Posted on 11/03/2004 7:04:25 PM PST by quidnunc
By now it is well-known and a part of the 2004 election lore how the exit polls by the major television networks were wrong.
Likely this faux pas will assume its place among wartime stories alongside the mistaken calls on Florida’s vote for one side and then for the other in the 2000 election. But the inaccuracies of the media’s polling deserve more scrutiny and investigation.
Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.
So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. When I worked on Vicente Fox’s campaign in Mexico, for example, I was so fearful that the governing PRI would steal the election that I had the campaign commission two U.S. firms to conduct exit polls to be released immediately after the polls closed to foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns. When the polls announced a seven-point Fox victory, mobs thronged the streets in a joyous celebration within minutes that made fraud in the actual counting impossible.
But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong. So, according to ABC-TV’s exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
You make a good point. It would have worked, I think, but for the relentless GOTV efforts by the local precincts and the non-stop encouragement to get to the polls by the afternoon conservative talk radio hosts like Hewitt, Medved, et al.
I'm certainly no pollster
But even I know you better not sample gender incorrectly because women and men tend to vote differently.
This is as obvious as those forged documents.
More will come out on this, assuredly.
Actually, Dick may have missed something significant ... I happened to witness it when I voted at the Courthouse: most of the people in East Tennessee are Republicans and voted for Bush/Cheney, but the pollsters trying to get feedback from exiting voters had trouble getting middle-aged, male, voters to stop and give them the time of day, yet young females and strange looking (as in butchy) females, as well as college-aged males were more than happy to chat with the pollsters. Skews the numbers don'tchaknow, Dick! Moral of the story ... ignore Dick Morris's opinions and disregard polls. Vote, even if you have to crawl across broken glass! Our nation is in grave peril from liberalism, so vote them (liberals) out.
Mat Drudge has made a career out of being first. The NRO was simply parroting the info they were giving.
What I really want to "come out" of this election: I WANNA' see kerry's real DD214.
:p
Say what you like about Dick Morris (I like him), this is his profession and I think he makes some very valid and important points.
I heard one caller (I think to Mark Levin's show) say that when he came out from voting (in PA, I think) the exit poller taker was sitting at a table. He saw some folks going over to fill out the forms, but he just left.
Now, it is possible that he was mistaken, and the person at the table wasn't an official exit poller. But if he or she was, it is terrible to have participants "self-select". That completely invalidates any poll, as poll freepers know.
Maybe the media does need to be investigated by congress. Our democracy really is designed to have a functioning free press, not a bunch of lying shills for one side.
And, all those Clinton people aboard the Kerry/Rapunzel campaign!
That EVIL guru Karl Rove did it to make democrats think it would suppress the Republican vote, which actually suppressed the 18-20 year old vote which would have gone for Kerry!
NRO was horrible. Not only did they parrot the numbers, they did their best to induce a mass panic by acting like the election was already all over. What idiots.
Is it wheat, rye, or melba?
Yeah, the bogus exit polls were the 'November Surprise.' When I first saw them on drudge they looked bogus. My suspicions were confirmed when I saw the lengthy segment on CSPAN yesterday afternoon in which they toured the exit polling company and some guy from the company lectured us about how accurate and worthy exit polls are. This guy had all the acting skill of joe lockhart (basically none).
This will be one of the big stories that will be remembered. The Kerry campaign had a number of other smoke and mirror tactics, but this was about the most clumsy.
The theory was, get as many Pubbies voting early as possible--just in case.
And it must be called for what it is; and the sooner, the better
I doubt that's ever going to happen now. I think that might have been used to persuade Kerry to concede Ohio and the election this morning.
[taking off my tinfoil hat now]
", the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered."
I agree (for once) with Morris.
I think the exit polls should just be outlawed.
Just as we outlaw electioneering within 300 feet of a
polling place we should outlaw polling.
It serves no purpose and satisfies no need.
No, IMHO, Matt Drudge is just a useful idiot who wants to make a buck. The NRO folks, however, again IMHO, get their morning faxes from Dan Rather!
If the MSM were out of this picture of biting Bush in the a$$ every day while giving their favorite liberal son a pass on everything, GW would have won this election by a 20-30 point margin.
It was the AP. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000670974
Here is the money quote from that article:
The AP will have stringers calling in results from each of the nation's 4,600 counties. Hundreds of people will be assigned to input the information into computers, and others will monitor the systems to guard against problems. In all, a total of about 5,500 people will be working on AP's vote count on election night.
"We have real confidence in the reliability of the AP's vote count," said Kathleen Carroll, AP senior vice president and executive editor. "We also have enormous confidence in the journalists in the field and the bureau chiefs who will be using the data and their experience when they call winners in the race."
Dick clearly explained that a GOOD exit pollster would NOT take more samples or would weigh them to match the numbers. Thus a handful of middle aged males would be weighted to match their numbers in previous samples.
Thus, these weren't serious exit pollsters. It was another attempt by the left wing media to play havoc with the election. They do it every election and just can't get away with it any longer.
And what makes Dick right, more than often, is that he was in the belly of their beast also and he knows the things they do. You can't be an advisor to Clinton since 1980 Arkansas and not know the media takes sides.
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