Exit polls act as fairly consistent methods of predicting elections and breaking down the different characteristics that may play a role in why the population votes the way they do. I decided to look at the exit poll results for the 2008 general election in Wisconsin. More Specifically I wanted to find how early the voters had their mind set on a candidate and what other relationship might explain this.
The Majority of people know who they are going to vote for long before the election itself. The exit polls on cnn.com (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=WIP00p1) ask when the voters knew when they were going to vote for the candidate they voted for. The bulk of voters said that they knew months before the election. 60% of Wisconsin voters knew which Presidential candidate they would vote for prior to September 2008. This most likely coincides with the results showing that 95% of Democrats voted in alignment with their party Identification and 89% Percent of Republicans voted along side theirs.
It makes sense that if people are voting in alignment with their usual party identification, that their decision of a candidate would be known months prior to the election. 15% of people did not vote in accordance with their party ID and 11% of voters did not know who they were going to vote for until less than a week prior to the election. It might be interesting to draw a comparison of these results. It may have been those struggling with voting opposite their typical party loyalty, that suffered the most indecision before the election.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is a good point you make in regard to party identification. For most people, the choice of a candidate really isn't a choice at all. I have always been bemused by these tortured voters who are on the fence so late in the game. There was such a distinct choice between candidates in this election, although I agree that the undecideds were probably for the most part those voters toying with the idea of breaking party ranks for the first time.
ReplyDeleteInteresting choice of topic to focus on this week! Party alignment and voting in line with this alignment surely helped contribute to the 60% of Wisconsin voters that knew who they were voting for prior to Sept. 2008. Our political “schooling” begins early in our lives and we often take cues regarding party preference from our parents and family that we continue to uphold throughout our life. Choosing to vote for a candidate outside of your party may certainly lead to indecision, though we could expand this to say perhaps that our religious conditioning (and other similar factors) helped us pick a candidate early on, political party notwithstanding.
ReplyDeleteDoes the gapology article discuss the early decision making phenomena? What would those authors say about it?
ReplyDelete