News Roundup

Exit Polls Incumbent Rule Legacy blog posts Weighting by Party

So many good topics, so little time. Several items appeared in the past 48 hours that are worth passing along.

Slate’s David Kenner and William Saletan did a post-election review of the issues raised in their pre-election consumer’s guide to polling. Their conclusions:

On Weighting by Party: "Pollsters who assumed that historical patterns would temper the Republican intensity in this year’s surveys got it wrong. Those who bet on the data instead of the historical patterns [the Pew Research Center and the Battleground Survey] got it right."

On Undecided Voters: Contrary to the historical pattern, undecided voters did not break to the challenger: "Oops! According to exit polls, Bush got 46 percent of those who made up their minds in the last week of the campaign and 44 percent of those who made up their minds in the final three days. TIPP got it wrong, Gallup got it very wrong, and Slate’s vote-share formula got it very, very wrong . Who got it right? Pew again. In its final report, Pew predicted that undecideds ‘may break only slightly in Kerry’s favor.’ With 6 percent of voters undecided in the week before the election, Pew added 3 percent to Bush’s total and 3 percent to Kerry’s."

[Mystery Pollster was also quite wrong on this one].

On "Automated" Surveys: "Rasmussen and SurveyUSA beat their human competitors in the battleground states, often by large margins… when the two major automated pollsters beat the three major human pollsters across the board, it’s time to broaden the experiment in automated polling and compare results to see what’s working and why. Clearly, the automated pollsters are onto something, and the human pollsters will have to figure out how to beat it-or join it."

Read it all. This piece is also a reminder to Mystery Pollster that he needs to wrap up his review of exit polls and move on to these other important lessons from the 2004 elections.

USA Today‘s Mark Memmott reported yesterday that Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) is requesting "raw" exit poll data from the news media outlets that sponsored the National Election Pool (NEP) poll. Memmott’s piece includes the caution (echoed by MP) that "most polling experts who have studied exit polls doubt the data would be of use." Buried in the story is a bit more on the internal report being prepared by Mitofsky International & Edison Research:

Edie Emery, a spokeswoman for the [NEP] consortium, said the group did not want to comment on Conyers’ request. She said that, as after past elections, much of this year’s data "will be archived at the Roper Center and the University of Connecticut in early 2005."

In addition, she said, the firms that produced the exit polls are reviewing this year’s results and will submit a report to the AP and networks "in mid- to late-January" [emphasis added].

Finally, the Cal Tech MIT Voting Project has just released an addendum to their original report on "Voting Technologies and Underestimate of the Bush Vote." Regular readers will recall that their otherwise intriguing analysis unknowingly used exit poll data that had already been "corrected" (or reweighted) to match the actual count. Their addendum repeats the same analysis using two sets of uncorrected data reported by Steven Freeman and others. Their conclusion remains the same:

There is no statistically significant correlation between the use of voting methods in states and the size of the exit poll discrepancies….

The attention paid to the size and cause of exit poll discrepancies reveals a desire to use exit polls as a check on the honesty of election officials and the performance of voting systems. The design of the NEP exit polls makes it a blunt instrument for this sort of oversight. Therefore, much of the attention on these polls, seeking evidence of fraud, has been misplaced. More direct methods of election system auditing will be more effective [emphasis added].

The report addendum includes much supporting analysis and data. It is very well done and worth reading in full.

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is the principal at MysteryPollster, LLC. With decades of experience in polling using traditional and innovative online methods, he is uniquely positioned to advise survey researchers, progressive organizations and candidates and the public at-large on how to adapt to polling’s ongoing reinvention. He was previously head of election polling at SurveyMonkey, senior polling editor for The Huffington Post, co-founder of Pollster.com and a long-time campaign consultant who conducted and analyzed political polls and focus groups for Democratic party candidates.