The Gap between Exit Polls and Reality

As of Wednesday afternoon with 97 percent of the results in, the poll results indicated that Obama had 52.4 percent of the popular vote. This means that everyone else (including John McCain, Bob Barr and Ralph Nader and “other”) received 47.6 percent. That is, Obama outpolled the rest by 4.8 percent.


But according to the exit polls, 13% of the electorate was black and they cast their votes 95 percent to 4 percent for Obama. This means that the black vote alone should have given Obama 11.8 percent more of the vote than the rest of the field [Because 11.8 = 13 x (0.95–0.04)].


In fact, based on the exit poll data, Obama should have outpolled the rest of the field by 7.3 percent, rather than 4.8 percent. See the following table.

Clearly, unless the vast majority of untallied votes are for Obama or voting machines are biased against him, exit polls are just too problematic to be used either because they don’t constitute a true random sample, there’s a lot of lying going on, or perhaps both.