Exit polls reveal information about California voters

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Nov 16, 2004

EXIT polling -- surveying voters after they cast their ballots -- got a bad rap during this month's presidential election.

Early and strictly preliminary results of a national news media consortium's state-by-state exit polling, which were not supposed to be published or broadcast, were leaked to Internet bloggers, feeding a widespread impression, reflected in some broadcast reports, that John Kerry was on his way to defeating President Bush. But, of course, Bush won both the popular and electoral votes, and exit polling was tarred.

In fact, the final exit polls, which were adjusted for early hard vote counts, were quite accurate in depicting Bush's victory.

One hopes that the flap over exit polling -- there was another version in the 2000 election -- does not somehow end the practice, because it performs the much more lasting function of telling us who is voting and why.

What we know of the electorate in terms of age, income, ethnicity and other demographic factors, and why they vote as they do, comes from exit polling. There's no other source of that information, which is both interesting and vital to framing the public discourse.

Exit polling data is especially important in a state like California, whose economy and culture are undergoing profound and constant change and where value conflicts between voters and the nonvoting majority drives political events.

When one examines California exit polling data from this month's election, overlays those numbers on hard vote results from 58 counties and then looks at both in the context of past elections and past exit polls, important patterns emerge:

The geographic divide -- both cultural and political -- between coastal and inland California is hardening.

Although enclaves of Republicanism remain on the coast in San Diego, Orange, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties, the overall coastal zone is continuing to drift toward the Democratic Party, while inland California is become ever-more oriented toward Republicans. The pro-Bush margin in inland counties doubled in 2004 over 2000 to 16 percentage points, pollster Mark DiCamillo points out, while the Democratic mar-

gin on the coast was unchanged at 20 percentage points.

The biggest geographic reorientation is evident in Los Angeles County, home to about a quarter of California voters. The demise of the aerospace indus-

try, the departure of hundreds of thousands of Republican-leaning defense workers and a massive influx of immigrants have pushed the county's politics, once evenly divided between Democrats and Repub-

licans, leftward. Kerry got 60 percent of the L.A. vote -- arguably the major factor in shifting the state into the Democratic column in recent elections.

The high-turnout election saw considerable gains in voting by both the under-30 set and Latinos, the latter moving somewhere -- depending on the poll one examines -- into the high teens as a percentage of the electorate. Asian voting, however, continues to lag, in relative terms, behind any other ethnic group. Non-Latino whites continue to dominate the California electorate -- about 65 percent in both exit polls -- even though they make up less than half the population, but their proportion of voters is drifting slowly downward. And most voters continue to be middle-aged or older.

It's likely, however, that older and whiter voters will reassert their dominance in non-presidential elections, in which turnout is millions of voters lower. The differences from election to election are especially critical for ballot measures, which often hinge on marginal changes in the ideological bent of voters.

Although labor unions are a dominant force in the Democratic Party and worked strenuously to turn out their mem-

bers to vote for Kerry, in fact Bush garnered about 40 percent of voters in union households, just slightly under his overall percentage in California.

The overwhelming -- and perhaps decisive -- support that Bush enjoyed nationally from those with strong, particularly Protestant, religious convictions was reflected in California, where he got 60 percent of the Protestant vote. The percentages were reversed among Catholics, however.

Dan Walters writes for the Sacramento Bee.