Talk Elections

The Associated Press confirmed Friday it has joined Fox News in abandoning the so-called National Election Pool — the election surveying instrument that the news media, campaign operatives and political junkies have come to love and hate — marking the end of an era when one ubiquitous Election Day survey shaped the understanding of presidential and state election outcomes.

The departures of AP and Fox from the 20-year alliance of news organizations that have commissioned and reported national and state exit polls doesn’t necessarily sound the death knell for exit polling. The four remaining networks in the pool — ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News -- are locked into the current exit poll regime through the next presidential election.

But they will be facing unprecedented competition — from the AP and Fox News, among others — and the future beyond 2020 remains uncertain.

The National Election Pool exit poll does attempt to account for in-person early voting, and for mail voting. In states with liberal early-voting laws, the exit-poll samples (which are typically conducted on Election Day outside polling stations) are supplemented with phone surveys in the days leading up to Election Day with people who have already voted. And phone surveys take the place of in-person interviewing in an all-mail battleground state like Colorado.

The AP and Fox News haven’t left the playing field: They plan to conduct their own exit polls and other experiments that they hope will more accurately — and efficiently — replace the existing exit poll.

Both the AP and Fox projects eschew the underlying history of exit polls: questioning voters in person as they leave their polling place. Instead, the “Fox News Voter Analysis” in last month’s New Jersey and Virginia.gubernatorial races consists of telephone and internet interviews with voters and non-voters alike — “for enhanced analytical purposes,” according to a methodology statement.

Fox News cited this when it announced it was leaving the pool earlier this year. “We’ve had concerns with Election Day exit polling for many years, and this year once again proved that they are problematic,” Jay Wallace, Fox’s executive vice president of news, said back in April.