Kerry led after four innings

[Awsi Dooger]

This from Slate.com, early Tuesday afternoon:http://slate.msn.com/id/2109053/(note: there are two sets of early exit polls at that link)

"These early exit-poll numbers do not divine the name of the winner. Instead, regard these numbers as a sportswriter does the line scores from the fourth inning of a baseball game. The leading team might win the game, but then again it might not. But having the early data in front of him helps the sportswriter plot the story he thinks he'll need to write at game's end."

Preceded by this warning from MyDD.com, posted October 25: http://www.mydd.com/story/2004/10/25/204626/04

Exit Poll Potential Problems? by Matt Stoller

I've spoken with a few people who are deeply concerned about the accuracy of exit polls this year.  There are a couple of issues:

1. I'm not sure how early voting is being taken into account and weighted in the exit polls.

2. I am told that exit polls are done by using representative areas with a high degree of political stability acting as bellweathers for districts.  Because the assumptions underlying the use of these districts are based on historical stability, exit polls are backwards looking and will not take into account fluctuations in the electorate due to new voters.

[SoCalDemocrat]

1. Kerry was ahead in the 9th inning

After the game went into extra innings, that's when Kerry "lost".

I find it intersting that an MSNBC sports writer with a sports email handle is writing on political events surrounding the election.

Kerry was ahead in exit polls until 1:36 am CST when the AP changed the exit polling data out from under us.

[Awsi Dooger]

2. Yeah, and the Cardinals swept the Red Sox

You obviously have zero background with exit polls. Exit polls ALWAYS change late election night, the following week, and often a month or so later. The most laughable thing I've seen on DU this campaign was some screenshot of the exit poll data early in the evening compared to later, as if that were some form of evil manipulation. I remember identical in '96, '98, '00 and '02.

Try some relevant research, if you dare. Check out obscure states with no vote controversy, no electronic voting and no questionable exit polls. Then look at 2000 and 2004. It will be obvious Bush was more preferred this year, particularly in rural counties and among white women. Anyone who followed this election at all knew that group, white women, would decide this election. Myself and others posted that on DU several times.

White Women:
2000: Bush 49 Gore 48%
2004: Bush 55 Kerry 44%

That's the election. Losing 10% among the largest voting block in the country, 41%, is fatal.

White men went from 60-36 Bush in 2000 to 62-37 this year. African Americans went from 90-9 to 88-11. The only significant change was white women.

[Julien Sorel]

3. I have a few concerns,

and I'm hardly a tinfoil hatter.

First of all, you're denigrating the accuracy of exit polls, then citing data from exit polls to prove your point. It hardly makes sense.

Second, and what I really find bizarre, is the people who ran the exit polls haven't come up with a really good explanation as to why they have always worked in the past, but didn't this time. What they're saying now is that Kerry voters were more enthusiastic and wanted to tell the world whom they voted for, but why has this never happened in any other election that I'm aware of? In any election, one side or the other is going to be pretty enthusiastic about their candidate; I can imagine some countries getting to vote for the first time, where they would be absolutely ecstatic about the opportunity to vote for a candidate. Exit polls work in those countries, but they don't here? It makes no sense.

Third, the telephone polls taken on the eve of and the same day as the election predicted results consistent with the exit polls, and inconsistent with the actual vote tallies.

I'm sure you're aware that undecideds break for the challenger, and I'm not aware of a single national poll that had Bush at 50% of the popular vote. Most of them had him at 47 and 48%, as I recall -- consistent with the exit polls that had him at 48%.


There's a whole lot of information suggesting Bush should have gotten about 48% of the vote, which is what the exit polls said he got, and none at all that say he would have gotten 51% of the vote, which he actually got. It looks funny to me, and I'd like a better explanation than the one being passed around about the "enthusiasm" of Kerry voters. Right up until the election, in fact, we were being told how unenthusiastic Kerry voters were, how they were really ABB voters. Now it turns out they were actually overflowing with excitement for Kerry.


I'm a stickler for logic to an almost unhealthy degree, and this doesn't add up for me.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

4. The Incumbent Rule Is A Theory... It's Not An Ironclad Law Of Mathematics.

The incumbent rule only works until it doesn't...

And if you research the incumbent rule you will learn that it's not infallible and sometimes wrong....


If you looked at the polls in their totality they showed Bush* with a slight edge....

[Julien Sorel]

6. A slight edge, yes.

But the most I saw him getting in any poll was 49%; most of the polls had him, as I said, with either 47 or 48%.

I'm not sure "theory" is the right word. At any rate, I'm unaware of a presidential election where the incumbent rule didn't work. And again, if it did break down this time, I'd like to know why, and I've seen no explanation.

[bornskeptic]

5. Subject: But there's still a problem here.

I agree that it's ridiculous to try to claim that a discrepancy between the early leaked exit polls and the final vote tally is proof of fraud. However, the final exit polls are adjusted to reflect the final vote count, so of course they are going to show Bush gaining enough strength in some subgroups to account for the official margin of victory. Had Kerry won 51-48, instead of the other way around, the subgroup numbers would have reflected that. Long-time Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal gives a good description of exit poll methodology for those who don't understand what's going on here. Scroll down to the heading EXIT POLLS: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW.

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main /

The problem that remains is that apparently the final predictive poll numbers, which are released around the time the polls close and are waited according to turnout, apparently also showed Kerry ahead by something like 51-48.

Officials with some of the newspapers that subscribed to the service said the ultimately misleading polling data forced them to scramble late at night to change some articles. The presumption of a Kerry victory built a head of steam late in the day, when the national survey showed the senator with a statistically significant lead, one falling outside the survey's margin of error.

"The last wave of national exit polls we received, along with many other subscribers, showed Kerry winning the popular vote by 51 percent to 48 percent, if true, surely enough to carry the Electoral College,'' Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post, wrote in an online chat with readers Wednesday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/politics/campaign/05p...

If that is the case, then either there would appear to be a serious problem with the exit poll methodology or a serious problem with the vote counting, or both. Unfortunately, as far as I know, those numbers are not publicly available anywhere, although they were presumably disseminated to numerous news agencies. Mitofsky, the agency which does the polling, tries to explain the discrepancy as a problem with the exit polls themselves, but it looks to me like they are just presuming there was a fair count of the votes and trying to make excuses. It looks to me that the explanation is at least as likely to be massive fraud.

Edited for trivial typing error, and another