2012 Election Eve Poll

Latino Decisions completed 5,600 interviews with Latinos who have already voted, or were certain to vote in the November 6, 2012 presidential election. Interviews were conducted via telephone with live callers, all of whom were bilingual, and interviews were completed in the language of preference of the respondent. Overall, 62% of interviews were completed in English and 38% in Spanish. Respondents were reached on landline and cell phone-only households, from November 1-5, 2012 and interviews averaged 12 minutes in length.

Voters were pre-screened based on their vote history in previous presidential elections, and date of registration to include a mix of new registrants and first-time voters. Respondents were asked if they had already voted early, and if not, if they were 100% certain they would vote on November 6th. Any respondent who was not certain was terminated. Using this same methodology in 2010, 88% of the interviewed sample was subsequently confirmed (validated) as having voted, without any meaningful deviation from reported totals.

For 11 individual states, a minimum of 400 interviews were completed to provide state-specific reliable estimates. For the remaining 39 states and the District of Columbia an additional national sample was completed, and then combined with the 11 stand-alone state samples for an overall combined nationally proportionate sample. The national sample of 5,600 is directly proportionate to the Latino voter population nationwide, and is weighted to reflect the known Census demographics for Latino voters.

The national sample carries an overall margin of error of 1.8%. This margin-of-error is adjusted to account for the design effect resulting from 12 unique sample strata of varying size and post-stratification weighting used to derive the national estimate. California and Florida each had 800 completed interviews and carry a margin of error of 3.5%. The remaining 9 individual states sampled — Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia — all had 400 completed interviews and carry a margin of error of 4.9%. Interviewing was administered and overseen by Pacific Market Research.