much more likely to identify as Republicans than Puerto Ricans, the second largest (and growing) group of Latinos in Florida. The margin of error in this poll was 4.9%. Both landline and cell phones were called. This same poll shows that 39% of Cuban Americans intend to vote for Obama (50% for Romney), compared to 71% of all other Latinos in the poll (22% for Romney). The issue here is that the FIU results were not “weighted” to account for the possibility that Cuban Americans—i.e., votes for Romney—were overrepresented in the poll relative to their actual share of Florida’s Latino electorate. The Latino Decisions data discussed above were corrected in this manner.

The upshot of all of this is that any softening of Latino support for Obama in Florida is, at the very least, overestimated. If we compare the results of the September Latino Decisions poll to one they conducted in June, support for President Obama among Latinos in Florida has been solid over the summer (Figure 2). Note that with a 4.9% margin of error the shifts in the data over time are not statistically significant, though perhaps indicative of a weak trend of increased support for the President.

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http://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/2012/10/30/latinos-support-for-obama-solid-in-florida/