Minority turnout and the racial breakdown of polls

First, as Chait repeatedly concedes, we don’t know what the ultimate electorate will look like this November. That really should be the end of the argument — if we don’t know what the racial breakdown is going to be, it’s hard to criticize the pollsters for under-sampling minorities. After all, almost all pollsters weight their base sample of adults to CPS (current population survey) estimates to ensure the base sample reflects the actual population; after that, the data simply are what they are.

It’s true that the minority share of the electorate increased every year from 1996 through 2008. But there’s a reason that 1996 is always used as a start date: After declining every election from 1980 through 1988, the white share of the vote suddenly ticked up two points in 1992. In other words, these things aren’t one-way ratchets (and while there is no H. Ross Perot this year, the underlying white working-class angst that propelled his candidacy is very much present, as writers on the left repeatedly have observed).

While one can certainly make the case that the minority share of the electorate will be the same in 2012 as in 2008, or even greater than 2008 (more implausible, as I argue here), one can also look at things such as low Latino enthusiasm and the disproportionate impact the recession has had on minority registration, and suspect that it might fall.

The latter factor is especially important — the unusually white registered-voter samples might simply reflect the fact that Latino registration dropped from 11.6 million in 2008 to 10.9 million in 2010.