Do Exit Polls Favor Democrats? -- Taegan Goddard's Political Wire

January 28, 2005

Do Exit Polls Favor Democrats?

Mystery Pollster notes that in The War Room, a documentary that followed James Carville and George Stephanopoulos during Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, "one of the final scenes shows Clinton's operatives reacting to the first leaked exit poll results."

By pausing the DVD, we can see the handwritten leaked numbers and "it is obvious that these mid-day reports in 1992 were off by nearly as much as the leaked numbers everyone saw on the Internet in the middle of the Election Day, 2004."

This doesn't prove exit polls are biased to favor Democrats, but it does show errors are more frequent than we previously thought. The key differences were that Clinton still won the election and "the Internet was in its infancy, so the leaked results spread to a few hundred reporters and politicos, not the millions that saw the leaked exit polls in 2004."

One other great tidbit: It appears Warren Mitofsky, the director of the 2004 exit polls, leaked the data to the Clinton campaign in 1992.
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Taegan D. Goddard is the creator of Political Wire, a political column updated around the clock with the most interesting news, buzz and commentary.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science Monitor.

This is a personal site and does not necessarily reflect the views of any company, political campaign or advocacy group.

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Taegan Goddard's Political Wire

January 28, 2005