Are the Polls Undercounting Latino Obama Backers?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/polls-undercounting-latino-voters

Evidence from the 2010 elections suggests pollsters may be ignoring Spanish-speaking Latinos—potentially making Colorado and Nevada safer bets for Obama than they appear.

If President Barack Obama loses big Eastern states like Florida and Ohio on November 6, Western swing states like Colorado and Nevada could help him hold on to the White House. Polls in Colorado and Nevada make the states look like anything but sure bets for the president, but there's good news for Obama: By undercounting Democratic-leaning Latinos, those polls could be dead wrong.

It's happened before.

Shortly after the 2010 midterm elections, Jim Margolis, a longtime Democratic pollster who's now a top media consultant for Obama's reelection campaign, cowrote a memo outlining how the Democrats had managed to save his then-boss, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). During the fall, Reid had looked like he was going to get swept away in the tea party wave that handed the GOP a majority in the House of Representatives. Polls showed Reid trailing his Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, by an average of nearly 3 points. Republicans were about to knock off the second Democratic Senate leader in a row, having ended Tom Daschle's Senate career in 2004.

Then something weird happened. Reid won—by almost 6 points.  

Nobody had Reid winning, nobody had Reid ahead," says Brad Coker, a pollster for Mason-Dixon, the firm hired by the Las Vegas Review-Journal to poll the state. "People underestimated the ability to turn out Hispanic voters the way they had turned out for Obama." 

 gives you a good reason why the right is so gung ho on voter suppression.

When you start polling in any state that's competitive with a big component of the electorate being Latino, you tend to see that they tend to underestimate the Latino vote," says David Damore, a political science professor at the University of Nevada. "[The result] tends to be more Republican than it actually will be".

slip shod or just arrogantly dismissive?