Most Americans who had listened to radio or surfed the Internet on Election Day this year, sat down to watch election night coverage expecting that John Kerry had been elected President. Exit polls showed him ahead in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by sizable margins. As usually happens in close elections, undecided voters broke heavily toward the challenger, and the Democratic Party, possibly better organized and more committed than ever in their history, generated extraordinary turnout. But then in key state after key state, counts were showing very different numbers than the polls predicted; and the differentials were all in the same direction. The first shaded column in Table 1 shows the differential between the major candidates' predicted (exit poll) percentages of the vote; the next shaded column shows the differential between their tallied percentages of the vote. The final shaded column reveals the "shift." In ten of the eleven consensus battleground states1, the tallied margin differs from the predicted margin, and in every one, the shift favors Bush. The media has largely ignored this discrepancy (although the Blogosphere has been abuzz), suggesting that the polls were flawed, within normal sampling error, or that it was a statistical anomaly. In this paper, I examine the likelihood of each of these assumptions: validity of exit polls, sampling error, and the possibility of statistical anomaly. [more]
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