This is more of a question then a diary. But have any of you seen exit polls asking voters their ideology? The splits I have seen are 23% Liberal, 33% Conservative, and 44% Moderate. Does anyone know if this takes into account early voters? This could have a huge effect on the ideological breakdown. If the exit polling is in fact a random sample of people EXITING the polling sites the exit polling is too heavily weighted towards conservatives.
CO and OR both mid size states that are center-left (CO) to liberal (OR) had large amounts of early voting (in Oregon's case everyone votes by mail). I read that 2/3 of CO votes were already cast before election day. Washington state had large numbers of early votes also. Georgia had about 1.3 million early voters, over half were in the Atlanta area. These large numbers of early voters were heavily African American a group that leans liberal.
My main point is this. I heard on NPR 20% of all voters nation wide were early voters (voting before Nov 4th). The Obama campaign made a huge push to get their voters to vote early. He won this group of voters by 57% to 42% (the rest were for minor candidates). This group if they were the focus of Obama's GOTV were most likely heavily composed of white democrats (who are more liberal then the average voters as a whole) and African Americans ( a group more liberal then voters as a whole). If they are not being included in the exit polling, this would cause the exit polling to weight more heavily conservative. If the exit polling is in fact a random sample of people EXITING the polling sites, the exit polling is too heavily weighted towards conservatives.
If these 20% are not being included the electorate most likely did in fact move to the left. Hopefully someone can find this out, so we can attact the growing talking point that exit polling proves America didn't move to the left. If someone has the answer to this "were early voter not included in exit polling" I will email Nate Silva at 538.com (now that he is less busy no elections and no baseball) and see if he can figure out away of extracting this information out. These type of fact help to build the Obama mandate.
Any help would be welcomed.
Information sources:
Exit poll 2008
Exit poll 2004