Polls

Taggert Brooks posted this before the election.

I'm inclined to agree. Polls probably do influence voters. It is a lot like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Let's apply this to exit polls. We'll probably never know, but I'd like to know whether Republicans came out later in the day after they heard early exit polls saying that Kerry appeared to be leading or that it was going to be really close. For more on this story, read here. Here is part of the article:

That said, Harris believes that the media and the campaigns misuse exit polls.

"It got on Drudge (Report), it got to the campaigns," Harris said of Tuesday's early exit polls. "You looked at President Bush (Tuesday) morning and he looked sick. Exit polls are a wonderful advantage in providing context and texture. But for trying to make a call, we've learned in two elections in a row that they lead to confusion."

Bill Schneider, a CNN analyst and former Harvard University political science professor, agreed.

"The lesson here is put not your faith in exit polls ... particularly if the exit poll is close," he said. "Exit polls are designed for analysis. ... They are not very good, nor really is any poll very good, for being an absolute, exact prediction."

But Karyn Barker, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, believes the exit polls are getting a bad rap. It's not the polls, she says, it's how the people use them.

"Anyone who follows exit polls should not use them as a prediction of the turnout of certain groups," she said. "To assume that these numbers were spot-on was foolish. It seems some people, including me, wildly misinterpreted what they meant."

Zogby said Tuesday's exit-poll problem would probably send pollsters back to the drawing board to figure out whether they need to apply different formulas, models and weights to their surveys.

"There was a time you could go to the bank with the early exit polls," Zogby said. "Now we have a problem."

I think they are missing the point as to what the real problem is.