Newest Latino Decisions Poll Has Obama at 70% and Romney at 22% Among US Latino Voters

Jul 18, 2012
1:26 PM

Today Latino Decisions published a new poll commissioned by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and America’s Voice that shows President Obama increase his lead over Mitt Romney among US Latino voters. The latest results reported that Obama was favored by 70% of those polled with Romney earning 22% support from poll participants. The following image shows how this poll has tracked since the GOP primaries of 2011. (Today's poll results have a margin of error of +/- 4.4%, according to Latino Decisions)

In addition, the poll also broke down who is supporting Obama and who is supporting Romney. Here is what Latino Decisions said about the next chart: "Obama maintains a substantial lead over Romney within nearly all segments of the Latino electorate. Among foreign-born, naturalized citizens Obama leads 72% to 19% and among U.S.-born Latinos he leads 69% to 25%. Similarly, Obama polls ahead of Romney by a large margin, 76% to 15% among Spanish dominant Latinos, and also has a healthy lead of 66% to 28% from English dominant. Two concerns for Romney may be that 13% of self-identified Latino Republicans say they will cross-over and vote for Obama and 60% of Independents plan to vote for Obama. In contrast only 2% of Democrats say they plan to vote for Romney."

Finally, Latino Decisions ended its post with a cautionary note about polls surrounding the US Latino vote. We added it here since it gives this poll and other polls some context:

An important note on Latino polls

As the election draws near, more and more poll results will be reported for Latino voters. We caution readers against relying on small Latino samples taken from a larger national poll. Instead, more reliable results will be found in polls that focus exclusively on Latino voters and maintain a larger sample size. For example, Latino samples taken from larger national polls are often small, between 80 – 200 and carry a margin of error between 8 – 11%. Further, because the overall target is all voters, the interviewers are not bilingual, and often try to call-back Spanish-dominant respondents who they could not communicate with in English. This results in greatly underestimating the number of immigrant and Spanish-speaking voters in polls. A recent poll from Quinnipiac reported a sample of just 143 Latinos, and 14% of interviews conducted in Spanish, an unacceptably low number. Finally, national polls are not designed to get an accurate geographic representation of Latinos because they draw a nationally proportionate sample of all Americans, and pick up Latino respondents wherever they surface. The Latino population maintains substantially different patterns of residence than the national population and as such, the Latino sample is rarely representative of the overall Latino population. For example, New Mexico has the 8th largest Latino population, but nationally it ranks 36th in size. Likewise Ohio has the 7th largest population nationally, but ranks 20th among Latino states. 

Latino Decisions interviewed 504 Latino registered voters between July 7-16, 2012 using live telephone callers, sampled across all 50 states, and the Latino population in our sample is proportionate to the actual Latino population across all states. A mix of landline and cell phone-only households were called, and up to 5 attempts were made per number. Latino respondents had the opportunity to complete the survey in either English or Spanish, using fully bilingual callers, and overall 39% of Latinos chose to complete the survey in Spanish. Overall, the sample has a margin of error of +/- 4.4%. Additional survey results will be reported over the next several days.