Polls and Politics: The Dilemmas of Democracy

7. Are Exit Polls Bad for Democracy?

7 Are Exit Polls Bad for Democracy? Gerald C. Wright Editors’ note: Since this writing, exit polls have undergone more scrutiny and criticism. In the 2002 midterm elections, after an overhauling of the Voter News Service (VNS), computer malfunctions kept news outlets from obtaining exit poll data. Shortly afterward, the major news organizations dismantled VNS. However, the networks have indicated that they remain committed to exit polling. The problems of 2002 and the dismantling of VNS in no way change Wright’s support of exit polling as crucial to studying voting behavior and election outcomes. Exit Polls as Public Enemy The media and politics merge on the nights of U.S. presidential elections to provide one of the most riveting spectacles of our national politics. It provides the grandeur of a free people selecting their leaders in a democratic celebration of the peaceful transfer of power and combines this with suspense—at least in some years—of a national “who dunit,” only in this case it is “who’s gonna’ get it?” The “it” of course is the presidency, easily the most visible, followed, and powerful position in the world. Election night, thus understandably captures 117 I would like to thank Jeanette Morehouse for her assistance in compiling the materials used in this essay. the attention not only of Americans, but also of observers across the globe. With so much at stake, and with huge audiences, the broadcast media, especially television, gear up to do their level best at reporting on the election in ways that will bring prestige to their networks and viewers for their sponsors. Out of this volatile mix of media and politics has grown the highly controversial offshoot of scientific polling called the “exit poll,” which collects information gathered from large samples of citizens as they leave their polling places. Exit polls ask, first and foremost, who the voters have cast their ballots for, and also some information about the voters themselves to enable analysts to get at class, race, and religious cleavages that may be at work in the election. They typically also include a few questions about perceptions of the candidates’ qualities and the voter’s positions on some of the issues that were prominent in the campaign.To meet their needs the media invented these exit polls, which have now become fixtures of national, and many state, elections. The exit polls represent quite a substantial investment by the media. In 2000, the Voter News Service, which is the major exit poll organization and about which I will say more below, had a budget of $35 million.With this budget, they harvest information that is to serve the two principal goals of election night coverage: to tell us who is winning and to explain the voters’ decisions. For this investment, one would think that smart businesspeople like those running the network news organizations would see a favorable return in terms of a higher level of precision and depth of explanations of election night reporting.Instead, for many postelection commentators, the chief result of exit polling has been to debase democracy and to show the recklessness of media in their pursuit of ratings. Consider some of the language used to describe the media’s contribution to Election Night 2000. Headlines proclaimed “the big mistake” and the Columbia Journalism Review condemned “hair trigger projections ,”1 while the Christian Science Monitor reported on what it called “egregious mistakes” and said “the biggest problem on election night was the media’s use of exit polling.”2 On the other side of the world, election night was headlined as “Technology Goes Mad in Polling,”3 and the thesis was offered that the American media’s use of technology would increase America’s cynicism . Allan Lichtman argued that the media are “turning the presidential elections into something like horse racing, driven solely by the poll.” Lichtman wrote that the media had “to get rid of these pernicious polls” and suggested that the networks were attempting to whip up “artificial drama.”4 Another saw it as a night in which TV’s 118 Gerald C. Wright talking heads were “humbled and humiliated.”5 The British description of Election Night 2000 is the most interesting: “a debacle of million dollar gadgetry and pseudo-science” in which an anxiously awaiting world “has been force fed ersatz omniscience.”6 Still more colorful was the description of election night projections as “premature statistical...