Talk Elections

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/10/04/networks-ap-cancel-exit-polls-in-19-states/

Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

:(

Horrible!!!

:'( :'(

So does this mean we will never know the true measure of party ID?

They are still including these 19 states + DC into the national exit poll, but they aren't doing nearly enough surveying for them to have full exit polls of their own.

Urgh....I guess this means no national exit poll either?

EDIT: Oh, yeah. BK.

???

What if one of these states becomes competitive (unlikely, but not impossible)? Would they un-cancel?

Some of those obviously aren't going to be competitive, but would be cool to look at the demographics of (Texas and Georgia being obvious.)

ARRRGGGGGGGHHHH, this day gets more and more horrible !

No party ID breakdown for 13 states ???????!!!!!

Suck my balls, National Election Pool Consortium !!!

No exit polls for Texas and Georgia (and North Dakota where we have a competitive Senate race...) really, really sucks.

I'm familiar enough with Georgia and its politics that as soon as precinct-level data is released I should be able to estimate an exit poll (though not for things like "most important issue", and I doubt partisan affiliation would be anything more than a vaguely educated guess). I could possibly do Louisiana as well but I'd probably need some help from someone like Miles when looking upstate.

Hell, we could all combine our areas of expertise and put together a collaborative "Unofficial Atlas Exit Poll" for these states. Anyone interested?

Way things are going these days, isn't it?

It's mostly the fact that polling has gotten more expensive so resources are more likely to be spent where it's relevant.

Exit polling is more difficult because early voting has soared in popularity and they have to get an accurate sample from early voters, which makes it a lot more difficult. Phone polls are plagued by record high refusal rates and increasing numbers of cellphone-only households (and pollsters who call cellphones have to deal with even higher refusal rates!) so polls have to make much more calls than they used to just to get the same number of respondants.

I can understand most of those except Nebraska, or specifically Nebraska CD 2 since Romney hasn't locked that down.

Though maybe this will be a good thing, in a weird way. People are far too trusting of the numbers that come out of exit polls.

For the first time in over two decades, we will not have individual exit polls from all 50 states:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/10/04/networks-ap-cancel-exit-polls-in-19-states/

In order to cut costs, the networks will have exit polls for 31 states, but will not do the following non-competitive states:


They're also going to reduce the number of states for which they supplement the in-person polling with telephone polls to catch early voters to just 15 states.

To be clear, it looks like there will still be some individual precincts polled in the states that are "skipped", with results to be included in their national exit poll, and the focus will be on the national exit poll.  But they won't be sampling enough precincts in those 19 states to produce individual exit polls for those states.  (For example, they might poll one or two precincts in North Dakota to include in the national poll, but one precinct isn't good enough to produce a separate poll for North Dakota.)

Well that blows.

Georgia's going to be a safe R forever, so it's okay they're not doing that.  At least we'll still get polls of the states that may be competitive next time, such as Vermont and Alabama.

Of course, this all makes perfect sense. Kansas is polled but Georgia and South Carolina are not

Yeah but if they're only going to do some, they might as well just do none as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather watch the numbers while they roll in, if we're just going to be working with incomplete data anyway.

What surprised me is that Washington, Oregon, and California weren't on the list.  California I can understand, because it's such a large state, but Oregon and Washington are not considered competitive and are not particularly populous.  Do they think these states are more competitive than the ones they're leaving out?

()

The states in grey are the ones on the "no statewide exit poll" list.  Some observations:

All but three (very small) states carried by Obama in 2008 will get exit polls, probably for comparative purposes.  Maybe they figure he's more likely to lose ground than to gain it. 

Why would they leave out Texas?  It has substantial black and Hispanic voter bases, which would yield useful data on voting trends for these groups. 

It looks like they threw out the smallest and/or "safest" states. 

Really? They kick out Texas?

Screw you, AP.

Perhaps another organization will be kind enough to fill in those states for us.