Dick Morris and Exit Polls: Half Right?
You may know former strategist/pollster Dick Morris. He used to advise Bill Clinton to bear right-much to the chagrin of Hillary and others in the White House. Then he got caught in a sex scandal, got a job at FoxNews, and now makes a living bashing Clinton/Democrats.
Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.
So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.
(edit)
To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.
(edit)
This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.
His 'foul play' is that the exit polls were conspiring to show Kerry was winning. Of course, that a quarter will get you the NYPost in NYC. The alternate explanation is that the exit polls were right and the votes were being tampered with...
UPDATE:
Check out CNN's exit polls. At 12:21 AM, Kerry leads among men AND
women:
At 1:41 AM, Bush leads in men and is tied with women, with only 60 more respondents creating this big swing.
Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.
So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.
(edit)
To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.
(edit)
This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.
His 'foul play' is that the exit polls were conspiring to show Kerry was winning. Of course, that a quarter will get you the NYPost in NYC. The alternate explanation is that the exit polls were right and the votes were being tampered with...
UPDATE:
Check out CNN's exit polls. At 12:21 AM, Kerry leads among men AND
women:
At 1:41 AM, Bush leads in men and is tied with women, with only 60 more respondents creating this big swing.
posted by BlueMan at
7:38 AM
