November 2004A lot of people are writing now about why Kerry lost. Here I want toexamine a more specific question: why were the exit polls so wrong?In Ohio, which Kerry ultimatelylost 49-51, exit polls gave him a 52-48 victory. And this wasn't justrandom error. In every swing state they overestimated the Kerry vote.In Florida, which Bush ultimately won 52-47, exit polls predicteda dead heat.(These are not early numbers. They're from about midnight eastern time, long after polls closed in Ohio and Florida. And yet by thenext afternoon the exit poll numbers online corresponded to the returns. The only way I can imagine this happening is if those incharge of the exit polls cooked the books after seeing the actualreturns. But that's another issue.)What happened? The source of the problem may be a variant ofthe Bradley Effect. This termwas invented after Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, lost an election for governor of California despite a comfortablelead in the polls. Apparently voters were afraid to say they planned to vote against him, lest their motives be(perhaps correctly) suspected.It seems likely that something similar happened in exit polls this year.In theory, exit polls ought to be very accurate. You're not asking people what they would do. You'reasking what they just did.How can you get errors asking that? Because some people don'trespond. To get a truly random sample, pollsters ask, say, every20th person leaving the polling place who they voted for. But noteveryone wants to answer. And the pollsters can't simply ignorethose who won't, or their sample isn't random anymore. So whatthey do, apparently, is note down the age and race and sex of theperson, and guess from that who they voted for.This works so long as there is no correlation between who peoplevote for and whether they're willing to talk about it. But thisyear there may have been. It may be that a significant number of those who voted forBush didn't want to say so.Why not? Because people in the US are more conservative than they'rewilling to admit. The values of the elite in this country, at leastat the moment, are NPR values. The average person, as I think bothRepublicans and Democrats would agree, is more socially conservative. But while some openly flaunt the fact that they don't share theopinions of the elite, others feel a little nervous about it, as if they had bad table manners.For example, according to current NPR values, you can't say anything that might be perceived as disparaging towards homosexuals. To do so is "homophobic." And yet a large number of Americans are deeplyreligious, and the Bible is quite explicit on the subject ofhomosexuality. What are they to do? I think what many do is keep their opinions, but keep them to themselves.They know what they believe, but they also know what they're supposedto believe.And so when a stranger (for example, a pollster) asksthem their opinion about something like gay marriage, they will notalways say what they really think.When the values of the elite are liberal, polls will tend tounderestimate the conservativeness of ordinary voters. This seemsto me the leading theory to explain why the exit polls were so far off this year. NPR values said one ought to vote for Kerry. So all the people who voted forKerry felt virtuous for doing so, and were eager to tell pollstersthey had. No one who voted for Kerry did it as an act of quietdefiance.
