According to these CNN exist polls, 53% of respondent voters were women, and 47% were men. 54% of female respondents voted for Harris, 44% for Trump. 54% of male respondents for Trump and 44% for Harris. That means Harris should win the popular vote, if these polls are indicative of the election as a whole. But, she isn’t winning the popular vote, she’s losing by more than five million votes. That must mean that many more women than men voted on election day, but many more men than women voted early and/or by mail/absentee. Isn’t that kind of odd? You’d think the gender breakdown of mail in and early voting would be roughly the same as election day voting. The only other thing I can think of is these exit polls just aren’t indicative of the election broadly. Maybe CNN’s exit polls aren’t capturing a large or diverse enough sample size?

  • dhork@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    No, it means that a decent proportion of Biden voters (nearly 1/7 as of now, with votes still to count) stayed home this time around. Why, with so much at stake? You’ll have to ask them.

    • spector@lemmy.ca
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      12 days ago

      I thought to myself before the election. If the Dems lose it’s not entirely on them this time. The (non-)voters will have made their choice.

      I still stand by that. I know the internet trolls are feasting on the Dems bad narrative. This one is just as much is on those voters as it is on whatever failings will be pinned on the party in the coming future.

    • chakan2@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      I don’t think they did. Anecdotally, I don’t know a single person that backed Biden that didn’t vote. Out of the few dozen to maybe 100 people in my circles, there should have been a few descents by that math. There wasn’t.

      I didn’t buy 2016, I don’t buy this one either. The polls are too far from the actuals results. They had a decade to install Republican officials at every level, and they did it.

      Manipulating election results is trivial. I think the R’s just proved that in their final push to Fascism. They had to win this one or they’d never be in power again.

      • dhork@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        Elections are very closely watched by all sides. And they are massively distributed, run by local people who are accountable in their communities. They don’t just run Presidential elections every four years. They run midterm Congressional elections, county and local elections, school voard elections, and so on.

        Could someone with ill intent stuff a sack full of ballots in their car without being detected? Maybe. But you would need a massive operation to account for millions of ballots. Fraud at that scale is bound to be detected. If at the end of this thing there really are upwards of 10M fewer votes for Harris than Biden, that can’t be explained by anything else than people simply not showing up.

        • kablammy@sh.itjust.works
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          11 days ago

          Seems like one simple fraud check that would discover cases of “lost” ballots would be to cross-check the number of people entering the polling station (or having their name crossed off a roll sheet before voting, if they do that) vs number of votes counted from that station. Do they do that?

        • chakan2@lemmy.world
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          12 days ago

          But you would need a massive operation to account for millions of ballots.

          Not really…look at X and how successful it’s been on changing the discourse of the US. I don’t think an election would even take that scale of tomfoolery. Maybe the US really is this big of a steaming pile of shit, but I don’t buy it.

          • dhork@lemmy.world
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            12 days ago

            There’s a big difference between how a single (now private) company operates vs. a voting system which is decentalized to each state (and even each county). Fuckigng with the actual votes will be detected.

            Now, if you’re saying that X is fucking with everyone’s minds and lying to them to get them to vote for Trump, you may be right there. But in that case, they don’t need to also try and mess with the actual voting process.

    • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.worldOP
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      12 days ago

      I can see how that might happen if there were more groups or options, but this is relatively straight forward. There are two possible choices for gender: male or female, and each of the two candidates won their respective gender by 54% to 44%. Since these exit polls indicate that more women voted than men, I don’t see how this could result in Harris not winning more votes overall.

      • dragontamer@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        Run the numbers again with abstained votes.

        If the women entered the polls only to vote for Abortion, but left the President line blank, then it easily explains one potential issue.

        Just because people went to the polls doesn’t mean they even voted on the Presidency.

        • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.worldOP
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          12 days ago

          But this poll indicates that voters were asked specifically which presidential candidate they voted for. They could have lied, but I’m not sure why they would.

          The only explanation I can think of is many more men than women voted early/absentee, enough to more than overcome the higher turnout of women than men on election day. Either that or these exist polls just aren’t very indicative.

  • techwooded@lemmy.ca
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    12 days ago

    The problem with exit polling, as with the problem with polling in general (exacerbated by the modern age), is that they’re voluntary. The simplest explanation is that a higher percentage of women answered the exit poll than men. Or that women who voted for Trump were less likely to answer the poll. Or the people lied when they answered the poll.

    There can also be statistics reasons for it too. Not knowing the methodology behind how this was collected, but you can also have selection effects. If I’m trying to run a statistical analysis on a population, I want as many respondents as possible to reduce the error and deviation, but I also have to operate with limited funds. Be much more efficient to post a few people up in higher density places like cities that tend to vote more blue anyways than having pollsters scour the backroads of Wyoming, for example, where I would wager a higher percentage of women voted for Trump.

    In the end, don’t put too much stock in pre-election polls, and definitely don’t put too much stock in exit polls. Think about it like this, if you got a phone call from a random number, would you pick up and answer questions about how you vote in such a controversial election? If the answer is no, then you know why polls aren’t accurate

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    It could just be that more men and/or more Republican voters refused to participate in a CNN exit poll.

  • _wizard@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    The fix was in at the start. If cheating was performed, we were conditioned to ignore it. IMO, the reason they were upset last time was because the cheat failed.

    • TheDannysaur@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Ah yes. Great. We’re the election conspiracy theorists now. It’s apparently democrats turn to make completely baseless accusations.

      This stuff is exhausting. We want to look for every reason except for the one that matters: Democrats lost America. We need to break the party apart and start over.

      Every other excuse just delays and distracts. Democrats fucked it. We can be all high and righteous as we want, but we lost 2 of 3 to Donald Trump.

      Face the reality. Democrats need to reinvent themselves or they will lose to shit candidates like Trump.