You’ve probably heard reports about exit polls showing big gains for Republicans among Hispanic voters this year. You may not have heard, however, that those gains were terribly exaggerated.
NBC News on Friday revised its estimated support that President Bush received from Hispanics on election day from 44 percent down to 40 percent. Support for Democratic candidate John Kerry was likewise revised upward from 53 percent to 58 percent.
The revision essentially doubles Kerry’s margin of victory among Hispanic voters from 9 to 18 percent.
Ana Maria Arumi, the NBC elections manager, also revised NBC’s estimate for Hispanic support for Bush in Texas, effectively going from an 18-point lead for Bush to a 2-point lead for Kerry – a 20-point turnaround from figures reported on election night.
Thank goodness for those reliable exit polls, right? I’m sure all of those media outlets that said blogs were the ones who couldn’t be trusted to deal with the data appropriately will, no doubt, be offering similar reprimands for NBC.
It’s also yet another reminder that the exit-poll process is seriously flawed and needs to be opened up for real scrutiny. At least one of the nation’s biggest pollsters seems to agree.
“I don’t think that exit polls can be used as a barometer for the accuracy of an election itself,” noted pollster John Zogby explained to me on last night’s [MSNBC’s] Countdown, in what we think was his first full-scale television interview since the election. “At least until we find out if there’s something broken with this round of election polls… I think that the gentlemen who are responsible for the exit polls should be fully transparent, release their data, discuss their methodology. Let us see what exactly it is that happened, and why it happened.”
What a concept. Any response from the National Election Pool? Afraid not.