More on exit polling

The last post on exit polls (below) prompted a number of comments... no surprise that the LGBT community is involved and opinionated. Let me just add a few things to this discussion.

First, it is true that the only insights the polls afforded about GLB voters came from states where the general population also voted for Clinton (NY and Cali), suggesting that it's possible queer voters were simply mirroring their straight counterparts. It would definitely have been interesting to see if the same were true in states like Illinois and Georgia, where Barack won big.

Poli-sci Prof. Ken Sherrill also noted a few things about the numbers. First, he questioned the sample in California, since it showed only 4% of CA voters identified themselves as GLB, which struck him as quite low.

He also said that queer exit polling is difficult to do in places where people are less likely to identify themselves because pollsters don't end up with a big enough sample to make it statistically significant. "You need 1500-2000 interviews," he said. "You want to be able to analyze at the very least 75-100 respondents. If you get fewer than that number saying they're GLB, it's not worth including the question."

Having said that, he added that states like Illinois, Texas, Florida should have enough GLB respondents to ask the question.

GLB Voters Chose Clinton Over Obama

Among many interesting developments last night, mainstream news organizations acknowledged that gay, lesbian, and bisexual voters exist and asked them to identify as such in the exits polls. A solid majority of those polled in California and New York preferred that Sen. Hillary Clinton be their next president.

NBC exit polling found that among the 4% of California voters who identified as GLB, 63% voted for Clinton, 29% for Obama, and 1% for Edwards. In New York, 7% of voters self-identified as GLB and 59% voted for Clinton, 36% for Obama, and 3% for Edwards.

New York and California were the only states in which this question was asked. The results show that the GLB electorate didn’t move much from where they were last fall in Hunter College’s national polling of the community, when likely GLB voters preferred Clinton by 63%, Obama’s by 22% and Edwards at 7%.