On the Exit Poll Debacle

Ace has some thoughts on why the exit polls were wrong. It is the analysis I've seen so far.

Key point I have not seen anywhere else:

The exit polls have been shown to be utter rubbish, and yet the Democrats and their liberal media Spirit Squad are still quoting from them. The numbers were simply bad-- they showed a coming landslide for Kerry, which was just not what happened. So if the numbers were off on the head-to-head horserace, why are liberals continuing to cite the erroneous polls for the non-horserace data?

FWIW, it think Michael Barone's "slamming" theory is plausible. Polling places in all the battleground states were crawling with observers from the DNC, the Kerry campaign, MoveOn, ACT, etc. It makes sense that activists saw the exit pollsters and the word got around.

No top down conspiracy is required. Just as Rove did not tell bloggers to go after the Rather documents, Mik McCurry did not have to call his minions to send them to the right polling places. Leftists, too, can operate as a pack instead of a herd.

A question: if intra-day poll results are inherently unreliable, why does the MSM want to see them?

Ace also spanks Wm. Saletan of Slate. Like Drudge and NRO, he reported that Kerry was running the table based on exit polls. Unlike Drudge and NRO, he did not report the problems with the internals later in the day.

But it might be worse still. I can't help suspecting that Saletan wasn't especially upset by the thought that the numbers he was publishing -- numbers he had to know by 5:00 were probably bad -- were helping to depress Republican turnout. Whether those numbers were right or wrong.

I wrote about this before Election Day here.

Poll games: one last card to play

UPDATE: Just saw this over at ProfessorBainbridge.com:

Outside one polling place, we noticed a stringer (a Frenchman!) working for a pool of several news organizations (CNN, ABC, Fox, MSNBC, etc.) who was doing some exit polling. For most of the day he was frequently caucusing with the Democrat lawyer poll watcher and occasionally with some ACT people. (I think they’re the Soros group.) It was just all too chummy for objective reporting. It occurred to my teammate that this might have been part of the bogus exit polling that was being disseminated throughout Election Day.