NP: radiokeneally.com

I've been relatively quiet on the political front since the election, but I've still been trying to keep up on a couple of topics. One is the whole exit poll fiasco. Lawrence Lessig, among others, doesn't see a conspiracy, but still sees something weird, and quotes pollmeister -- not my term, it's what he has his, um, "hired help" call him -- Dick Morris as saying exit polls are never that wrong.

I'm taking more of a "never say never" tack. What I keep coming back to is the assumption that exit polls can only sample some voters, and must have some sort of model to extrapolate those results to the overall population. Now if voter turnout was as much a wild-card in the election as it appeared to be, doesn't it follow that the models upon which those extrapolations are built could be really, really wrong? If everyone was surprised by the evangelical base coming out in such numbers, and noone really knew what the youth vote and the new Democratic registrants would do, wouldn't that throw a major wrench in the projections?

I don't have an answer to this, because that would take actual research, but it's food for thought. Blaming the bloggers seems pretty ridiculous to me, because the wrongness of the numbers seems entirely independent of them. Screaming "how dare you release our wrong numbers" doesn't really resonate. Of course, there's a counter-argument that literally at the end of the day, the poll numbers weren't so far off, but I don't know who's prevailing in the marketplace of ideas on that one.