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John Sexton, at Verum Serum Blog, talks today about Mort Kondracke and Megan McCain using rough language to blame Sarah Palin for the Republican "loss" of the Senate. First of all, who in the world cares about anything said by either Mort Kondracke or, especially, Megan McCain? Secondly, the Republicans didn't "lose" the Senate." They just failed (but not by much) to win it back.
John provides the most valid reason for the Republican failure to win the Senate: The Latino vote.
Nate Silver who took a look at where Democrats out-performed polling. Though the trend isn’t crystal clear, it seems possible that a big part of wins in Nevada, California and Colorado had to do with Hispanic voting:
“There is one overarching reason why the polls were wrong in Nevada,” Mr. Barreto wrote in an e-mail to FiveThirtyEight. “The Latino vote.”
His firm, which conducts interviews in both English and Spanish, had found that Latino voters — somewhat against the conventional wisdom — were relatively engaged by this election and for the most part were going to vote Democratic. Mr. Barreto also found that Latino voters who prefer to speak Spanish — about 40 percent of Latino voters in California meet this description, he told me — are particularly likely to vote Democratic. Pollsters who don’t conduct bilingual interviewing at all, or who make it cumbersome for the respondent to take the poll in Spanish, may be missing these voters.
John adds: So when the President went on Univision a week before the election and suggested Hispanics should “punish their enemies,” I think we have to look at the results and consider the real possibility that they listened.
