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A New NBC/WSJ Poll Has Trump Improving Among Nevada Latinos? “Highly Unlikely”

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A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has Donald Trump improving his standing among Nevada Latino voters by 15 points?

Yeah right. We’ve been down this road before. In 2010, most pollsters expected Harry Reid to lose by 4 points. Except that he won by 5 points. Most pollsters didn’t — and don’t — speak Spanish, and got the Latino vote wrong — by a mile.

Nevada political guru, Jon Ralston of Ralston Reports, explained to host Chuck Todd exactly what’s going on in the state — and why this poll might not be accurate. The key conversation begins at about the 01:50 mark:

Chuck Todd himself admits during the segment that the pollster thought the sample of Latinos might have problems. Expert pollsters Latino Decisions — who have seen this movie before, during 2010 — chimed in on Twitter:

In his new piece earlier today, Frank Wilkinson goes into further detail on what to look at in polls of Latino voters:

[Emory University political scientist Alan] Abramowitz, in an e-mail, pointed out that Latino Decisions has an “excellent” track record from 2012 and that its large margin for Clinton has been supported by other polls that also used large samples of Hispanics, conducted interviews in both Spanish and English and employed other techniques designed to obtain more representative voter samples. (Latino Decisions principals Matt Barreto and Gary Segura are advising the Clinton campaign. “We are completely firewalled off from the rest of our firm this cycle,” Barreto told me in an e-mail.)

presentation by Latino Decisions pollster Gabriel Sanchez pointed out that 2010 Senate polls in Nevada and Colorado, both of which have large Hispanic populations, generally underestimated Democratic support. (Democrats won both contests.) Many polls similarly undercounted Obama’s Hispanic support in 2012.

And, here’s what our own Frank Sharry tweeted – and the response from Ralston: