Darryl Fears, a staff writer on Thanksgiving duty, has an interesting article in Friday's Washington Post on the Hispanic vote in the 2004 election. In "Pollsters Debate Hispanics' Presidential Voting", he writes thusly:

In the days before the presidential election, some opinion surveys said Democrats would get as much as 65 percent of the Hispanic vote.

But on the morning after the voting, some exit polls held that Democratic nominee John F. Kerry had received about 56 percent of Hispanics' votes and that President Bush had gotten 44 percent.

Now some public opinion researchers are trying to determine the reasons for the discrepancies between the pre- and post-election numbers.

[...]

[Pollster John] Zogby believes the correct percentage for Hispanic Bush supporters is 33 to 38. That view is supported by an exit poll conducted by the William C. Velasquez Institute of San Antonio.

In that exit poll, Hispanics favored Kerry over Bush by 65 percent to 34 percent. Fernando J. Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said hundreds of researchers have posted comments that support the institute's survey.

"There's nothing special that Bush did to get a higher turnout," Guerra said, doubting that the president won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. "What would explain this tremendous amount of Latino support for Bush?"

Interesting stuff. I always thought it was a bit fishy to believe that Bush picked up that much of the Hispanic vote, but now there is some real data to back up that hunch. Check out the whole article for more details.