Exit polls are ‘the debil’

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: November 4, 2008

Remember Kathy Bates as Bobby Boucher’s mother in “The Waterboy?“

She was a caricature of an overprotective mother in Cajun country, and she thought pretty much everything—except the family horse, Steve—was “THE DEBIL!!“

Of course, with all the cable news channels and all the broadcast networks and all the C-SPAN channels rushing to get their handsomely paid anchors to report the election results FIRST!, they’ll all be relying on exit polls to tell you what’s going on in the polls long before they close.

And why not? After all, they’ve been making all sorts of assumptions about the electoral map based on polls, other polls and polls of polls for the past three months. CNN has already assured us that Barack Obama will win enough electoral votes to become president. And we all know that the polls are never wrong. So why are we even going through the motions of having this election? It’s SO inconvenient and time consuming!

Because polls don’t matter. Votes do.

And as for those highly regarded, highly touted exit polls we are going to be hearing about ALL DAY LONG?

Well, John McCain’s campaign pollster wants the media to know something:

EXIT POLLS ARE THE DEBIL!!

McCain’s internal pollster, Bill McInturff, released a memo saying that the campaign “would discourage a rush to judgment based on the exit polls” when reporting results tonight.

They are unreliable, McInturff says, for five reasons:

1. Historically, exit polls have tended to overstate the Democratic vote.

2. The exit polls are likely to overstate the Obama vote because Obama voters are more likely to participate in the exit poll.

3. The exit polls have tended to skew most Democratic in years where there is high turnout and high vote interest like in 1992 and 2004.

4. It is not just the national exit poll that skews Democratic, but each of the state exit polls also suffers from the same Democratic leanings.

5. The results of the exit polls are also influenced by the demographics of the voters who conduct the exit polls.

McInturff missed a sixth reason: Of the expected record of 130 million to 140 million votes, early and absentee voters will comprise about 30 percent of the total.

Guess what’s not included in exit polls?

If you guessed early and absentee votes, congratulations! You’ve won this handsome dinette set from ...

Oh, wait; that’s right. No corporate sponsors here. It appears that you’ve won little more than personal satisfaction. But that beats a cheesy dinette set any day.

So, McInturff offers a novel idea:

“...do not overreact to the early exit poll data. Rather than looking at the exit polls, we should wait until we start seeing actual election results from key precincts and counties to gauge who won the election.“

WHAT???

Don’t rely on potentially unreliable estimates, but wait for ACTUAL RESULTS to declare who won the election?

That’s so last century!

After all, the networks have to be FIRST! FIRST! FIRST! I tell you!

As for being right, well ... they’ll take their chances.