Ignore Those Polls!

A final edition of this popular feature for the 2012 cycle: tomorrow afternoon, you'll start to see raw-total exit polls leaked. Ignore those polls!

Here's the deal. First of all, at their very best, exit polls are...polls. They're subject to the same problems as all polls. And more; it turns out that there are considerable difficulties in doing exit polling well. So while exit polls do have the advantage of at least knowing who really did vote and who didn't (at least for election day voting; for everyone else it's just the same as day-before-elections polls), other than that exit polls are subject to the same sampling and other errors that any poll has. To this point, my advise has been to essentially ignore each individual poll and trust the polling averages. That applies to exit polls, too.

What is extremely useful about exit polls is that they can be adjusted, after the fact, to account for the actual vote -- and then the various questions contained in them can be studied to figure out what happened. We can't really do that with pre-election polls because we don't know what the "true" number is. That is, we'll know exactly what actual voters did in 2012, so we can adjust the polls to that number. But if we take a poll a week out, we don't know what sampling or other error is involved, because we don't know exactly what would have happened had the election been that day. All we have are best estimates.

But as far as predicting what will happen in the various states...the exit polls aren't very helpful with that. And even worse, the initial exit polls you'll hear about are still partial, with additional waves coming at the end of the day. Not to mention that I've seen false "leaked" exit polls more than once; of course, that's not the fault of the polls themselves, but it is yet another reason to be cautious of numbers that are in no way official.

You'll know soon enough. The extra two or three hours of having an additional, very dubious, hint, just isn't worth anything.