If you don't follow Kieran Healy, you should:
Today is Exit Poll Crosstab Storytime day.
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) November 10, 2022
I used to do this, but not anymore. Even back in the day, I knew that exit polls were probably not good enough to rely on, but I shut my eyes and did it anyway. Gotta have something to write about on the day after!
But over the past few years it's just become way too obvious that the initial releases of exit polls are all but meaningless. I mean, if they show a 10% shift in something or other, it probably means there really was a shift. But most of the time exit polls deal in shifts of 3 or 4%, and that's just pure noise.
So you won't see much in the way of exit poll storytelling from me anymore. I love the genre, but if it's facts you're after it's best to ignore them.¹
¹But if you wait a few months for the later releases of exit polls, after they've been reweighted and fitted to actual numbers, they're probably still useful. You should assume a largish margin of error, but that's all.
I know nobody wants to wait. We want to set narratives now! But facts is facts, and narratives based on initial releases of exit polls should be treated with the contempt they deserve.
“I used to do this (as recently as a few hours ago), but not anymore.”
-FTFY
I’d like to comment on the youth vote that you posted earlier using preliminary exit polling, which you apparently no longer do. People in the past election got hung up on the Democratic Party “declining” among some of their stronger constituent bases. In terms of percentages, this may have been true, but in terms of raw votes it was not. It is better to get a few extra million voters voting for your candidate 55%-45%, and bringing your percentage of that group down overall if you are getting more raw votes total. Getting slightly weaker Democratic voters is still a net gain, and this has been ignored and obscured the past two years.
Your post doesn’t address this in the youth vote either. The youth vote in 2002 was in the low 20’s in terms of percentages. However, what was the raw number then compared to now and what was that percentage of the total voting population then compared to now? If you are getting a 50-30% improvement over an even larger group of people that is much more significant than you are willing to give credit. As well, you don’t address how much were they voting for Democrats and Republican a decade or two ago. Has that number changed? However, you ignore all these important data points, and proclaim your conclusion based on a limited and faulty set of facts.
…however, if that quote was a parody of the awful Malibu Passages commercial, Bravo!
Bah. Exit polls, like other data, are just used to confirm a predetermined "narrative" which has generally been devised to explain something before it actually happened. At least, if you're our "News" media.
Exit polls are generally used a basis for a narrative about the election results as soon as possible. The narratives are almost always written well before the election. The writer merely cherry picks the parts of the exit polls that seem to support it.
Some random observations about this story in particular and the election in general.
1 - My home state of NC. It is a lost cause for Democrats. We elected Ted Budd a trump acolyte to replace Richard Burr who has retired. It wasn't even close. The attack ads by the Budd campaign were "Willie Horton"-ish in their attacks on Cheri Beasley. But they were effective. I had hopes that NC was turning slightly purple but I was wrong.
2 - Both Florida and Texas have gone deeper into the red column.
3 - I think it may be time for electronic voting using fingerprint technology such as that on your smart phone or retina scan . The number of people that don't have access to this technology via app or computer program is small. The actual process of filling in the circles should be shit-canned
4 - Trump lost and in doing so his influence has suffered and he doesn't like it. A person with an ego the size of his cannot take losing. His battle with Ron Desantis may fracture the republican party and that will open up another huge can of worms
5 - In spite of all of the above I think the GOP lost and the DEMs lost less than anticipated
Which brings me to polling. Some were right and many were wrong
But the "level" of lying by ordinary folks has gotten so pervasive in our society today we can no longer ignore it. We now put liars on pedestals (like Trump, Kari Lake and Walker). We can no longer "trust" polls - either exit or pre election polling. Most people now have an ulterior motive for their answers, and THAT is dishonest, at it's core