Including Election Day of '04. Kerry was absolutely crushing Dubya in the exit polls. The moving vans were already moving up 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!!! :-)
Indeed, exit polls are very unreliable. (As is Zogby, who clearly has a side he's rooting for.)
Do you respect Stuart Rothenberg? I do.
Also, I hope it is not rude to bring this up, but I do recall hearing some predictions for a Kilgore win of 4-5 points last November. I expected him to win as well, so I cast no aspersions on the source of the prediction, but these things do not always move in the same direction.
By the way, what exactly are we arguing about? We're probably closer than it seems. Here's my point of view:
Polls are not predictive, but several can be a good snapshot of the race at that point in time. What this means is that if the polls in April end up very different from the outcome in November, it doesn't mean the polls are wrong, necessarily, although they may have been; the dynamics also change.
Exit polls are useless, and some polls are more reliable than others.
Some pundits have a good track record, (Rothenberg, Charlie Cook, Barone) some parrot the CW without adding anything (Sabato, Madonna), some are weirdly unreliable and have their own biases (Novak, Zogby), and anything spoken by a past or present consultant for a party should be taken with a grain of salt.
I remember the 2002 and 2004 campaigns pretty well and the only way to argue that the spin is the same is to cherry pick quotes and polls. People are decidedly more downbeat this year than in the past. It looks like things have changed in the past two weeks, but we need to see if the course stays. However, it is not legitimate to say that anyone with any credibility were predicting the Democrats to pick up 20 seats in 2002 or 2004, because they weren't. And even to take control of the House they needed a lot fewer seats, because they went into the 2002 and 2004 redistrictings with several more seats than they have now.