But a clear consensus among experienced pollsters is finally emerging on what happened with the exits. Last month, at an annual conference of opinion pollsters in Miami Beach, Warren Mitofsky, the veteran pollster who conducted the exit poll for the networks, offered a detailed and convincing explanation of what went wrong with the polls. The reason the exits were off, Mitofsky said, is that interviewers assigned to talk to voters as they left the polls appeared to be slightly more inclined to seek out Kerry voters than Bush voters. Kerry voters were overrepresented in the poll by a small margin, which is why everyone thought that Kerry was going to win. The underlying error, Mitofsky's firm said in a report this January, is "likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters."
There's another interesting wrinkle in the exit poll discussion. During the past several months, some of the early "fraudsters" -- an initially derogatory term that some in the election-was-stolen camp have embraced -- who once suspected that the exit polls pointed to election fraud, have begun to change their minds. One of these is Bruce O'Dell, a computer engineer in Minneapolis and one of the founders of US Count Votes, the group that has been leading the charge to show that exit polls prove Kerry won. After initially signing on with this view, O'Dell now thinks it's impossible to say whether the exit polls suggest that Bush stole the election. O'Dell also thinks Mitofsky's explanation -- that Kerry voters were overrepresented in the poll -- is plausible.
They don't have time to chat with hippies toting clipboards.
No kidding. Kerry won the exit poll because more people who voted for Kerry were polled. A 5 year old could tell you that, and it wouldn't take 7 or 8 months. I'll wait until a real news source carries it. I'm not paying to read it at Salon
Possibly because Republicans, who've never done an honest day's work in their lives, have day jobs on election day, all the lay-abouts have time to chat with pollsters.
That was my immediate take, on Nov. 3.