Donald Trump did not win 34% of Latino vote in Texas. He won much less.

*The evidence is mounting that Donald Trump didn’t do as well as he and some analysts say he did. Texas Latinos soundly rejected his candidacy. VL

By Francisco Pedraza and Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta, The Washington Post (4 minute read)

Ever since the national exit poll reported that 29 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump, the accuracy of that number has been debated. In particular, some have questioned whether it is an overestimate, citing a separate survey of Latino voters by the polling firm Latino Decisions that reported that 18 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump.

Now, analysis of precinct data from Texas and several other states suggests that, indeed, the exit poll overestimated how many Latinos voted for Trump.

The exit poll for Texas reported that 61 percent of Hispanics voted for Clinton and 34 percent for Trump. On its face, this seems implausible. Clinton won 560,000 more votes in Texas than Obama did in 2012. Moreover, voter turnout in Texas was two points higher this year than in 2012, and Hispanics are the fastest-growing segment of the Texas electorate. Is it possible that Clinton gained 560,000 votes in Texas while winning only 61 percent of Hispanic votes?

Some analysts looking at county-level data think that rural Hispanic voters shifted toward Trump, as Geraldo Cadava argued, or that Clinton did worse with Hispanic voters than Obama, as Harry Enten argued. But counties can be large and, therefore, not well suited to learning about the behavior of subgroups like Hispanics.

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Instead, we draw on 4,372 precincts across Texas. These precincts cover all regions of the state and more than 75 percent of its Latino population. You can download our data here.

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Francisco I. Pedraza is assistant professor of political science and public policy at the University of California at Riverside. Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta is a political science PhD student at the University of California at Los Angeles. Additional graphs are available here.