Parsing the Polls

The presidential primaries can be exciting, yet confusing at the same time. The byzantine methods for assigning delegates and determining party nominees are bad enough, but there are also the sometimes incomprehensible analyses by pundits and experts. With the proper guidance, however, understanding election results can be easy and fun.

First, one has to understand exist polls. Exit polling involves interviewing a random sample of voters leaving the polling place. Exit polls do not just involve asking "who did you vote for?". Rather, they consider a wide range of demographic and ideologically based questions that allow experts to parse the polling data to determine why one candidate won and the others lost. This allows pundits to extrapolate and make predictions and candidates to adjust their campaign strategies.

To illustrate just how this works, let us consider Hillary Clinton's recent victories in Texas and Ohio. First, Texas. An analysis of the exit polls reveals that the deciding factor was Hillary Clinton's 4 to 1 margin of support in the turtle lover demographic. Most likely this was due to Clinton's long history of supporting keratin subsidies which turtles need to build strong, healthy shells. Interestingly, the trend totally reversed in Ohio where Obama won the turtle lover vote 3 to 1.

Now you might be confused here, but this too is easily explainable because Ohioans are strongly against NAFTA which has led to a marked rise in the export of US turtles to Mexico (Something Ohioans strongly oppose). So in the case of Ohio, Clinton's support of NAFTA clearly outweighed her support of keratin subsidies. Making more sense now?

Of course, you might wonder, if Obama won the turtle lover vote in Ohio, then why didn't he win the Ohio primary? Well, it turns out that turtle lovers make up a much smaller portion of voters in Ohio than in Texas. It seems that in Ohio, the majority of Democratic voters were uncomfortable with a candidate of mixed ancestry.

Now you might say, why didn't the exit polling in other states reveal these critical trends and make the Texas and Ohio contests a foregone conclusion? I will forgive your ignorance. Your still have a lot to learn!