Reply #11: what we see is that [View All]

the states that were furthest out from pre-election polls aren't states with large red shifts. (No, the red shift isn't uniform at all. Ironically, at precinct level, that is one of the few findings of Ron Baiman's that I agree with. But it's pretty obvious at state level; TIA used to post a pretty picture of this, which he used to argue propositions like "THE BEAST WAS IN THE EAST!" And indeed most of the largest red shifts were in the Eastern time zone.)

It's hard to answer unambiguously your question about (as I understood it) whether the official returns are closer to the pre-election polls or to the exit poll projections, because some folks have argued that the pre-election polls were biased against Kerry. But using the pre-election polls as even a crude baseline, I don't see anything in the official returns that is nearly as hard to believe as the exit poll result that Kerry won New York by 30 (actually 31.3 by the Best Geo estimate), or that Kerry won New Hampshire by 15.

Honestly, even Kerry winning Ohio by 6.5 is a big stretch. Even the folks who think they've made up Kerry's 118,000 vote deficit in Ohio don't seem to think they have turned around and found him another 350,000-plus votes to win by. And if we are basing those numbers on exit polls, they should apply just among people who would have participated in the exit polls, i.e., presumably people who at least thought they voted.

So, frankly, I don't know anyone who acts as if s/he believes the exit polls were right when it comes to analyzing specific states.

As we've discussed, I just think the Hispanic issue is a mess, and even if we conclude that the final NEP Hispanic estimate is way off, I don't see how we can conclude that all the NEP estimates would have been basically right if they hadn't been weighted to the official returns. But I haven't even looked at Awsi's stuff downthread yet.