Reply #14: fact check

[OnTheOtherHand]

To deal with the 43/37 conundrum, exit poll naysayers had to come up with another hypothesis — "false recall": Returning-Gore-voters misspoke (lied, forgot) and told the exit pollsters they voted for Bush in 2000 because they wanted to associate with his win of the 2000 (stolen) election, and he was a war president (who ignored warnings of 911) and had a 48% approval rating to show for his efforts.

As far as I know, the assertion that respondents "wanted to associate with (Bush's) win of the 2000 (stolen) election" was invented by TIA himself. Nevertheless, the evidence of routine overstatement of support for a previous winner -- in survey after survey, election after election, exit polls and other polls -- is extensive. I've linked to some summaries in post #8 for your convenience. TIA never has offered a satisfactory response to this evidence, so I don't expect one now.

To suggest that the 46/37 Bush/Kerry returning-voter mix was due to Kerry voter "false recall" that they voted for Bush (at 22% approval in '08) makes absolutely no sense...

TIA, to be charitable, has managed to misunderstand the argument all this time, so I guess it's not surprising that he still has failed to examine or to comprehend any of the historical evidence. It is TIA's assertion alone that false reporting of past votes depends on the popularity of the president in question, although there may be some correlation. If anything, the magnitude of the gap between retrospective reports and the previous results seems to depend more heavily on the prominence of the losing candidate. John Kerry was not especially prominent after the 2004 election, so his (roughly average) retrospective decline in the exit poll isn't surprising.

It isn't a matter of "getting hit by lightening (sic) two days in a row." As I've pointed out to TIA repeatedly, this phenomenon has occurred in every presidential exit poll in the ICPSR archives.