Have a heart, Mickey. You may be right… in fact, no doubt you are… when you describe exit polls in general as “crappy” and then have the temerity to ask the logical question: “If the exit polls are this unreliable for press’ result-predicting purposes, why aren’t they also unreliable for all the scholarly purposes they are supposedly put to? Garbage is garbage, no?”
No! It’s something for pundits to chew on for hours of empty screen time while waiting for actual results to come in. What if they didn’t have this? They’d just have to… make stuff up. [Wait a minute. You just said the exit polls were essentially made up.-ed. Okay, now I'm confused. No surprise there. Okay, I'll give you the last word. Where'd I hear that before?]
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4 Comments
1. srlucado:It’s just one of those stupid things that the news has to do when it’s live.
You know, reports like:
“It’s raining really hard now…”
“There’s a lot of police activity here at the scene…”
“The heat from this fire is intense…”
(How many years of journalism school do you need to do that?)
It does, however, give us insight into the empty-headedness of the blathering class. Without a feed from a Tele-Prompt-R, they couldn’t recite their birthdate.
But let’s face it, life in real-time just isn’t that interesting.
Scott
Apr 23, 2008 - 3:35 pm 2. David Thomson:Dick Morris often praises exit polling as extremely accurate. My guess is that it may no longer be true. Exit polling is perhaps effective if the person being questioned behaves in a passive manner. But what happens if someone actively seeks to be questioned so that they show support for their candidate?
There is, alas, also an unpleasant possibility in this race drenched political cycle. And yes, it might be the so-called Bradley effect. Could some guilt tripped whites feel uncomfortable telling someone else, especially if they are a minority—that they did not vote for “Barry” Obama?
Apr 23, 2008 - 6:17 pm 3. Lem:I think David has a good point.
Apr 23, 2008 - 7:50 pm 4. David C:Actually, I think exit polls can be both crappy *and* accurate, just in different ways.
Where they’re pretty provably crappy is for *counting* voters. For whatever reasons, they do a bad job of figuring out what percentage of real voters were Obama voters or Hillary voters.
But figuring out, say, the psychology or demographics of Obama voters on election day, that’s easier. You just need to talk to a large enough sample of Obama voters, and you don’t care how many of them you have compared to Hillary voters. There can still be distortions (and I’m sure there are), but I think the “internals” are probably a lot more reliable and useful than the “who’s winning” data.
Apr 24, 2008 - 7:04 am