What The Polls Tell Us About Latinos
According to dueling polls released this week President Barack Obama’s popularity rating among Latinos is dragging, it’s the lowest his popularity has ever been.
ImpreMedia/Latino Decisions has Obama at a 63% approval rating; the venerable Gallup poll has him at 44%.
A couple of things to take into account: the Gallup numbers, as best as I can tell, were culled from a general population, ongoing tracking poll. Gallup puts out a weekly presidential approval poll and tracks it over time. What they seem to have done is extract the self-identified Latinos from their usual poll and called it a measure of Latino attitudes, which is a lot like taking the beans out of a plate of pork and beans and calling it frijoles borrachos. ImpreMedia came up with their measure by polling Latinos in the states with the largest Latino population. And while that’s a little better, it’s just a snapshot.
The thing about polls is that they’ll never be more than a snapshot. You can’t go and ask every Latino in the country how they feel about the President. The best that you can do is identify a scientifically calculated sample of Latinos and derive general Latino attitudes from that group. If you think about it, even elections aren’t an accurate representation of Latino attitudes – they only measure the feelings of registered Latino voters who bothered to go to the polls. But elections are the polls that count because they’re the ones that stick. It makes this whole poll watching thing kinda useless – fun, but useless.
Both polls I mentioned were reported with their respective caveats. Here’s the impreMedia caveat, as reported in USA Today:
…the poll was conducted from July 30 to Aug. 9, before the Department of Homeland Security announced a policy on deportation of illegal immigrants. The policy, largely favored by Hispanic advocacy groups, will focus more on people with criminal records.
And this is Gallup’s, reported in newsmax.com:
The drop came in the same week that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced her department was going to review the cases of 300,000 illegal aliens in deportation proceedings and allow “low-priority” cases to stay in the country and receive work permits.
Same explanation, different numbers. They make Latinos look fickle. The unspoken conclusion is to come back next week, when they’ll do another poll under the effect of different news headlines and we’ll see how Latino attitudes have changed.
Campaign hacks, journalists and political scientists love these things. They help them write donor letters, news stories and research articles. And that’s mostly because opinion polls are by and large accurate – they paint a good picture of a specific moment in time given specific circumstances. The questions themselves are also relevant. The difference between “How are you today?” and “Are you feeling bad today?” is the difference between good and not bad.
And these polls also have a reflective quality. They say as much about the President as they do about Latinos, and you can’t take either of the conclusions to the bank to cash them. The best that you can do is follow the trends in order to project them all the way to election day. Obama had a 74% Latino approval when he took office; now it’s either 63% or 44%, depending on what poll you believe. Either way he’s taking a nose-dive among the selectively random Latinos who took part in the polls.
This is significant, given the President’s efforts of late to “win back” the Latino community. It was the polls that led him to believe he was losing them to begin with. But then this could all change by next week – depending on the news headlines and the Latinos who agree to answer the poll.
I’m not sure what the President’s number among Latinos will be next month. Then again, no pollster has bothered to ask me.
Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda
[Image by cobrasoft and News Taco]
