So the official results from Germany's election are in. From
AP:
The Christian Democrats and ally Christian Social Union won 35.2 percent of the vote, compared with 34.3 percent for the Social Democrats, according to the official results. Schroeder's coalition partner, the Greens, won 8.1 percent. The pro-business Free Democrats, with whom Merkel had hoped to form a center-right government, had 9.8 percent. The new Left Party, angered by Schroeder's efforts to trim the welfare state, had 8.7 percent.
The result reflected counting in 298 of 299 districts; voting in the final district, in the eastern city of Dresden, has been delayed until Oct. 2 because of the death of a candidate.
That's from a news story published around 7:25 EDT.
A summary of the various exit polls was published by Reuters after noon today:
Polls by leading institutes broadcast on German television put Merkel's conservatives -- the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) -- the biggest share of the vote at 35.5-36.0 percent and their preferred partners, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), at 10.5 percent -- not enough to form a governing coalition.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's SPD stood at 33.5-34.0 percent, its partners the Greens at 8.5 percent and the new Left Party at 7.5-8.5 percent.
The ranges of the various exit polls (and if someone has links to sites breaking down the results by polling organization, that would be most appreciated) were within half a percentage point of the official result.
To put them side by side:
CDU (Merkel's coalition): Exit polls 35.5-36%, official tally 35.2%
SPD (Schroeder's party): Exit polls 33.5-34.0%, official tally 34.3%.
Amazing. Maybe the Germans are uniquely good at polling ,or German voters uniquely compliant. Well, no, seems the Brits did pretty well in the May 2005 UK election:
This is the first year that the BBC and ITV have combined forces to do a joint exit poll, whose results were known just after the polls closed at 10PM.
The BBC/ITV News exit poll predicted a Labour majority of 66 seats which was exactly the final outcome (assuming that the Staffordshire constituency, where the vote was postponed because of the death of the LibDem candidate, returns a Conservative).
The polling companies NOP and MORI interviewed some 20,000 voters as they left 120 polling stations throughout Britain on 5 May.
It predicted 37% for Labour, 33% for the Conservatives, and 22% for the Liberal Democrats.
The NOP/MORI poll did overestimate the Labour vote by 1.7 points, but got the Tory and Lib Dem vote within a point, and the parliamentary majority spot-on. It underestimated small-party votes by 2 points.
Whatever you think about the US exit poll, I think we can lay to rest any argument that exit polls are inherently flimsy and only good for detecting gross discrepancies. If our polling firms aren't doing what they're doing (and the size of the British poll was over 7,000 larger than the national Edison Mitofsky sample last year, so that may be a reasonable argument), they need to be doing it by November 2006.
Exit polls can be sensitive enough to offer evidence of serious irregularities, even in a close election. Case closed.