And I’m honestly embarassed that I didn’t. Jim Lampley caught it, though.
The Huffington Post | The Biggest Story of Our Lives: “At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.
People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.
And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted.”
I went so hard after the hard math angle, I never even thought to consult the Vegas line. Even know that Vegas isn’t perfect and that there are upsets, the odds against the oddsmakers calling it wrong are very, very slim.
I say it again, folks: we got took. I wonder how long you have to claim a ticket…
Garbage in, garbage out. When did exit polls become more reliable than the actual vote? This is just silly.
Bill, exit polls have (until the advent of Dubya) been incredibly reliable–in fact, it was the exit polling done in Ukraine which led to that country’s “Orange Revolution” (the exit polls suggested that Yushchenko had an 11% lead while “official” results gave Yanukovych a 3% win).
From Wikipedia:
“Protests began the day after the second round of voting in the contest between incumbent prime minister Viktor Yanukovych and opposition candidate Yushchenko, when official returns differed markedly from exit polling results; exit polls gave Yushchenko up to an 11% lead, while official results gave the election to Yanukovych by 3%. While Yanukovych supporters have claimed that Yushchenko’s connections to the Ukrainian media explain this disparity, the Yushchenko team publicized evidence of many incidents of electoral fraud in favor of the government-backed Yanukovych, witnessed by many local and foreign observers. These allegations were further strengthened by the similar signs of the electoral fraud observed, though at a lesser scale, during the first presidential run on October 31. However, the scale of the irregularities of October 31 run was less clear and even for the supporters of both candidates it appeared unlikely that they could have affected the outcome of the first round by bringing any candidate to collecting an outright majority of the vote cast.”
While this isn’t absolute proof, the facts remain that until the 2000 election, exit polls (at ALL political levels) were reasonably close to the actual outcome. There have been a few instances where individual points have had the exit polls showing a different result than the actual vote(Colorado’s Amendment 2, for instance; the exit polls, as well as all pre-election polls, showed the Amendment being defeated by about 10% while the actual results were almost the opposite, but there’s a belief that people told the pollers what they thought the pollers wanted to hear–something I don’t quite understand) but these have been the exceptions more than the rule.
“Bill, exit polls have (until the advent of Dubya) been incredibly reliable”
Actually, not so much. The validity of the polls varies with the quality of the poll taker–just like all the other polls.
Exit polls even have a built in error factor that they have to account for, which, with the advent of absentee balloting, may prove insurmountable. Witness this bit from the CBS News analysis of what went wrong in 2000.
One of the calculations that VNS routinely provides is called a bias computation. It
compares the results from the exit poll with the actual vote totals in the same precincts.
There have been cases in the past in which one candidate’s voters seemed more willing
than the other candidate’s to complete the exit-poll questionnaires.
This year, the bias computation in Kentucky suggested that Bush supporters were more
likely to respond to exit pollsters and complete the questionnaire. That meant that the
CBS News Decision Team would need to be cautious in calling states for Bush from the
exit poll alone unless his lead was very wide, but would not have the same concern about
calls for Gore. Kentucky was one of the first two states to close, and that computation
delayed calls in other states, including Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia.
There is a relatively new but growing problem with exit polls, because only those people
who vote in person on Election Day are included. But absentees are coming to represent
an increasingly large proportion of voters. States with large numbers of absentee ballots
are not likely to be called from exit polls, except when one candidate has a very wide
lead. VNS has conducted phone surveys in several states with the largest proportions of
absentees, but it will be costly to extend that research.
Sooo…you can’t be sure how good the exit results are until you compare them to the real results, which you may not know for a while due to the absentee ballots, which may not reflect the same patterns seen on election day.
But if folks want to go on believing that the biggest political story of all time is being secretly suppressed by the right wing dominated media…hey, go for it. Thank God for first rate investigative reporters like Jim Lampley!
There’s no point in belaboring this–anyone who wants some reality based info can find it at http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/05/smackdowns_and_.html
Assuming one wants to hear from the ACTUAL PEOPLE who conducted the exit polls and not the bookies who had the Kentucky Derby winner at 50 to 1 odds, that is.
I remember being afraid that Democrats would absolutely go postal if they lost this one. As it turns out, some of them just refuse to accept the results. Well, I guess that’s better than climbing a tower with a sniper rifle.
One last link, for those ineterested– http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=536&e=3&u=/ap/20050515/ap_on_el_pr/exit_polls
This has some interesting statements from the folks who conducted the actual exit polls. Doesn’t support the paranoia so some of you may want to give it a skip.