I absolutely love Richard Morin's Unconventional Wisdom feature in the Washington Post -- which reports interesting findings from social science research in fun and often funny ways. So I was a little surprised by the overt and, in my view, unfair hostility Morin unleashed at unnamed bloggers in a Sunday "Outlook" analysis of the exit poll controversy from this year's election.
First, here are the excerpts during which he mentions bloggers, usually with a tone mixed of condescension and anger:
It's also time to make our peace with those self-important bloggers who took it upon themselves to release the first rounds of leaked exit poll results. Those numbers showed Democrat John F. Kerry with a narrow lead, which ignited premature celebrations in one camp and needless commiseration in the other -- until the actual votes showed President Bush had won...But rather than flog the bloggers for rushing to publish the raw exit poll data on their Web sites, we may owe them a debt of gratitude. A few more presidential elections like this one and the public will learn to do the right thing and simply ignore news of early exit poll data.
Then perhaps people will start ignoring the bloggers, who proved once more that their spectacular lack of judgment is matched only by their abundant arrogance.
----
Last Thursday, the National Election Pool board took steps to minimize [the problem of 1 p.m. results being circulated] next time. It voted to delay release of the first wave of exit poll results until after 4 p.m. That may or may not minimize the damage done by bloggers because those numbers will still leak out and cause mischief. Ironically, the first release of data shortly before 1 p.m. that showed Kerry leading by one point was closer to the final result than the 3:50 p.m. release, which showed the Democrats leading 51 percent to 48 percent. That doesn't mean the early release was more "accurate." Early data are not necessarily a reliable predictor of the final outcome because different types of voters tend to cast ballots at different times of the day.
In a perfect world, early exit poll results would be treated just like early vote returns or the score at the end of the first quarter of a Redskins game. In a gubernatorial contest, the news media have learned not to get too excited about early returns from, say, Northern Virginia; we know from experience and common sense that partial returns from a fraction of the electorate are an unreliable guide to the outcome.
Sometime soon, I suspect that the electorate will come to see these early exit poll results the same way. The view of exit polls also will change, from blind awe and acceptance to respect tempered by a healthy skepticism. Thanks to the 2004 election and my new best friends the bloggers, we're closer to that day.
OK, let's be clear about a couple of things. First, no blogger -- of the "self-important," "abundantly arrogant" or any other variety -- is a paid subscriber to the National Election Pool, a consortium of major news operations that includes Morin's own paper. That said, it has to be the case that at least one person (and probably more) who does work for either the NEP or an NEP-member media outlet leaked the exit poll results, either to bloggers directly or, more likely, indirectly by leaking first to big media types and/or top officials from both campaigns. Not sure whether Morin considers these persons to be lacking judgment, and perhaps spectacularly so at that, because he refrains from passing his own judgments, despite noting that their behavior causes "mischief." Indeed, though campaigns track turnout rates by precinct/county in order to make same-day decisions about application of resources (e.g., shifting robo-calls to this part of the state from that, or from this state to another), leaked exit poll data from NEP could taint the procedure on election day by making campaigns question their own internal data and thus make poor tactical choices about spending scarce resources as the clock winds down. But no blogger would have the ability to publish the early numbers without the leaks in the first place. Will Mr. Morin dash off an angry letter to the FEC about the NEP corrupting the election?
Somehow I doubt it, given how gingerly Morin treads on the big boys, using a passive voiced "those numbers will still leak out," rather than perhaps writing, "the NEP members will still carelessly, unethically and perhaps strategically leak those numbers." And if, as Morin concedes, the numbers will leak out anyway, doesn't that mean even if there were no such thing as blogs, or even the internet, we would have still have had to witness, by late afternoon on election day, the site of Ted Kennedy and Tad Devine gloating on television while Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes bickered glumly on FOX about whether the election turned on David Kay's report or Bush's first debate performance?
In fact, Morin admits that exit polling data in 1988 was wrong, and yet the networks blundered ahead and discussed the results anyway:
I learned early in my Washington Post career that exit polls were useful but imperfect mirrors of the electorate. On election night in 1988, we relied on the ABC News exit poll to characterize how demographic subgroups and political constituencies had voted. One problem: The exit poll found the race to be a dead heat, even though Democrat Michael Dukakis lost the popular vote by seven percentage points to Dubya's father.
In 1988, the internet was just a gleam in Al Gore's eye, and many of the bloggers were still in diapers.
Ah, but by making such distinctions might just point Morin's finger at his own newspaper, and other major media subscribers to the NEP. It's far easier (and safer) to pick on the bloggers for reporting information they didn't leak in the first place, and would have been circulating by email and phone through the media by 1:15 EST on November 2 to the campaigns and other political insiders around Washington anyway.
I also happen to have it on good authority that the networks this year ignored the NEP's specific, direct warnings not to rush to judgment based on the early numbers. And, although I normally maintain a Novakian regard for protecting my sources, since my source went public with this very information, I may as well reveal him: Richard Morin himself. Continuining in the same piece, he writes:
[Warren] Mitofsky, the veteran pollster who co-directed this year's exit surveys, fears that Republican voters refused to be interviewed in disproportionately higher numbers, thus skewing the results. Perhaps they were busier than Democrats and didn't have time to be interviewed. Perhaps they disliked the media's coverage of Bush, and showed it by snubbing poll interviewers. Whatever the reason, Mitofsky warned the networks about the apparent Democratic bias mid-afternoon on Election Day -- a caution "they chose to ignore," he told Terence Smith on PBS.
First, I'd like to take issue with the smarmy "busier than" and victimhood-ish "disliked the media's coverage" suppositions from a columnist who covers serious social science. The implication, of course, is that lazy and/or unemployed Democrats don't have to rush back to work like salt-of-the-earth Republicans do, thus permitting them the luxury of chatting with exit pollsters - perhaps even breaking into conversations about what a great job the national newspapers did investigating the pre-war weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein. (I seem to recall an internal review and apology from a certain newspaper that signs Mr. Morin's check and - to show I'm no suck-up afraid to risk appearing again some day in the same pages where Morin's piece is published - several checks for "Outlook" analyses I've published there myself.)
So, according to Morin's reporting, it was the esteemed, seasoned and of course ethical network folks who "chose to ignore" the NEP's warnings about rushing to judgment on the basis of early exit poll results. Yet somehow, the network folks do not lack judgment ("spectacularly," or not) and, again, their actions on Election Day must therefore be the fault of the bloggers, just as it was their fault for reporting info leaked to them by same network folks, directly or indirectly.
The sad thing is that Morin's piece is otherwise a very informative analysis of what happened regarding exit polling on Election Day. I know several of the "Outlook" editors, and they are a quality bunch. So I'm completely puzzled why they and Morin would pollute an otherwise superb piece with Morin's vented frustrations about bloggers when the origin of the problem is the behavior of NEP members and rush-to-judgment network types.
