Be Wary Of Exit Polls Telling You Who Will Win
As the votes are tabulated tonight, you’ll be seeing early exit polls — and the narratives around them. Exit polls are used to glean insight on who turned out to vote and who may have helped swing an election. But be warned: While exit polls can give us an early look into how things are shaking out and which slices of the American public went to the ballot box, they are poor predictors of the eventual outcome.
Here’s how exit polling has worked: Interviewers stand outside select polling stations throughout the country (they don’t tell reporters where) and ask people who they voted for, in addition to how they feel on a variety of topics. They also take early voters into account by conducting phone interviews in the days leading up to the election.
Since 2003, Edison Research has been the sole provider of exit polls. But after the 2016 election, Fox News and The Associated Press announced that they would conduct their own. These exit polls will be carried out both online and by telephone starting four days before the election and continuing until polling stations close on Election Day. They will also include opinions from people who did not vote. (FiveThirtyEight will be reporting on the traditional exit polls provided by Edison Research.)
Remember, exit polls are intended to help us understand why people voted the way they did and where the election might be headed. So we will will use them to report on how the election is shaping up throughout the evening, but we won’t use them to call races. And that’s because they are not intended to predict election outcomes. Exit polls are not definitive until they are combined with final election results and weighted accordingly to be representative of the electorate.
Still, as the polls close, some outlets may begin to make projections using exit poll data. We’d caution you to be skeptical of those projections and wait with us for the final results.