Ohio a dead heat based on 'fixed' exit poll?

[chorti]

I have been looking at the Ohio exit poll over and over, especially the table on the voting by size of community.

...........................Bush....Kerry
Big Cities (6%)...........53.....43
Smaller Cities (19%)...38.....62
Suburbs (49%)..........51......49
Small Towns (6%)......49......49
Rural (19%)..............63.......36

The MSNBC exit poll site says that 'Big Cities' refers to places over 500,000 and the only city in Ohio of that category is Columbus. So Cleveland and Cincinnati would be considered smaller cities, along with any others over 50,000. I'm not sure exactly how suburbs are defined.

Anyway, the 94% of the sample that does not include Columbus should be fairly accurate, after all it is nearly 100% of the sample. Multiplying out the figures above, you have Bush winning Ohio minus Columbus by 47.1 % to 45.6 %.

But the pollsters were way off on Columbus. Kerry won the Franklin-portion of Columbus by 63 to 37 (177,748 to 105,708, not including absentees or provisionals). I know that a small portion of Columbus is in neighboring counties, so let's say that Kerry's margin in Columbus was only 62 to 38. Adding the real results to the table above (isn't that what the exit pollsters said that they did - add real results to the exit poll results), we have a result for the state of 49.4% for Bush and 49.3% for Kerry. A dead heat, with a margin of error of about 2%. If Kerry really split the small towns and came close in the suburbs, it is not hard to believe that he won Ohio.