Question:

Poll Demographics

About this Poll

These findings are based on a random sample survey of 1,508 (1,408 weighted) registered voters in the state of California, conducted from August 17th - 28th, 2011. Interviews were conducted by telephone using live interviewers from Interviewing Services of America. Voters were randomly selected from a list of registered voters statewide and reached on a landline or cell phone depending on the number they designated on their voter registration. Fifteen percent of this sample was reached on a cell phone. Up to five attempts were made to reach and interview each randomly selected voter. In order to examine distinctions and include a wider range of questions in this study, some questions were split into random half-samples, with 704 respondents in each split sample.

The study includes an oversample of Latino registered voters, with the total number of Latino voters interviewed at 460 (282 weighted). All interviews among known Latinos were carried out via telephone by bilingual Latino interviewers, and conducted in the preferred language of the survey respondent, English or Spanish. Overall, 35 percent of interviews among the known Latino sample were conducted in Spanish and 65 percent in English. The technique of using fully bilingual interviewers yields higher response and cooperation rates and is greatly preferred because it does not terminate calls with Spanish-language households and require a callback.

Upon completion of all interviewing, the results were weighted to bring the Latino oversample population into line with the racial and ethnic composition of registered voters in California. The data were weighted to reflect the total population of registered voters throughout the state, balancing on regional and demographic characteristics for gender, age, race, party registration and education according to known census estimates and voter file projections.

The maximum sampling error for the overall sample of 1,508 registered voters is +/- 2.52 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. The margin of error for the 483 Latino sample respondents is +/- 4.46 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.