Exit Exit Polls, stage left

Thanks to Nate Silver at www.fivethirtyeight.com I've learned much about polling data and technique in the last 5 months. Aggregating and analyzing most major polling data, Mr. Silver has had a better predictive track record in the primaries —and so far in the campaign— than any one major polling service, network, or print news organization.

And he's a sports statistician by trade!

Mr. Silver had this to say today about exit polls, and why we should ignore them, and backed up his position with 9 arguments.

an exit poll is not a definitive record of what happened at the polling place; it is at best a random sampling.

His 10th point was a plea for sanity patience:

You'll know the actual results soon enough anyway.

Here's his prediction for the election:

Our model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana. These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which looks at these outcomes probabilistically -- for instance, assigns North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time -- comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6 electoral votes.

We also project Obama to win the popular vote by 6.1 points; his lead is slightly larger than that in the polls now, but our model accounts for the fact that candidates with large leads in the polls typically underperform their numbers by a small margin on Election Day.