As you wait for votes to be counted and results to trickle in, you might be curious about whether the exit polls you sometimes see cited on TV or social media can provide a preview of what’s to come.
Exit polls are surveys conducted as voters leave their polling places. The most widely cited are by Edison Research, for the National Election Pool, a coalition of broadcast news organizations. Unfortunately, exit polls don’t have a very good track record, and they can contribute to misleading narratives on election night.
As more polls close, more interviews are added to an exit poll’s sample, so the results evolve throughout the night. And while exit polls are eventually weighted to match the final vote outcome, that obviously can’t happen until after the election is over. So, on election night, the sample is weighted to reflect the known electorate, but that, too, changes as more votes are tallied. As a result, exit polls, especially early ones, sometimes seem to show trends that don’t turn out to be true after all the votes have been counted.
In 2016, for example, exit polls showed Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald J. Trump. Later, they showed a majority of white women voting for Trump. Both of these narratives proved to be untrue. In 2004, the early exit polls showed the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, with such a strong lead that fellow Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, reportedly emailed her mother to lament, “All is lost.” (In fact, Mr. Kerry was the one who lost, to former President George W. Bush, by two percentage points).
In particular, early exit polls have a poor track record when it comes to measuring Black, Latino and younger voters.
Exit polls do serve a purpose. The information they gather can be useful after races have been called, because they can help provide insight into how different voting groups actually broke. But when a race is still in flux, exit polls are a notoriously flawed gauge of what’s actually happening. Don’t expect to see much coverage of them here.
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