Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Mickey Kaus reports that a "smoking gun indicting the official Mitofsky/Lenski exit poll appears to have surfaced."

Mitofsky and Lenski were apparently telling their clients (NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, etc.) that after "weighting" Kerry was beating Bush by 9 points among women and losing by only 4 among men. By 1:24 P.M. the next day (see this file) revised results revealed that, in fact, Kerry won women by only 3 points while Bush won men by 11 points. Whoops! ... It wasn't the dumb bloggers who didn't understand on Nov. 2 that they were being leaked "complex displays intended for trained statisticians," as Mitofsky would have it — or the dumb Kerry aides and dumb Bush aides who believed the same numbers. It was that the weighted results Mitofsky's statisticians put out were full of it!

I'll bet a lot of readers of this site now want to know more — like why were they so wrong, and so uniformly wrong in favor of Kerry. The Mystery Pollster offers a few theories. But he misses the one that a lot of folks on the right are wondering about - that a combination of subconscious and conscious biases on the part of the exit pollers was designed to put out word that Kerry was doing well early in the day, encouraging Democrats and depressing Republicans.

[Posted 01/04 10:17 AM]