OK, we all know that the exit polls last night were way off. They predicted a strong Kerry lead which turned out to be not true. Which brings me to the question: Why are we trusting any of the exit polls? By that I mean the ones that say moral values was an important factor, or the ones that said $35-70,000 income families voted in favor of Bush, etc.? A lot of us are basing what we think this election means based on the exit polls but this didn't do too well yesterday...*shrugs*
I don't trust 'exit polls'. I voted for Bush and it had nothing to do with 'moral values' and no one polled me. What would the cable news channels do without polls? Sometimes I think that's the only reason polls exist.
They didn't predict a strong kerry lead in total, they just predicted a small lead (1 pt or so) in a number of different states. Enough to make it look like a big electoral lead, but based on a few small margins based all around. The fact that they were uniformly off (maybe by 3 pts each in the big toss up states) actually reinforces them Anyway, the exit poll to which you refer too has been adjusted significantly since the yesterday PM polls, and in fact is a differnt poll altogether.
They need to reconcile 2 things to maintian any credibility: Who voted early on Tuesday? According to their stat sit was 57% females and 43% males. Keep in mind females leaned towards Kerry and Males to Bush. So did more women vote in the AM, or why did the pollsters select more women? Locations: The polls were heavily weighted to big cities. Here in Ohio they more heavily weighted polls at Cleveland and Columbus than of teh population or voting trends. Why? Did they expect different voting patters or dd they just not have the manpowr to goto the smaller towns?