In 2004, exit-poll data leaked, as everyone assumed it would, and caused widespread consternation. This year, pollsters are really intent on keeping the early numbers under wraps.
Two-by-two, polling specialists from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press will go into rooms in New York and Washington shortly before noon Tuesday. Their cellphones and BlackBerrys will be confiscated; proctors will monitor the doors; and for the next five hours, these experts will pore over exit-poll data from across the country.
If all goes well, only when they emerge from their cloisters will the legions of ravenous political bloggers have any chance of getting their hands on the earliest indication of which party will end up controlling Congress.
“The demand for info is intense, and if the safeguards aren’t steel doors bolting people inside a room, it will get out,” says Marc Ambinder, associate editor of National Journal’s Hotline OnCall. “The insatiable appetite for this info will overwhelm the ability to keep it secret.”
Count on it. The WSJ said media executives figure the secret will keep less than half an hour. I’d frankly be a little surprised if it kept that long.
The Journal added, “Mainstream news organizations know that bloggers will eventually get their hands on the exit-poll data, but their goal is to delay it as long as possible because the accuracy of the data improves as the day goes on.” That’s only partially true — the data certainly becomes more reliable as the universe of those polled goes up, but that’s not quite the reason the numbers are carefully shielded.
TPM’s DK explains.
Let’s just remember, folks, that this is about protecting the value of their proprietary information, not some high-minded effort to prevent the misuse of the polling data. That’s fine. No one is expected to reveal his or her scoop in advance (in this instance, literally before it’s ready for primetime).
What remains ironic though is that it’s the major news organizations themselves that over-rely on the exit polls and have done so for years. The 2000 and 2004 debacles aside, the exit polls have long driven the networks’ election night coverage, providing them with the pretense of speaking authoritatively about the results before the results are known.
It is television that has turned election night into the political equivalent of the Super Bowl, where the Democrats and Republicans will battle it out for four hours or so and then a winner will be handed the trophy by a beaming TV announcer. For those four hours, they want us on the couch eating Doritos, not surfing the web for exit poll data.
You wonder though. If all the money the networks pour into exit polling went instead into political reporting, actual political reporting, wearing out the shoe leather about who’s doing what and where during the last hours of the campaigns and on election day, whether the result might be more informative for the electorate. Maybe, for instance, the networks would have caught on to the NRCC’s nationwide robocall scam first, instead of the blogs.
Hard work pounding the pavement? Shoe-leather reporting during an election? What sheer madness.
DK’s point about “proprietary information” is of particular significance today. These exit polls are a commercial product, sold to media outlets and news organizations for thousands of dollars. A week after the election, all of the data can be purchased by academics, political parties and others for $10,000.
To protect their product, the process will unfold with a strict process:
In previous years, numbers were made available to the news organizations in waves via secure Web sites. In 2004, the first wave of data went out around 2 p.m. and quickly leaked onto the Internet. That’s what brought about this year’s sequestering of the news organization’s representatives. The only communication they’ll be allowed to make out of the so-called quarantine rooms before 5 p.m. will be to warn their new organizations about potential problems in the data. (In 2000, faulty polling prompted some networks to incorrectly call Florida in favor of Al Gore.) Those messages will be monitored by representatives of the polling firm NEP has contracted with. […]
But at 5 p.m., waves of exit-poll data will begin flowing to newsrooms via limited-access Web sites. For the bloggers, the scramble will be on to get the data first, hoping for an email from a friendly source.
It’s only a matter of time.