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Sanders was leading among Nevada Latinos in campaign's last internal survey, pollster says
02/23/2016   By John Wagner | The Washington Post
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Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally at Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville, S.C., on Feb. 21. (Cassi Alexandra for The Washington Post)
 

The pollster for Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Tuesday that his final survey before the Nevada caucuses showed Sanders winning Latino support by nearly the same margin as independent entrance polling that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has sought to discredit.

The representation by Ben Tulchin, Sanders’s pollster, is the latest salvo in a dispute between the two campaigns over which candidate was more popular Saturday with a rapidly growing demographic that will be important to their fortunes in other nominating contests.

Clinton was the overall winner of the Nevada caucuses, winning 52.6 percent support to Sanders’s 47.3 percent.

In one of the bigger surprises of the day, entrance polling conducted by Edison Media Research suggested that Sanders won the Hispanic vote by a margin of 8 percentage points.

The Clinton campaign disputed that possibility, pointing to heavily Latino precincts where the former secretary of state outperformed the Vermont senator.

Tulchin said Tuesday that his polling, conducted shortly before the caucuses, showed Sanders up among likely Latino participants by 6 percentage points. Moreover, he said, his polling had Clinton leading Sanders overall by 5.3 percentage points — nearly identical to the actual result.

Therefore, Tulchin reasoned, it’s perfectly plausible that Edison’s numbers were on the mark. At campaign events in recent days, Sanders has continued to tell audience that he won the Latino vote.

Tulchin said the Clinton camp’s reasoning is flawed because Latino voters live around the entire state, not just in precincts where they are a heavy presence.

He pointed to the precinct where the  University of Nevada, Reno is located. Latinos make up only about 20 percent of that precinct, Tulchin said. But Sanders demonstrated widespread appeal among younger voters regardless of race, he said. Accordingly, Sanders picked up a great deal of Latino support around the university, even though it wouldn’t be considered a heavily Hispanic area, he said.

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