Let me start with: I’m not a professional statistician and could be wrong here.
So: I’ve seen a lot of talk about the exit polls that show Harris to be up in early voting, beyond even the Dem party advantage in early voting, and how that’s good news because exit polling is more accurate bla bla bla.
I get it—there’s been a lot of discussion about whether the polls are being slanted, and like anyone else I’m desperate for signs that they’ve been slanted away from Harris.
But I don’t think the “exit polls” tell us much either way.
That’s because they aren’t, as far as I can tell, actual exit polls. They’re the same polls we’ve been seeing all year, where pollsters contact voters and ask questions. Since early voting started, one of the questions has been whether they’ve already voted yet. For instance, that seems to be how CNN’s poll here worked: www.cnn.com/…
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that whatever slanting the pollsters are doing or not doing to the overall raw data, they’ll also do to the raw data for people who say they’ve already voted.
So what these numbers tell us is that, *if* the polls are right and the electorate is close to 50-50 in swing states, then Dems have a roughly 60-40 advantage in early voting in swing states. Which is, I guess, more or less what we should expect? An early advantage, but not as big as in 2020 when things were weird (and presumably we’ll have less of a disadvantage on Election Day).
Point being, while the polls may not be right, in one direction or the other, I don’t think the “exit polls” give us new information on that. Because they’re not true exit polls; they’re just part of the regular polls we’ve been seeing this whole election, and are slanted in the same way (whatever way that is).
Happy to be proven wrong, though.
