I sent in my mail ballot for California yesterday and today got an e-mail for a survey from Open California, publisher of Capitol Weekly, a non-profit 501(c)3 foundation participating in confidential voter research and public policy reporting. They are doing an exit poll for mail in ballot voters such as myself.
So I took the poll and at the end they presented a current snapshot of this exit poll. The poll at this snapshot is based on 6,539 responses.
Now, I will be the first to admit I generally despise polls, I think they miss the target and might have a tendency to sway voters who border on apathetic to not vote if they see their cadidate winning. I also am not fond with the general tendency I see here on DKOS of constant up-playing of pro-democratic polls while poo-pooing those that favor the GOP.
If posting this make me a hypocrit, so be it. For me an exit poll of actual voters is far superior to a poll of selected individuals which may or may not be targeted to a specific demographic.
That said, There were a few interesting takeaways from this poll for me. For those interested in digging deeper into the results.
First of all, here is a link to current exit poll results.
First of all the nice thing about this poll is it isnt likely voters and it isnt a targeted poll for democrat or GOP voters, its people who have already voted.
I'm not going to go into specific races, what struck me most was the primary driver for these early votes. The question (#28 I think) was; "What was the primary driver of your interest in voting this year?" Of the over 6000 respondents, some 5,271 voters responded to this question.
Fully 52.40% of them chose "To have an impact on what is happening in Washington DC with President Trump and Congress". Less than 10% voted because of the statewide offices, only over 1% voted because of local offices. This seems a promising statistic to me, though given its California its perhaps not all that surprising.
but:
More or less the same question was asked of young voters (18-34), now there are very few young voters in this poll. The vast majority represented in this exit poll were 55 or older. Only 342 respondents are under 35 years old. Of those however, the reason they voted was split between effecting the National political debate (37.17%) and Sense of obligation to vote (32.45%).
There has been a lot of chatter that maybe younger voters arent reliable and are disconnected from political thought, but here we see over 60% of this segment in the poll have voted either because of responsibility to vote or interest in current political debate.
The makeup of the 6000+ respondents in this poll so far are predominantly, Older white Males who identify as moderate and mostly to always support Democrat candidates.
Healthcare and Immigration were the leaders among issues. the least important issues were Transportation, water and the #metoo movement.
It will be interesting to follow this exit poll and see how the results change.
Don't forget to vote everyone......