[persecutor]

What gets me is that in all of the years prior to 2000, the exit polls were accurate. 'Wha happened?

[MikefromOhio]

good question....

[Paradox]

What gets me is that in all of the years prior to 2000, the exit polls were accurate. 'Wha happened?

Actually, they have always been a bit off. Early polls had Dukakis and Reagan in a virtual tie. The "final" exit polling always has to be adjusted to "fit" the actual results, by a few percentage points. It so happens that usually, the election isn't that close so the error goes unnoticed. The last two elections, however, have been reeeal close...

[dvwjr]

Originally posted by persecutor:

"What gets me is that in all of the years prior to 2000, the exit polls were accurate.'Wha happened?"

Because they aren't.

Here are the raw exit poll "popular vote" data for the US Presidential elections from 1988 to 2000, before the exit poll data is adjusted to reflect the final election results. Even the exit polls in Ukraine in the December 26th, 2004 re-vote did not come within their MoE when the final results were published. The "Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004" report published today continues to show that the exit polls have a bias towards Democrats, which accounted for the bad results taken as gospel by the demented leftists...

Presidential Exit Polls
Raw Data (Unweighted)

Year	Exit Poll Results	Dem Lead	Dem Actual
1988	Dukakis: 50.3% Bush: 49.7%	+0.6%	-7.7%
1992	Clinton: 46% Bush: 33.2%	+12.8%	+5.6%
1996	Clinton: 52.2% Dole: 37.5%	+14.7%	+8.5%
2000	Gore: 48.5% Bush: 46.2%	+2.3%	+0.5%

"As you can see, the raw exit poll results always overstate the Democratic vote, sometimes by as much as eight percentage points. So the fact that the raw results this year overstated Kerry's actual vote tally is hardly cause for alarm."

Source: Washington Monthly, "Political Animal" column, November 17th, 2004 by Kevin Drum - Exit Poll update.
Source: The Century Foundation, PDF file page 5/8 by Ruy Teixeria.

Hope this helps,

dvwjr