It is hard for me to believe that I posted my first message on this blog barely six week ago. Yesterday, this site had over 120,000 visitors and had been averaging 10,000 to 20,000 for the previous week. I thank all of you for your interest and support. This has been an amazing experience.
I started this blog as an experiment. Now I have to think hard about its future. I have trouble thinking about anything without survey data, so I created a short reader survey. If you have not done so already, could you take 3-5 minutes and fill it out? It will not track respondent identities, and as such, your participation is completely anonymous and confidential.
As I said before, I will not try to use the survey to predict how many of you will return in the future. I have no illusions: Most of you have been obsessed with because of the election, and your interests will quickly move elsewhere until the next close election comes along.
However, I am very curious about those who have been reading this blog for the last few weeks, how you got here and what you think about it. I’d also want to use the survey to learn more about those who think they might want to return every now and then, even at times when an election is months or years away.
So, again, if you have found this site useful, please take a moment and complete the survey. If you have problems with it, please email me. Feel free to post comments or email them to me directly. I will leave the survey up for another 24 hours or so.
I encourage you to keep up with this blog, even if the updates are not as frequently updated.
Regardless of your decision on the future of the blog, I hope that you keep the old content (particularly the faq) available. It’s been an incredibly useful and accessible reference tool for making sense of surveys.
Like many Democrats, I’m still trying to figure out what happened. Your insights into the strengths and weaknesses of various surveys helps puts things in perspective. I hope that you keep this blog active for at least a month or so to make sense of the data we receive about who voted and why (and where, I guess).
Either way, thanks for your efforts! It’s been fun.
what i am most looking for is a reasoned, educated explanation for the wild inaccuracy of exit polls .. it seems to cooincide with the GOP ownership and implementation of voting machines .. most of which are fundamentally prone to abuse.
It seems highly improbable to me that someone who had just voted would do anything other than proudly proclaim who his choice has been….. does this mean that the voters who voted GOP were too ashamed to admit who they voted for in an honest way?
I’d like to see more family pictures, of course.
Note also that since you have an RSS feed, people can subscribe to your site through Kinja.com and other means and be notified when you have a new post up.
In the short term, I’d like to have you guide us through the post-poll poll-postmortems; in the long-term, I imagine someone is polling to lay the groundwork for their ’06 senate race.
Somewhere in between, I’d really like to see a statistical analysis of the different game play if you update Landslide for the current electoral vote counts 🙂
Cassandra,
I agree with you whole heartedly. FINAL Exit polls are used internationally to confirm and give legitimacy to reported results. Discrepancies between the two often call in question the reported results. It seems in America we do the opposite. We value the early calls of states exit polls allow, but not the questions they sometimes raise about the reported results.
So, let me take the opposite tact of most and ask for reasons why the reported results don’t live up to exit polls, assuming they are accurate.
***How many people voted in precints compared to how many votes for president were counted? The missing votes for president are the spoiled/overvotes/undervotes, right?
***Does this account for the discrepancy in what voters say they did and what gets counted?
***How many missing votes in OH and FL vs. the other states? Does this explain the greater reported vote/exit poll discrepancies in these states vs the other states?
***Is there a bias by precint in OH FL in #’s of missing votes?
Is any blog commenting on these questions? I feel, your experience expertise is greatly needed on these questions, exit polls, and reported vote accuracies in general.
Thank you for all you have done so far.
I was referred to your site by a friend on election night. I wound up spending two hours grazing when I had intended to get a quick dinner and start watching the returns. Your explanations are very lucid and free of jargon. I also found the discussion among the people who posted to be interesting and free from the ad hominem attacks that pass for arguments in many on-line discussions. Thanks for providing a valuable service. I hope you will keep things going for a least a couple of months and be active in 2006.
A friend with good contacts tells me that rumors are going around that the Democratic “ground game” may have developed a secret plan to “slam” the exit polls to produce fake momentum in Kerry’s favor . . . . . .
Think about it. All the DNC “ground gamers” would need is a well-placed mole at NEP or at Mitofsky International or Edison Media Research to give them an advance copy of the precincts to be randomly sampled and then the DNC ground game could aggressively push democratic voters through specific precincts at the exit pollsters. Kind of like the old “slamming” game played by the telemarketers of long distance services at the height of the AT&T, Sprint and MCI wars . . . . . .
Anyway, that’s MY STORY and I’m sticking with it . . .
“Mystery”:
Could you please share with us the party ID of those exit-polled this year. I’m assuming the old Year 2009 39%D, 35%R 26%I was incorrect. (I’m guessing even % of R’s and D’s this time) Thanks for a great site, I plan to keep reading even after the election
-Indy