Early Exit Polls Favor Obama

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit.html

Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls
Oh, let me count the ways. Almost all of this, by the way, is lifted from Mark Bluemthnal's outstanding Exit Poll FAQ. For the long version, see over there.

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

2. Exit polls have consistently overstated the Democratic share of the vote. Many of you will recall this happening in 2004, when leaked exit polls suggested that John Kerry would have a much better day than he actually had. But this phenomenon was hardly unique to 2004. In 2000, for instance, exit polls had Al Gore winning states like Alabama and Georgia (!). If you go back and watch The War Room, you'll find George Stephanopolous and James Carville gloating over exit polls showing Bill Clinton winning states like Indiana and Texas, which of course he did not win.

3. Exit polls were particularly bad in this year's primaries. They overstated Barack Obama's performance by an average of about 7 points.

4. Exit polls challenge the definition of a random sample. Although the exit polls have theoretically established procedures to collect a random sample -- essentially, having the interviewer approach every nth person who leaves the polling place -- in practice this is hard to execute at a busy polling place, particularly when the pollster may be standing many yards away from the polling place itself because of electioneering laws.

5. Democrats may be more likely to participate in exit polls. Related to items #1 and #4 above, Scott Rasmussen has found that Democrats supporters are more likely to agree to participate in exit polls, probably because they are more enthusiastic about this election.

6. Exit polls may have problems calibrating results from early voting. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, exit polls will attempt account for people who voted before election day in most (although not all) states by means of a random telephone sample of such voters. However, this requires the polling firms to guess at the ratio of early voters to regular ones, and sometimes they do not guess correctly. In Florida in 2000, for instance, there was a significant underestimation of the absentee vote, which that year was a substantially Republican vote, leading to an overestimation of Al Gore's share of the vote, and contributing to the infamous miscall of the state.

7. Exit polls may also miss late voters. By "late" voters I mean persons who come to their polling place in the last couple of hours of the day, after the exit polls are out of the field. Although there is no clear consensus about which types of voters tend to vote later rather than earlier, this adds another way in which the sample may be nonrandom, particularly in precincts with long lines or extended voting hours.

8. "Leaked" exit poll results may not be the genuine article. Sometimes, sources like Matt Drudge and Jim Geraghty have gotten their hands on the actual exit polls collected by the network pools. At other times, they may be reporting data from "first-wave" exit polls, which contain extremely small sample sizes and are not calibrated for their demographics. And at other places on the Internet (though likely not from Gergahty and Drudge, who actually have reasonably good track records), you may see numbers that are completely fabricated.

9. A high-turnout election may make demographic weighting difficult. Just as regular, telephone polls are having difficulty this cycle estimating turnout demographics -- will younger voters and minorities show up in greater numbers? -- the same challenges await exit pollsters. Remember, an exit poll is not a definitive record of what happened at the polling place; it is at best a random sampling.

10. You'll know the actual results soon enough anyway. Have patience, my friends, and consider yourselves lucky: in France, it is illegal to conduct a poll of any kind within 48 hours of the election. But exit polls are really more trouble than they're worth, at least as a predictive tool. An independent panel created by CNN in the wake of the Florida disaster in 2000 recommended that the network completely ignore exit polls when calling particular states. I suggest that you do the same.

-- Nate Silver at 9:15 AM

 

Exit polls have been proven to be worthless. If you still think McCain will win, only you will have a long night.

The celebration at Grant Park is going to be MASSIVE! My brother lives 3 blocks away and is leaving in 30 minutes. I don't know what scale back you are talking about. There are 65,000 tickets plus an untold number of non-ticketed folks on the outside. How local Chicago police would have any special insight into the election?

 

Can't really believe these exit polls.

I'm an Obama supporter, and I'm watching and quite nevrous.

 

Exit polls are bull**** a lot of the time.

 

Remember 2004?


Egg On Face of Exit Pollsters
Wednesday, November 03, 2004

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos


WASHINGTON — Once again, exit polls (search) received a black eye in the presidential election.

By the time most of the polls closed in precincts across the country Tuesday night, real numbers began to suggest that the early estimations that had been so upbeat for Sen. John Kerry were over-inflated — so much so, that FOX News Channel decided to quit using the exit poll results Tuesday evening, calling them inaccurate and unreliable.

FOX News had been using exit poll numbers crunched by Edison Media Research (search) in New Jersey and Mitofsky International (search) of New York, which had been contracted by the six news organizations that had formed the National Election Pool — besides the FOX News Channel, they were ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the Associated Press.

The new pollsters had replaced the Voter News Service (search), a consortium of media outlets that did its own exit polling and vote counting in 2000, and was largely blamed for misjudging the 2000 election.

Long before the polls closed, Tuesday's exit polling, which included presidential preferences as well as gauges about the importance of issues to voters, had been widely circulated via the Internet along with independent voting predictions. All suggested unusually strong numbers for Kerry.

Early numbers looked so positive for Kerry that FOX News analyst Jim Pinkerton, at 3:30 p.m. EST, said, "I think it looks good for angry Democrats."

Television anchors and pundits, who are expected not to reveal trends, began reporting the "buzz" or the "mood" of the campaigns, suggesting they too had seen the numbers and were reacting accordingly.

NBC News' David Gregory said Bush "appeared subdued," while ABC News' Terry Moran noted the president had expressed a "rare sense of doubt."

The political Web logs or "blogosphere," posted the numbers throughout the day, and depending on which side of the aisle bloggers aligned themselves, either embraced or were repulsed by what they saw during the day.

"Clearly exit polls are not meaningless: I think they have something to do with the Bushies' glumness," wrote "Alexander" on the Democratic-leaning Dailykos.com.

Later on FOX News, analysts talked openly about how some actual results contradicted exit polls numbers.

"Either the exit polls are completely wrong or George Bush loses," FOX News analyst Susan Estrich said.

By midnight, Bush was declared the winner in Florida, though throughout the day the state had been predicted a winner for Kerry. Similar predictions in Ohio were also found to be wrong as the state was put in Bush's column.

"We began noticing there was some very odd things," in the polls, Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes told FOX News. "We knew there were some problems from the get-go."

One Republican strategist told FOX News that "in the beginning of the night, we were asking how we could have been so far off.

"I bought a box of Kleenex. But I didn't open them," he said.

Exit polls did elicit some news about voters' moods, which suggested that neither candidate had a clear mandate on the issues. The close nature of the popular vote in the early morning hours Wednesday seemed to indicate that those attitudes may have been more accurately reflected in exit data than presidential preferences.

Exit polls suggested that slightly more voters trusted Bush to handle terrorism than Kerry. A majority said the country was safer from terrorism than four years ago. Those voters overwhelmingly backed Bush.

But among those who said they were very worried about a terrorist strike, Kerry held a slight lead. The majority of voters who said things were going poorly in Iraq heavily favored Kerry.

Kerry was also favored by eight of 10 voters who listed the economy as a top issue.

Half said the country was headed in the right direction, a good sign for the incumbent

 

Do you plan to move to France?