NPR on AAPOR

Exit Polls Legacy blog posts Miscellanous

I am back today from four days at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR).  Given the various "day job" tasks that have accumulated in my absence, I am grateful that Marc Rosenbaum of National Public Radio, another AAPOR conference attendee, filed a helpful first person account on the NPR blog Mixed Signals.  Rosenbaum’s provides a nice review of his experience at the conference.  He was certainly right about the rain.

As for my own experience over four very full and exhausting days, my preference is to try to share the results from some of the more interesting papers a little at a time over the upcoming summer months rather trying to summarize it all now.   

But before moving on to other things, I thought I would pass along Marc Rosenbaum’s helpful assessment of a panel on exit polls and theories about a stolen election in 2004: 

There also was a session called, "Who Really Won the Election 2004?" This was an opportunity for the cyber-active bloggers who think the Ohio vote was somehow fraudulent to present their best case. They didn’t. Their presentations were confusing, if not incoherent to this listener, and they all seemed to boil down to one complaint: namely, that the vote totals didn’t match the exit polls. The problem with that argument is that if you can give good reasons why the exit polls were wrong in Ohio (and there are many), their entire complaint disappears.

As regular readers might guess, I had the same reaction.  The panel on exit polls largely rehashed old arguments, although it did feature coherent rebuttals of the exit-polls-as-evidence-of-fraud theories by regular MP commenters Mark Lindeman and Elizabeth Liddle. Those new to the issue may want to review my exit poll FAQ and other recent posts on the subject, especially these two from last year.  Mark Hertsgaard’s Mother Jones review of the various conspiracy theories also provides a helpful reality check on some of the other annecodotes still frequently cited by the conspiracy theorists as evidence of fraud.    

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.