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The exit polls get it wrong again

James Forsyth

Wednesday, 6th February 2008

You would have thought that we would have learnt by now but journalists and pundits still insist on taking exit polls far too seriously despite how frequently they are wrong. The lessons of 2004, when the exits had John Kerry cruising towards the White House, have been quickly forgotten by most of us including yours truly.

On Tuesday, the exits led us all up several blind allies. To take one example, they suggested that McCain was in a tight race in Arizona which fed heavily into the McCain is underperforming storyline but the Senator from Arizona actually won his home state by 16 points, a larger margin than the one that Mitt Romney triumphed by in Massachusetts.

Over at Contentions, John Podhoretz asks if we can trust the other data—the issue and demographic breakdowns—that come out of the exits if they are wrong on the actual result this frequently. Having said all this, folk will continue to place too much faith in exit polls as on election day they are the only thing filling the information vacuum.