NBC News Exit Poll: Election Reveals a Sharp Divide Between White, Latino Catholics
America’s Catholic voters are sharply divided along the lines of ethnicity, results from today’s NBC News Exit Poll show.
White Catholics appear to have broken heavily for Republican Donald Trump, who currently holds about a 20-point lead over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton with these voters. But exit polls show an even bigger gap among Latino Catholics, who are favoring Clinton by roughly 40 percentage points over Trump.
The split between white and Latino Catholics comes in the wake of a campaign in which Trump promised mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants and claimed a Mexican-American federal judge was biased against him because of his heritage. Still, Clinton’s advantage among Hispanic Catholics is very similar to Obama’s four years ago.
Exit polls indicate that Latinos are accounting for about one in five Catholics voting in the 2016 presidential election.
Meet the NBC News Exit Poll Desk Team
Throughout Election Night, a team of survey research analysts will be crunching the numbers on who voted, what issues were on their minds and why they voted the way they did.
The team includes Stephanie Psyllos, manager of exit polling, NBC News; Scott Keeter, senior survey advisor at Pew Research Center; Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at Pew Research Center; Cary Funk, associate director of research at Pew Research Center; Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute; Maureen Michaels, president of Michaels Opinion Research Inc.; Mara Ostfeld, postdoctoral fellow, Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan; Patrick Egan, associate professor of politics and public policy at New York University; Hannah Hartig, assistant director, University of Pennsylvania's Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies; Jennifer Su, senior project director, Princeton Survey Research Associates International; and Andrew Arenge, assistant producer, NBC News. The NBC News Exit Poll Desk works closely with digital editors David Taintor and Elizabeth Johnstone to curate the stories we produce.