… Biden didn’t do as well as public polls projected. Some groups unexpectedly appeared to have shifted toward Trump, such as Latinos. In rushing to understand what happened, some have relied on the National Exit Poll (NEP) conducted by Edison Research to form narratives about what happened and why. But that data source appears to have significant flaws — which could skew those narratives’ conclusions.
Specifically, the NEP’s estimates of who voted — what percentage of voters fall into any given demographic group — appear to be wrong. This kind of problem has plagued the NEP in the past and, apparently, it is an issue again this year. If the NEP’s estimate of who voted is incorrect, then the vote margins — the percent by which each demographic group voted for each candidate — could be incorrect. That can distort our picture of how different groups voted. And if the numbers for how different groups voted Trump/Biden are wrong, they shouldn’t be used to try to explain what happened in this election. CONT.
Robert Griffin, Monkey Cage