Exit poll prelims (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Wednesday, 24 November 2004

Exit poll prelims

I’m now most of the way through (with some help from a few students) entering the data from our exit poll three weeks ago. Based on 632 respondents, there are a few things that jump out at me:

Never ask people if they consider themselves born-again Christians, because apparently they don’t understand that question. Ditto asking them to figure out if they are “Protestant.”
People who don’t have friends or family members who are gay were 2.5 times (!) more likely to vote for the same-sex marriage ban than those who do have gay friends or family members. This suggests that a compelling political strategy for gay people who support same-sex marriage is to come out.
Younger people were significantly less likely to support the amendment than other people. This suggests that (combined with the strategy above) all people who support same-sex marriage should wait for a lot of old people to die off.
Black voters are much more likely than white voters to believe Clarence Thomas is the chief justice of the United States.

There’s other fun stuff in the poll that I’ll get to once our last precinct is entered and the data is properly cleaned up.

By the way, if you need to enter a lot of data, I cannot say enough good things about EpiData. It’s very slick and the price is right.

6 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.

1. Xrlq wrote @ Wed, 24 Nov 2004, 4:02 pm CST:

Younger people were significantly less likely to support the amendment than other people. This suggests that (combined with the strategy above) all people who support same-sex marriage should wait for a lot of old people to die off.

Not necessarily. It could just mean that younger people, especially those not yet married themselves, without kids, etc., are more likely to support (or at least not oppose) a radical redefinition of marriage. I supported it myself when I was in my mid-20s; I don’t now.

2. Brock Sides wrote @ Wed, 24 Nov 2004, 6:35 pm CST:

I’m curious about the wording of your Supreme Court question. Was it “Who is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?” or “True or false: Clarence Thomas is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?”

I’m also curious about the percentage of correct answers you received. I’d be surprised if more than 20% of the population could name even one Justice.

3. Chris Lawrence wrote @ Wed, 24 Nov 2004, 6:52 pm CST:

It was a four-choice question: “Who is the Chief Justice of the United States?” The options were Clarence Thomas, Olympia Snowe, William Rehnquist, or Someone Else. 60% of respondents (who didn’t leave it blank) correctly answered the question—50.7% of all respondents (including blanks) got it right. Among black respondents, 27.3% thought Thomas was Chief Justice while 37.7% thought Rehnquist was.

Mind you, his medical condition was made public within a few days of the poll, so more people got it right than I would expect normally.

4. bryan wrote @ Wed, 24 Nov 2004, 9:03 pm CST:

Yeah, asking “born again” is confusing, but not much more so thatn asking if someone is “evangelical.” Scripps-Howard religion columnist terry mattingly has a column coming out this week about that, and mentions how Gallup (?) and Barna figure out who fits the definition.

Comment aside: your comment box has this weird effect in the new Mac firefox version where the cursor is behind the text, so I can’t tell what I’m erasing, sort of like italics on a word processor. Very disconcerting.

E-mail me if you’re interested in mattingly’s article. II’ll forward it to you.

5. Steven Jens wrote @ Wed, 24 Nov 2004, 10:31 pm CST:

I’m not sure of “born again” myself, but I’m surprised that “Protestant” confuses people.

I would assume that some of the effect you note in bullet point 2 is from people associating homosexuality with people you know, as you seem to suggest. But there’s probably some causation the other way as well—i.e., people who frown on, or at least don’t want legal recognition for, homosexuality probably don’t hang out with a lot of homosexuals, and especially homosexuals who are open about it. I assume the distinction between correlation and causation isn’t lost on you.

I would guess that more than 20% of the population could name a member of the Supreme Court, but it’s the sort of thing I’d be likely to overestimate.

6. Chris Lawrence wrote @ Thu, 25 Nov 2004, 12:05 am CST:

Bryan: Yeah, I wouldn’t mind taking a look at the Mattingly piece.

Steven: There’s probably some reciprical causality there, in that people who frown on homosexuality are probably less likely to associate with homosexuals. Mind you, even among people who did have gay friends or family members, the amendment was preferred. (Apropos of Xrlq’s comment, I haven’t looked at the effect of marital status yet on this question, although there’s a pretty stunning marriage gap in vote choice for president among the respondents.)

Comments are now closed on this post.