Well, No One I Know Voted for Him

The New York Times reports on November's wacky exit polls and the research groups apologizing for them. Apparently, a bunch of 20-somethings asking their 20-something peers whether they were actually going to vote for that fascist Dubya was not the best way to get accurate results. But the researchers are on top of things now, just in time for Inauguration Day:

"We understand that the impression given by the results during the day didn't meet the results of what happened," an author of the report, Joseph Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Media Research, said in an interview yesterday.

Comments

[Adam]

so what's next - electronic key-pad self-administered poll responding? can't do any worse than they did last year.

[Jason Ligon]

In the spirit of the monkeys running the zoo, who is Kerry Howley?

I was in Spain for a little while, so I might have missed something ...

[uh...]

Uh, that's not what the report said at all.

Are you kidding? I could be missing that.

The young pollsters may have acted inappropriately, and may have even oversampled people their own age (though so few young people cote, that'd be hard), but they certainly weren't asking their friends.

I don't mean to be humourless...

[Thomas Paine's Goiter]

"We understand that the impression given by the results during the day didn't meet the results of what happened," an author of the report, Joseph Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Media Research, said in an interview yesterday.

Finally, an executive with a grasp of the obvious.

[R C Dean]

Actually, Lenski got it wrong. It wasn't "the impression given by the results during the day that was wrong, it was the results themselves. Lenski is trying to make it sound like it was the reporting on the exit poll results that was bad, not the poll results themselves.

[j g truth]

The exit polls were fine. It was the closed-source, no-receipt voting compluters produced by the military-industrial complex that were the problem.

Hope this helps.

[David T]

What I'd like to see is a comparison of the people hired in 2004 with those hired in 2000 and 1996 when the exit polls were much more accurate. If the exit pollers then too were mostly 20-somethings, some other explanation is is needed to explain the greater inaccuracy in 2004.