Admit it; you saw the exit polls yesterday afternoon and felt pretty good. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t take my own caveats seriously enough. This data was unreliable in 2000 and it proved even worse yesterday.
The exit polls missed the mark very badly last night (before they were reweighted to correspond to the actual results). The national exit poll consistently showed Kerry leading by 3 points — just the reverse of the actual vote. The Ohio exit poll had Kerry up by 4 and the Florida exit poll had it tied.
What happened? Some combination of bad precinct samples, response bias, or failing to accurately account for early and absentee votes must have been at work. Whatever it was, it was a major problem. In 2000, the national exit poll also overestimated Gore’s vote, but not by nearly as big a margin.
When I’m done writing “I will not get my hopes up” 100 times, I’ll follow it up with “I will not listen to exit polls.” Fool me once…
Update: It’s one thing to misuse exit polls that turn out to be false, but as my friend Katie mentioned, it’s something else entirely to pretend your exit polls were right all along.