Early Exit Polls: 72% First Time Voters For Obama

Holy cows!

10 Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls

FiveThirtyEight's analysis

I have one reason: John Kerry.
Here are the first four from Fivethirtyeight: :

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

2. Exit polls have consistently overstated the Democratic share of the vote. Many of you will recall this happening in 2004, when leaked exit polls suggested that John Kerry would have a much better day than he actually had. But this phenomenon was hardly unique to 2004. In 2000, for instance, exit polls had Al Gore winning states like Alabama and Georgia (!). If you go back and watch The War Room, you'll find George Stephanopolous and James Carville gloating over exit polls showing Bill Clinton winning states like Indiana and Texas, which of course he did not win.

3. Exit polls were particularly bad in this year's primaries. They overstated Barack Obama's performance by an average of about 7 points.

4. Exit polls challenge the definition of a random sample. Although the exit polls have theoretically established procedures to collect a random sample -- essentially, having the interviewer approach every nth person who leaves the polling place -- in practice this is hard to execute at a busy polling place, particularly when the pollster may be standing many yards away from the polling place itself because of electioneering laws. read the rest

A Plea to Obama Supporters

This is exactly what I'm feeling. De ja vu. The pollsters are too jolly for Obama. This is closer than we know. Don't let the Mac come back. Please don't plunge us into four more years of Bush. Get out and vote. Drag your friends and neighbors. It would be a shame if we miss this opportunity for transformational leadership. 

Lessig: But here’s the weird deja vu I feel. In 2004, I got on a plane Tuesday to fly to London. When I got on the plane, I watched every pundit, as well as Kerry’s daughter, speak about how all the polls were with Kerry. The “exit polls” indicated a clear Kerry victory. But then when I landed, I sat it utter disbelief in the United lounge at Heathrow, watching the Ohio numbers go against us, and therefore, delivering 4 more years to Bush.

We Democrats have trouble closing the deal. We have trouble continuing the push to the very last moment. We have repeatedly been blindsided by the fact that the other side votes regardless of the expected result, while we’re more contingent — making the effort if it seems necessary, relaxing when it doesn’t.

Please, don’t let this happen again. Please, if you’re an Obama supporter, do absolutely everything you can in the next 24 hours to make sure every single possible Obama vote turns out to vote. Volunteer for a phone bank, or use my.barackobama.com to phone bank from home. And beyond this, do the sort of things that too few of us ever have the courage to do: Express to your friends, and anyone you know, why you want them to support your candidate. Send an email with a personal story, or an argument important to you, to as many people as you can. Apologize for the intrusion, but intrude nonetheless. (How weird is it that engaging people about democratic issues in a democracy is generally viewed as inappropriate). And don’t let up until 8pm Pacific time.

Early Exit Polls Indiana and North Carolina

complete indiana exit polls
complete north carolina exit polls
update: the zogby poll was most inline with the indiana and north carolina turnouts.
update: indiana votes aren't expected to be finished counted until after midnight. obama is 40,000 votes off. lake county an obama stronghold and has 494,000 people there. the smaller union county is also left to count.
cbs calls race in indiana too early. in north carolina, obama won the first time voters, white voters, black voters, everyone except for older voters. will that shut up the naysayers? no. it will probably make them stronger. will hillary drop? no.
in indiana, several of the most populous counties have yet to been counted.
obama wins in north carolina, projected by cnn.
update: live blogging on the results at nyt
update: indiana results by county
update: indiana polls closed (most of them)
update: more exit poll data
first exit polls, obama up in north carolina; hillary up in indiana
i will post early exit polls here but in the meantime, this is a great story on why we shouldn't bother with early exit polls and obama supporters should just close our eyes and tune out until tomorrow. let's keep our perspective, obama is ahead and there is little clinton can do to catch up aside from big blowouts today. this comes by way of dailykos:

By Al Giordano

Today marks the 47th and 48th primaries or caucuses for the Democratic presidential nomination. More than 90 percent of the delegates will have been chosen by tonight. By now, we all ought to know the drill.

The day begins with the Clinton campaign “leaking” something to the Drudge Report to set expectations for the day. That then gets repeated on political blogs and cable news, where Clinton surrogate Terry McAuliffe elaborates. Today’s “expectation”: That the Clinton campaign expects a “15 point” defeat in North Carolina. Clinton’s yapping puppies in the news media repeat the manufactured expectation all day long, in which the bar is supposedly now that if Clinton comes within 15 points in that state that she has somehow “won” with a 14 point (or 6 point) defeat.

Around 4 p.m. rumors of exit polls begin circulating on the Internet. Around 5:30 p.m. AP and other news organizations leak minor data from the exit polls that explains almost nothing of value. Sometime after 6 p.m. Drudge posts raw numbers from exit polls that - if past is prologue - show Obama doing an average of seven percentage points better than he actually does.

Obama supporters then get prematurely jubilant and after polls close (tonight at 7 p.m. ET in Indiana and 7:30 p.m. ET in North Carolina) the real results start to come in and reveal Clinton then doing “better than expected” (at least better than the new expectations promoted during the day).

The media talking heads then ask aloud why Obama can’t “close the deal” (in Clinton’s own words) and what is numerically a defeat for Clinton (because the results, even in her recent wins, bring her objectively farther from the nomination in the context of the smaller number of delegates then available) gets spun as a Clinton victory.

Clinton takes to the stage, claims “unexpected” victory, gives out her web site address and pleads for elder women on fixed incomes to send more money to the $109 millionaire. The following day they claim that $10 million rolled in, only to be disproved more than a month later when the actual FEC filing is due. Obama’s FEC filing simultaneously reveals that he raised much, much more, from more small donors, and the Clinton campaign plays the victim card over being outspent.

The Chicken Littles among Obama supporters then proceed to agonize across the Internet for days on end, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their candidate has just moved closer to the nomination, and Clinton was pushed farther away from it.
read the rest
Most undeclared superdelegates duck behind all the media-generated