Jamelle Bouie notices that Rubio is a slight drag on the Republican ticket among Latinos in this McClatchy-Marist poll:

To return back to my main point, all of this is to say that, while Marco Rubio seems like he was designed to be the perfect vice presidential nominee, his actual effect on the election—as is the case with most VPs—would be small, and potentially counterproductive.

That wouldn’t surprise me. What this poll shows is that Rubio as VP drives undecided Latinos into Obama’s camp in droves, which is what I would expect. Once Rubio is added to the ticket, Obama gains 13 points among Latinos and Romney loses 2. Unfortunately, this poll is so strange in other ways that I’m not sure that we should put much stock in it.

What doesn’t make much sense is how Romney wins 48% of Latinos while Obama receives just 37% in a match-up that doesn’t include VP candidates. I have no problem agreeing with the claim that Rubio doesn’t help the GOP ticket with Latinos, but I don’t understand how Romney receives so much support from them either way. If Romney were to receive 48% of the Latino vote in the fall, that would be a record-high result for a Republican nominee. (Here is a useful corrective to the popular, incorrect belief that Bush received 44% in 2004.) Even the 46% that a Romney-Rubio ticket receives in the McClatchy-Marist poll is unusually high. Even more implausibly, a Romney-Bush ticket wins the Latino vote outright in this poll 57-39%.

According to the poll, Romney’s favorability among Latinos is supposedly 52%. I suppose we could come up with a way to explain why Rubio is the least popular of these three Republicans with the demographic to which he is supposed to be so appealing, but the results seem hard to believe. These results are entirely at odds with other recent surveys. For example, PPP shows Romney’s fav/unfav with Hispanics at 34/59%, and he trails Obama among Hispanics 26-64%. If the Marist poll means anything, it could mean is that Rubio does nothing to help the Republican ticket even among Latino respondents that are unusually well-disposed towards Mitt Romney.

Update: The only evidence the pro-Rubio argument has going for it that I have found is this FoxNews Latino poll that shows that 24% said that adding Rubio to the ticket would make them more likely to support the Republican (almost 14% said it would make them less likely to vote GOP). However, according to the same poll, Romney’s favorability is just 23%, he trails Obama among Latinos 14-69%.