The Power of Hope as illustrated by the 11/02 Exit Polls
Mickey Kaus and Mystery Pollster have been all over the extreme incompetence of Warren Mitofsky in the dreadful exit polls paid for and provided to our friends:
Here’s the first lines of the poll, created at 7:33 pm on election night:
Here’s what WaPo editor Steve Coll said on 11/3 during an online chat:
I see lots of reason to think that — again, as they have often been in the past — the exit polls were badly flawed. This was a real problem in our newsroom last night. The last wave of national exit polls we received, along with many other subscribers, showed Kerry winning the popular vote by 51 percent to 48 percent — if true, surely enough to carry the electoral college, however the contested states in the midwest broke down. The sample size was so large that it appeared beyond the usual margins of error in polling. Yet the poll was dead wrong. How can this be? You can be sure we’ll be asking that question pointedly in the days ahead, as well as producing stories for readers about the issues.
Well, gee, Steve, I didn’t need to read beyond line one to figure this out. And gee, Warren, why didn’t you include a serious caveat with the results — or, better still reweight the poll to correct for its obvious and ridiculous flaw: there is a zero percent chance that the electorate is 54% female and 46% male. Corruption, incompetence, or merely earnest wishful thinking: you decide.
Meanwhile, to the networks: you paid millions of dollars for this?
FURTHER ANALYSIS
In 2000, the vote total was about 105 million, and it is said that women were 52% of the voters, or 55 million. In 2004, around 122 million votes were cast. If the Mitofsky numbers were correct, 6 million more men would have voted in 2004 over the previous election, but 11 million more women would have had to vote in 2004 than in 2000.