An interesting and encouraging poll of Latinos

I get truly irritated by “polls” that refuse to provide the original questions, the selection methodology, the margin of error, or anything else from which to judge if they have meaning. So a new “survey for NBC Latino” of 400 Hispanic Americans by Zogby is driving me nuts. They tell us nothing about the methodology or how those “surveyed” were selected, but they do provide that “Participants were surveyed between August 31 and September 4 and the results have a -/+4.8 percentage point of error.”

I say all that so as to preface that I place no reliance on this report. However, it is good news and probably not altogether surprising news to those who live in a high-Latino density location.

In 2008, Hispanic voters supported Proposition 8 with numbers (53%) that very nearly mirrored the public vote as a whole (52%). And as polls show us that the public position on marriage equality has significantly changed since 2008, it would seem reasonable that the shift in Hispanic Americans has followed the national trend.

Another finding that is interesting is that 74% of American Latinos identify as being “American” while another 19% identify as being both American and as “Being from my home country” (only 4% chose “home country” alone). While these numbers were a little bit higher than I expected, they don’t come as much of a surprise. Being Mexican-American or Salvadoran-American appears to me to be rapidly taking on the cultural relevance of being Italian-American or Irish-American (or may have already to a large degree done so), culturally interesting but not exactly the most defining characteristic.

But I simply refuse to believe one of their reported findings: by 56% to 28%, Latinos prefer burgers over tacos. Burger over tacos? No way!

I did a quick informal survey of my office co-workers. Oddly enough, my very multi-cultural office doesn’t have any Latinos currently working here but the results came out this way:

Burgers: the American born Japanese lady and Vietnamese guy.
Tacos: the coworkers born in Israel, Norway, England, and the Philippines. And me.