Mark: I’m surprised that instead of accepting the results of a survey of more than 13,000 people on Election Day of 2004, anyone would be so readily accepting of the self-interested explanation by Ruy Texeira about why that election did not destroy the argument he made in The Emerging Democratic Majority.

Texeira begins his argument with the factually untrue statement that the Texas exit poll had Bush at 59 percent among Hispanics. In fact, the number in Texas was 49 percent — you can look it up yourself. Perhaps there was a typo somewhere when he wrote that. From there, his argument about county totals demonstrating an anomaly is pretty much discounted.

I’m inclined to think that the reliable number is the one that we got empirically, not the guesstimation by one liberal writer with his life’s work thrown into question.

But whatever — 44 percent, 39 percent — the point is that Hispanics don’t vote 90-10. They could someday vote 45-55 consistently.