Wake Forest students conducting an exit pollWake Forest students conducting an exit poll

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WFU First-year Seminar Conducts Exit Poll

On election day in November 2008, our exit poll interviewed 250 voters. Students began tallying the results at 3pm on election day; polls in North Carolina closed at 7pm (anyone in line at 7pm is allowed to vote). We first posted our results online around 7:45pm that evening. We correctly predicted the results of all 5 contests, except for one county commissioner. For the president, senate, and governor races, our results were all within a couple percentage points of the actual results. A summary of our results appears in the tables below; due to votes for third-party candidates, the totals do not sum to 100%.

Predictions

We predicted the following winners (for Forsyth Co. votes only): All of these predictions were correct, except for Young in the commissioner's race (see below).


Results Tables

Presidential results

US Senate results

Governor results

County commissioner results

Bonds results



One missed prediction: county commissioner race

The county commissioner race had 7 candidates vying for 3 seats. We correctly predicted the top two Republicans would win; however we showed that a Democrat, Nancy Young, would claim the third seat. Instead, she lost decisively, though she finished ahead of the other three candidates. Were our results biased for Young? Probably. Following the election, we learned of a simple explanation for Young’s appeal to our responders: she lives near the high school where we polled, and in this precinct her ‘hometown’ status helped her to finish second, a mere two votes behind Plyler. This precinct’s results closely match our exit poll data. With a better, more complicated poll design, we might have avoided this error.