Rachel just said exit polls always wrong & tend to favor Dems. They didn't start being wrong until

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

27. Exit polls for so long were so reliable that they

were used to announce results before polls closed. That's what happened in 1980, when all the networks called the race for Ronald Reagan several hours before polls closed on the west coast, causing thousands of people to walk away from polling places and not bother to vote. After that, the networks agreed not to make such predictions until the polls in the west coast closed.

I also understand that in 1992 the Clinton campaign knew by noon on Election Day that he was going to win big because of their own polling.

They also used to use the results from certain specific precincts that had been excellent predictors of the outcome for their states. I'm not sure if those results were also called exit polls but I know that they were important in the predictions, which is why you'd see a network calling a race with only a very tiny percentage of results in, so long as they had the results from those precincts.

It's hard to know what made exit polling less reliable. One thing in many states would be the advent of advance voting. Another might be that whoever was doing the exit polling wasn't being as careful as before. Maybe significant numbers of voters are lying to the exit pollers, or maybe who was willing to talk to them has become skewed. I'm inclined to guess that they're not being as careful and precise as before in many ways, including not selecting precincts very carefully. And the benchmark precincts may well have changed and the polling isn't keeping up with that.

Right now three states (Oregon, Washington, and Colorado) have mail-in voting only, which means exit polling as such can't happen in those states. I bet by 2050 around half of all states will be mail-in only. It's probably a lot harder to suppress voting in those mail-in states.