Polling Shatters the Image of a Single-Minded Community

Before 1994, when the specter of Proposition 187 finally induced a number of news organizations to spend the money to poll Latinos about hot-button issues, journalists had an easier time characterizing what Latinos thought. Activists and politicians were only too happy to speak for the so-called Latino community, projecting their own thoughts and feelings onto this wildly diverse ethnic group numbering millions.

Though at first glance it may make sense to turn to elected officials to take the pulse of a particular group, Latino officials from heavily Latino districts are usually elected by an extremely small number of voters. Xavier Becerra, for example, the Los Angeles Democrat who heads the Hispanic Caucus in Congress, represents one of the five congressional districts in the nation with the fewest voters.

But then again, even if a given Latino official garnered mass Latino support within his district, would that make him capable of divining the opinion of Latinos who live elsewhere? Would a reporter go to, say, L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan to ask what whites felt about a particular issue? And what about the majority of middle-class Latinos who don’t live in districts represented by Latino officials; don’t they count?

Not surprisingly, Latinos have often been mistaken as being a homogenous group with a political viewpoint remarkably similar to the largely liberal activists and politicians who long have spoken on their behalf.

The use of polls to gauge Latino opinion is a major tool in the enfranchisement of Latinos, at least in the realm of public opinion. They not only cut out the middlemen, they facilitate the democratic equation of constituents telling their leaders how to vote rather than the current formula of having the leader telling his constituents how to think.

But with the rise of polling of Latinos, there are new challenges to face. In this more competitive landscape, pollsters with distinct approaches are likely to be jockeying to prove the superiority of their findings. On Monday, L.A.’s Spanish-language Channel 52 and La Opinion released a poll on bilingual education that seemed to contradict the findings of both the Los Angeles Times and Field polls. In a press release, Latino pollster Sergio Bendixen decried the “rhetoric” we have heard so far “about what Latinos think of bilingual education.” His poll, he said, asked only the Latinos “in the best position to judge”: parents of L.A. schoolchildren. Where the earlier polls showed that 84% (Times) or 66% (Field) of Latino respondents favored the June ballot initiative to do away with bilingual education, Bendixen’s poll had only 43% of respondents in favor, even as 88% felt that bilingual education was good for their children.

Despite appearances, the competing polls are not contradictory. Indeed, the first two had a different universe of respondents than the last one. The majority in the Times and Fields polls were registered voters. And the vast majority of Latino registered voters are U.S.-born. Bendixen targeted 503 foreign-born Latino parents with children in the Los Angeles Unified School District; only 42% of his sample were voters.

Does the opinion of foreign-born parents count more on the issue of bilingual education than that of the U.S.-born Latino voter? After all, only foreign-born Latinos have children in bilingual programs. But U.S.-born Latinos are more likely to be bilingual educators or advocates than are the foreign-born. Indeed, it was U.S.-born Latinos who fought for bilingual education in the early 1970s before the average Latin American immigrant arrived in the U.S.

While the growth of polling among Latinos is a good thing, surveying nonvoters on electoral matters seems a bit risky, given that the results cannot be compared with election returns to test their validity. Like it or not, in U.S. democracy, a vote is still stronger than an opinion.

But if Latino polls come out the way you don’t like, you can always say that the pollsters asked the wrong Latinos. When Latino voters trounced Tom Hayden at the polls in the last Los Angeles mayoral election, his flacks and some reporters implied that those weren’t the Latinos the state senator had been courting.

On Tuesday, the Latino Issues Forum in San Francisco issued yet another poll that asked Latino voters what they thought of the bilingual education initiative. Two different wordings of the question were asked and, not surprisingly, they elicited contradictory responses. The poll sponsors’ conclusion: Latino voters are confused about “the implications of the Unz initiative” and need to be “educated.” This was the same response bilingual advocates had to the 43% who favored the initiative in the La Opinion poll.

There will be a lot more polls on bilingual education before June. Latinos will be asked whether they support the use of a pedagogical method based on sophisticated linguistic theory that is difficult to explain. This endeavor is the equivalent of asking Anglo parents whether they’d prefer their children to learn to read through phonics or whole language. Whether pro or con, most respondents will be basing their answer on a mixture of bias and faith. But that’s politics.