BTW: They disavow their own Exit Polling from 2004. So, naturally, the MSM news consortium hired the same folks to do the job again in 2008. Perhaps it was the company's apparently spot-on Exit Polling in Ukraine, in December of 2004, cited as evidence of fraud by George W. Bush and Colin Powell, that the challenger should have won, rather than the incumbant, as the election results announced, in contradiction of the Exit Polls...but don't get us started.
The "Apparently spot-on Exit Polling" (sic) was the very opposite of apparent:
A key part of the media game has been the claim that Yushchenko won according to "exit polls". What is not said is that the people doing these "exit polls" as voters left voting places were US-trained and paid by an entity known as Freedom House, a neo-conservative operation in Washington. Freedom House trained some 1,000 poll observers, who loudly declared an 11-point lead for Yushchenko. Those claims triggered the mass marches claiming fraud. The current head of Freedom House is former CIA director and outspoken neo-conservative, Admiral James Woolsey, who calls the Bush administration's "war on terror" "World War IV". On the Freedom House board sits none other than Brzezinski. This would hardly seem to be an impartial human-rights organization.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GA20Ag01.htmlTwo separate exit polls showed a clear victory by Mr. Yushchenko. One poll showed him ahead by 4 Percent, and the otherby the Exit Pollconsortium, supported by European governments and private Western foundations -- showed Mr. Yushchenko winning by 11 percent.
http://www.freedomhouse.org/media/pressrel/112204.htm (the horse's mouth)
More provocatively, the US and other western embassies paid for exit polls, prompting Russia to do likewise, though apparently to a lesser extent. The US's own election this month showed how wrong exit polls can be. But they provide a powerful mobilising effect, making it easier to persuade people to mount civil disobedience or seize public buildings on the grounds the election must have been stolen if the official results diverge.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360297,00.htmlPro-Yanukovich television stations used Russian exit poll results to vouch support for him as outcries against falsification increased and the CEC stalled in delivering official results. In addition, the exit poll did not really exist in Ukrainian political culture before 2004. Voters, who already believed the vlada would falsify the election months in advance, had a new tool at their disposal to reconfirm their suspicions. Steele posits that the exit polls, funded by the US and Russia, influenced the voters to take to the streets.
http://leopolis.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_leopolis_archive.html
Politico's Roger Simon, at the end of the Hardball segment, asks the question about NH '08, that we've been asking about 2004 for years: "If the exit polls got the results wrong, why do we think they got the demographics right?"
I can forgive Roger Simon not knowing dick, but Brad T. Blog ought to have learned something about his life's work by now:
I learned early in my Washington Post career that exit polls were useful but imperfect mirrors of the electorate. On election night in 1988, we relied on the ABC News exit poll to characterize how demographic subgroups and political constituencies had voted. One problem: The exit poll found the race to be a dead heat, even though Democrat Michael Dukakis lost the popular vote by seven percentage points to Dubya's father. (The dirty little secret, known to pollsters, is that discrepancies in the overall horse race don't affect the subgroup analyses. Whether Dukakis got 46 percent or 50 percent didn't change the fact that nine of 10 blacks voted for him, while a majority of all men didn't. The exit poll may have under- or over-sampled either group, producing an incorrect national total, but the within-group voting patterns remain accurate.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64906-2004Nov20.htmlOne thing I can explain is the special challenge exit polls face when it comes to small subgroups like Latinos and Jewish voters. The reason is the whole issue of "cluster sampling." Exit polls must sample voters in clusters: They randomly sample precincts first, then voters at precincts. In a cluster sample, characteristics or opinions that tend to "cluster" geographically tend to have higher rates of sampling error.
The reason is not all that mysterious. Consider the example of Jewish voters in Ohio (a demographic that once included the Mystery Pollster and still includes all of his family, so he speaks from some experience). Most Jews in Ohio live in a few suburbs east of Cleveland and few neighborhoods near Columbus and Cincinnati that cumulatively represent (at most) 3-5% of the state. If the Ohio exit poll sampled only 100 precincts, then most of the Jewish subsample would have come from, at most, 3-5 precincts. Now throw in a kicker: Orthodox Jews tend to be more politically conservative and tend to live among other Orthodox Jews in even more concentrated geographic areas within the Jewish Community. Thus, the odds are good that the exit poll sample will either over or underestimate the share of Orthodox Jews depending which 3-5 precincts get randomly selected. The same problems occurs with Cuban and non-Cuban Latinos in Florida.
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/week49/index.html
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