Here is your thread for exit polls in the 2010 general election on November 2, 2010. Available exit poll data is included in our live blog widget below in real time Preliminary data is summarized in this article and final exit poll data is included in the updated links. Join the Right Pundits election desk team for a long Tuesday election day where we will blog until we drop.

exit polls 2010


Update 1 (first wave data) 5pm ET:

country is on right track (35%), wrong track (62%)

democrat party favorability (43%), unfavorable (53%)
GOP favorable (41%) unfavorable (53%)

Obama approve disapprove (45%), disapprove (54%)

almost entirely useless so far. And note that for whatever it is worth, early exit poll data is notoriously unreliable.

stay tuned in the live blog window for more updates…..

Update 2 (second wave data) 6pm ET:

My vote is a referendum on Obama
38% yes, 24% no, 36% no effect.

Health care law:
most voters favor repeal.

More exit poll data can be found here and here.

Full set of final exit polls state by state can be found here.

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Exit poll data for the 2010 general election will be surveyed in several states and by several organizations, however the main exit polls surveys will definitely not be conducted by the Voter News Service. That organization of several networks and newspapers disbanded because of terrible results in two straight elections, both the 2000 election when their data resulted in networks calling the wrong winner in the national presidential election, and in 2002 when computer glitches rendered the data useless.








(Click arrow to join live blog)




In exit poll history, the VNS gave way to the National Election News Pool in 2004, but their data famously masked the true results which once again led to a wrong call in the early evening.

Current methods employed by the networks use a variety of tactics to gather exit poll data as managed by the National Election Pool under contract with Edison Research. They will conduct surveys in only 26 states in the 2010 general election, all at the state level meaning that no data for local congressional races will be gathered.

In fact some of the data is already known. Telephone surveys of early voters, which make up a significant part of the electorate in 2010, are already included in the data bank. What they will next do is use human surveys of election day voters combined with more telephone polls.

Much more can be learned here.

As usual the preliminary exit polls by state which are released in the late afternoon should always be taken with a grain of salt. Much of that early exit polling data will not be normalized and will not include later voters, typically office workers who work 9-5 jobs and vote on the way home. Because of this phenomenon, early exit polls tend to overestimate Democrat support and underestimate GOP support.

It is also true that Democrat voters are historically more willing to talk with poll takers. Demographic details give the numbers crunchers ways to normalize for this data, but the early data especially is suspect.

Keep all of that in mind when you review the exit poll data included in our live blog session and the final data that will be included later in this post.