Are Hispanic voters trending to Donald Trump? It seems unlikely, but there’s at least a little polling evidence that that’s been happening over the past week.
The evidence comes from the Los Angeles Times/USC poll, and so should be taken with a grain of salt. As Nate Cohn reported October 12 in the New York Time Upshot blog, the LAT/USC poll employs a weighting procedure that applies different weights to respondents in dozens of different and, in some cases, very small subgroups. That can result in the idiosyncratic responses of one individual tilting the total poll results in an almost certainly misleading fashion. Thus, one 19-year-old black male in Illinois who supported Donald Trump raised Trump’s overall percentage in the total line by a full 1 percent.
What caught my eye was that the Hispanic support for Hillary Clinton suddenly shifted downward from the 54 to 61 percent level shown between the end of the two parties’ national conventions until Oct. 30. During that period, Donald Trump’s Hispanic percentages were in the range of 24 to 34 percent, with one brief spike upward to 39 percent. That’s higher than the numbers Trump is getting from Hispanics in other polls, just as LAT/USC has been showing Trump running better than just about any other poll. But it’s not totally implausible and it held pretty steady.
Now LAT/USC is showing Hispanics voting 47 percent for Clinton and 44 percent for Trump. It’s possible that this represents the changed responses of just a few individuals, in a poll which asks the same panel of respondents for their preferences at regular intervals. But the total number of Hispanic respondents is listed at 181 — small but not totally suspect.
Does this represent a surge of Hispanics toward Trump or away from Clinton? Probably not, in my view. But if it does, the big surges of Hispanic early voting in Nevada and Florida may not be as good a sign for Clinton as every analyst has assumed.
