Didn't believe that Senator John Kerry was leading President Bush on Election Day? Tense as the day was, neither did I. John Tabin of the American Spectator read seventy-seven pages of a post-election report released by exit pollsters Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, and charges incompetence:
There was no problem with the precincts that Edison/Mitofsky chose to survey; comparing those precincts' actual vote totals to the actual vote totals of the states shows that they should have generated a good, balanced sample....More interesting are the characteristics of the interviewers themselves that correlated to high WPE rates. For some reason, Edison/Mitofsky didn't ask interviewers about their political leanings, but there are certain inferences that can be made. Younger interviewers' data had much higher WPE rates than older interviewers' — a big problem, since 35% of interviewers were 24 or younger and 50% were 34 or younger.
One of the highest WPE rates came in the data collected by those interviewers with post-graduate degrees. This is a group that leans to the left on average. ...Even assuming there was no deliberate fudging of the numbers going on — something I'm perfectly willing to assume — there's little doubt that many of these interviewers had a demeanor that absolutely screamed liberal. Small wonder that Kerry voters would be more likely to talk to them.
As Tabin notes, the pollsters — without much mind for their own error potential — have been blaming the broadcast of disinformation on the internet, specifically bloggers, whose publication of unlikely Kerry leads was then picked up radio and cable news networks. And the make-believe leftist fringe would dispute, in true banana republic style, the results of any lost election. Still, the credibility of exit polling has been dealt a blow nearly as severe as CBS News'; one wonders how much weight these pollsters will carry on Election Day 2006, if they are consulted at all.