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 Byron Tau writes up the biggest demographic trend of the midterms:

In an election marked by dramatic defections from the Democr

Rachel Maddow rose to the defense of her suspended MSNBC "colleague and friend" Keith Olbermann on her show Friday night. MSNBC President Phil Griffin relieved Olbermann of his hosting duties indefinitely following a report on Politico that revealed Olbermann's campaign contributions to three Democrats in violation of the network's ethics policies.

Before directly addressing the controversy over Olbermann's donations, Maddow detailed a variety of political activity at MSNBC's rival Fox News.

Maddow detailed Sean Hannity's...

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A subgroup of workers who say they suffered health problems after being exposed to ground-zero debris must opt in to a larger deal with the city to recover money.

A subgroup of workers who say they suffered health problems after being exposed to ground-zero debris must opt in to a larger deal with the city to recover money.

A subgroup of workers who say they suffered health problems after being exposed to ground-zero debris must opt in to a larger deal with the city to recover money.

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Eliot Spitzer took issue with rival network MSNBC's decision to suspend Keith Olbermann in light of the news that he made political donations.

On "Parker/Spitzer" the former governor said there is a "ridiculous false line that's being drawn in the sand and I don't buy it for a second. He is partial. He is a partisan. He made it very clear he was. That's the First...

Eliot Spitzer took issue with rival network MSNBC's decision to suspend Keith Olbermann in light of the news that he made political donations.

On "Parker/Spitzer" the former governor said there is a "ridiculous false line that's being drawn in the sand and I don't buy it for a second. He is partial. He is a partisan. He made it very clear he was. That's the First...

Andrew Cuomo's 82% share of the Latino vote may have reflected the fear Carl Paladino's anti-immigrant rhetoric inspired, but he was not the only Democrat to benefit from a national trend the left by Latinos.

Before 2006, Latinos commonly gave four out of ten of their votes to Republicans. Since then, even immigration moderates like John McCain have been swamped by the Latino wave towards Democrats.

A new poll of confirmed Latino voters offers some deep insight into the impact and attitudes of these voters.

Although standard exit polls often include breakouts of Latino and  Asian voters, the sample size is sometimes so small, a few dozen people  in some cases, as to offer little real insight. A new survey by Latino  Decisions did extensive surveying in eight battleground states with high  Latino populations.

In the survey, Latinos identified Immigration  as the second most  important issue, just after the Economy. 37% rated it as most important.

When asked how important the issue of immigration was in deciding who  to vote for, 34% said it was the most important issue, and another 47%  said it was important. In other words, 81% said it helped to determine  who they voted for.

75% said that rising anti-immigrant sentiment helped drive them to  the polls and decide for whom to vote. The Arizona law, SB 1070, seems  to have played a particular motivating role, with three-quarters  opposing it. 66% said that they wanted a path to citizenship for the  undocumented, five times as many as those supporting deportations.

In practical politics, this translated into the continued migration  by Latinos to the Democratic Party. In House races Latinos said they  voted 76% Democratic. In Senate races, they went 69% for the Democrats.  And that Senate number may have been skewed by the large number of  Latinos voting for Marco Rubio.

What the eight state poll shows is that immigration is not "just  another issue" for Latino voters, and that the anti-immigrant rhetoric  on the right is driving the 40% of Latinos who voted Republican in the  past away from the GOP.

Polling guru Nate Silver of 538 fame, looked closely at the Latino Decisions poll and says it explains why the Democrats did not get blown out in the Senate. Here is a bit of what he wrote:
The two Senate races where the actual winner was different from the leader in our polling-based projections were Colorado and Nevada.

The miss in Colorado wasn't bad - our forecast had Michael Bennet as about a 1-point underdog, and he won by 1 point instead, although there are still a few votes left to count.

In Nevada, however, where most polls showed Sharron Angle ahead and Harry Reid instead won by almost 6 points, the polls were pretty far off the mark. Errors like that occur quite frequently in primaries and in House races, where the polling landscape is tougher. They also occur sometimes in lopsided races, which are more difficult to hit on the nose. It's fairly unusual, however, to have the consensus of polls off by 7 or 8 points in an extremely competitive Senate or gubernatorial general election.

I riffed a little bit last night on why the public polls might have been wrong in Nevada; I speculated, for instance, that the fact that Mr. Reid is the sort of candidate whom one votes for unenthusiastically might have skewed the turnout models.

There is another theory, however, which was proposed to me last night by Matt Barreto of the polling firm Latino Decisions.

"There is one overarching reason why the polls were wrong in Nevada," Mr. Barreto wrote in an e-mail to FiveThirtyEight. "The Latino vote."

His firm, which conducts interviews in both English and Spanish, had found that Latino voters - somewhat against the conventional wisdom - were relatively engaged by this election and for the most part were going to vote Democratic. Mr. Barreto also found that Latino voters who prefer to speak Spanish - about 40 percent of Latino voters in California meet this description, he told me - are particularly likely to vote Democratic. Pollsters who don't conduct bilingual interviewing at all, or who make it cumbersome for the respondent to take the poll in Spanish, may be missing these voters.

Mr. Barreto had noted to me earlier this year that he felt polls might be overestimating support for Republican candidates in California. Indeed, the polls in that state called the right winners - Democrats Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer - but underestimated their eventual margin of victories.

Colorado, the other state where most polls picked the wrong winner, is also a state with a fairly heavy Latino population.

As a back-of-the-envelope test of Mr. Barreto's theory, I compiled results from the eight states with the largest share of Latinos in their population: these are Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, New York and Texas. There were 15 gubernatorial and Senate races last night between these states.

The table below compares the results from FiveThirtyEight's simple weighted polling average (not the fancier version we use to make our official projections, although the differences are usually slight) against the results from last night.

(Note: in the two races in the chart where a third-party candidate finished in second place - the Colorado gubernatorial race and the Florida Senate race - we count Tom Tancredo as being a Republican and Charlie Crist as being a Democrat, respectively.)

In 10 of the 15 races, the polling average underestimated the Democrat's margin by at least 2.5 points. There were 5 other races in which the Republican somewhat beat his polls.

Overall, however, the Democrats outperformed their polls by 2.3 points in these 15 races. There's enough state-to-state variance in the results that we can't come to any firm conclusions about whether inadequate sampling of Latino voters was the cause. Still, if you look at the presidential polling in 2008, it also underestimated Democrats' performance in states like Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, where they won by larger-than-expected margins.

So, we have at least the beginnings of a pattern - and considering how rapidly the Latino population is growing, it's one that pollsters are going to need to address in states like Nevada, California and Texas if we're going to be able to take their results at face value.
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