The polls-- A Review: Exit Polls in the 1989 Virginia Gubernatorial Race: Where Did They Go Wrong?

The article discusses the exit poll of 1989 Virginia gubernatorial election. In the contest, Democrat L. Douglas Wilder narrowly defeated his Republican opponent, J. Marshall Coleman, winning by two-tenths of one percentage point. Yet an experienced research firm, Mason-Dixon Opinion Research (MDOR), conducted an exit poll for several television stations in Virginia and Washington, DC, and estimated an easy Wilder victory by a 10-percentage-point margin. This 5-percentage-point discrepancy was outside the bounds of normal sampling error. The 1989 MDOR exit poll raised several interesting methodological questions and prompted a variety of speculations about what might have caused the error. The article points out that the number of interviews in the MDOR poll was not equally distributed across the 10 congressional districts, nor was registrants or actual voters. The results suggest that the estimates from the 1989 Virginia exit poll stemmed from the use of face-to-face interviews conducted in person than from a problematic sample of precincts by congressional district.