The Absurd Report

Will they or won’t they – take a few minutes to take an exit poll, that is?

Democrats still ache over Election Day 2004 when exit polling showed John Kerry about to become the next president of the United States. The only problem was that the actual vote count put George W. Bush back in the White House for four more years.

And that came just four years after the disastrous exit polling in 2000, when the race on Election Night was called first for Al Gore, then for Bush and then at 4 a.m. was declared “too close to call.”
Many voters wonder why they can’t ever seem to get it right?

Part of the frustration may stem from the fact that the primary value of exit polling is to help us understand why people voted the way they did. This is an entirely different task than trying to predict a winner for Internet junkies who can’t wait a few more hours until actual votes are counted.

Reviewing Fox News/Rasmussen Reports data from key battleground states raises a couple red flags about the use of early exit polling data to predict a winner. Understanding this data from polling conducted last Sunday night may save some a repeat of 2004’s heartache.

The bottom line is that in every state we polled–Colorado, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia– Democrats are a lot more eager to take exit polls than Republicans.

In five of the six states, a majority of Democrats say they would be Very Likely to participate in the exit polling process. At the same time, in five of the six states, fewer than 40% of Republicans would be willing to do the same.

In every state, Republicans are at least twice as likely as Democrats to say that they are not at all willing to take an exit poll.