Prof. Sophia Jordán Wallace talks with Naomi Ishisaka in The Seattle Times for her column and discusses Latino politics.
“Demography is destiny.”
That belief, that argues that a diversifying U.S. population will shift the electorate toward the left, has held strong for decades.
In the nearly two weeks since the election, numerous stories and think pieces have already been written on widely circulated early exit polls, showing a shift toward Trump by Latino men and Black men, in particular.
I reached out to Sophia Jordán Wallace, a University of Washington political science professor, social justice fellow and the director of the Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality and Race to try to understand more.
Wallace specializes in Latino politics, politics of race and ethnicity, immigration politics and policy, public opinion and legislative politics. She said we all need to stop and take a beat.
“Exit polling is not high quality polling, and so that part makes me pull my hair out,” Wallace said, “because I think exit polls, at best, can be suggestive to us, but to really look at granular differences and look at differences within a group, we really need much higher quality data than that.”
She said we will need to wait for the actual voting data to come out to fully understand how different groups voted and what it means, but it’s likely that while there might have been a slight shift Trumpward, it’s not the electoral earthquake some would make it out to be....
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