Were the Exit
Polls Juiced?
Commentary by Greg Lewis / OpinionEditorials.com
November 10, 2004
It occurred to me very early on election night —
as Brit Hume and the Fox News Channel analytical team expressed befuddlement
at the fact that afternoon exit polls (overwhelmingly reliable in the
past, as Dick Morris would attest) seemed to point to a stunning Kerry
victory, while actual election returns, which began to be released shortly
after 7 p.m., made it clear that Bush was at least holding his own and
very probably doing quite well, thank you — that those exit polls
might have been "juiced," to use the term that has become current
to describe athletes who cheat by using substances such as steroids to
enhance their performance.
Indeed, the day after the election former-Clinton-operative-turned-adversary
Dick Morris asserted unequivocally that the exit polls were juiced. More
specifically, Morris said that in all his years in politics, he'd never
seen exit polls that were so wrong as this year's crop. He claimed that
exit polls are by far the most accurate types of polls and that in order
for dozens of them to be wrong, someone had to be intentionally skewing
the numbers, either by juicing the samples (the early afternoon polls
were weighted, for example, about 60-40 in favor of women, which favored
Kerry and which was either a stupid mistake or a deliberate attempt by
pollsters to distort results) or by the Democrats' flooding the polls
with voters in locations where and at times when they knew the exit polls
were being taken, to cite two ways the alleged juicing might have happened.
Far from ruling out network collusion (the exit polling data was gathered
on behalf of participating news organizations), Morris mentioned the need
for a congressional investigation.
It is not without the realm of possibility that the skewing
of early exit poll results was done intentionally to convince people,
particularly those who had not yet voted, that Kerry was on his way to
a landslide victory, and thus to dampen Republican enthusiasm and turnout
in the mountain west and far western states. While I don't think that
intentional misrepresentation can be conclusively proven, I do think (or
rather I did think for about a day and a half) that there was the distinct
possibility that the exit polls which produced such dramatically inaccurate
results were in some way juiced.
The argument against intentional juicing of exit polls
actually rests on the amateurish and unsophisticated behavior of many
internet bloggers. Upon fairly close examination, their (the bloggers')
role in the matter of the perpetuation of phony exit poll numbers is pretty
deplorable, especially that of one "Wonkette" — whoever
the hell she is — who was chanting a kind of perverse mantra, "run
free, information," as if it were her duty to make sure that nothing,
even the most patently false info, was prevented from getting put out
there on the web for everyone to see. The fact that many bloggers —
without even bothering to take into consideration such Statistics-101
principles as the margin of error implicit in a set of several dozen small
local samples which added up to no more than 12,000 voters nationally
— should, like high school sophomores breathlessly passing along
the latest gossip, "inform" their readers (read "groupies")
that Kerry was possibly amassing landslide victory numbers would hardly
be worth comment if it hadn't caused such a misguided stir among so many
people.
The blogs' role in the (happily) temporary perpetuation
of such blatantly inaccurate information was puerile, self-involved romanticism
at its absolute worst. In fact, the post-election drivel I listened to
on Air America was no worse than this horsecrap. Even Glen Reynolds (of
Instapundit.com) sounded a lot more like a drunken college underclassman
at 3 a.m. than he did a lawyer. On balance, I guess that's not that much
of a stretch, is it?
In the face of this irresponsible reportage, Bush-Cheney campaign manager
Ken Mehlman has testified that the Republican assessment of the bogus
information at the time was along the lines of, "You know, what we're
seeing in these exit polls is just so far from what we know has to be
the case among voters, that we simply can't give it any credence."
Mehlman and his associates were quick to recognize that the early exit
poll results were heavily skewed toward women voters and that they came
from predominantly Democrat precincts, both of which would tend to argue
that Kerry's position was dramatically over-represented.
At any rate, in this case it was actually the networks
who put the brake on the exit poll data. For once it was the big guys
who acted responsibly. The bloggers' role in this whole thing ultimately
argues against a widespread conspiracy to influence voters to believe
that Kerry was winning. The exit-pollers were, at best, utterly incompetent.
In this case, however, it was the blogosphere in which the results of
their incompetence got broadcast, and not the mainstream media.
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