Stupid people or lousy exit polling... or both?

Primaries - Exit/Entrance Polls - Election Center 2012 - Elections & Politics from CNN.com

Pundits and journalists like to analyze the exit polling data after elections, general or primary, to look for patters and discover, if they can, what segments of the population each candidate gets their support from. It's useful, both for analysts and for the campaigns. One of the striking things about the NH primary exit polling data was that Mitt Romney won nearly every group of people. He won amongst men and women both. He won among most age groupings. He won on all levels of education. He won among all income groupings except for those making under $30K. He won the moderates, somewhat conservatives, and very conservatives. He won all groupings on fiscal tax and spend issues and only lost the "very liberal" section of social issues. Anyone who ranged from "somewhat oppose" to "strongly support" on the Tea Party voted for him. Protestants, Catholics, and born-again evangelicals all voted more for him than any other candidate. The early and late deciders all went to him. As did rural, suburban, and urban voters.

All of that looks like good news for the Romney campaign. Such broad appeal has to be encouraging, and it flies in the face of the narrative that exists about him. But looking at some of the numbers, one has to question either the accuracy of the polling or the intelligence of the voters (how well-informed they were). A few of the numbers that stuck out most in this regard. But some of the ones I question could be explained away. One of them, however, makes no sense no matter how I spin it in my head:

-20% of voters who "oppose" the Tea Party voted for Ron Paul. Further broken out, 24% of those who listed "somewhat oppose" and 18% who listed "strongly oppose" regarding the Tea Party voted for Congressman Ron Paul.

Congressman Ron Paul is the intellectual godfather of the Tea Party. This is well-known. You could argue about how influential he is versus other major figures in the movement, but it is inarguable that he is one of their heroes. The Tea Party's major issues and platforms are versions of what Congressman Paul has been advocating for 3+ decades. And yet, when people were asked about their tea party support/opposition, those are the numbers that show up. How ludicrous. How insane. How embarrassing.

I imagine some of it is the inaccuracy of exit polling data. I use it and think about it myself when trying to figure out what happened in an election or is going to happen, etcetera. But it seems to me that it's less trustworthy than the news media and politicians make it out to be. It's like standardized testing. It's a crappy way of discovering the knowledge and intelligence of the students, but it's the most useful tool we've yet come up with and it's better than nothing. The lion's share of that discrepancy, I suspect, can be attributed to the lack of knowledge on the part of the voters. Maybe some of them don't realize how extreme he is. Maybe they just like his foreign policy (like as not, not fully or even partially understanding the implications of neo-isolationism in this day and age). This is a man, though, who follows an economic ideology that has little-to-no room for a government aside from national defense. Certainly no place for public education. But also public firefighting and police forces. No place for the printing of money, and even a resistance to a gold-backed official currency (that, by the way, is his "compromise" position). Maybe they're just crazy about a guy who seems to support the Founding Fathers' wishes (never mind that it's been over two centuries since the Constitution was written and the Founding Fathers were far from a monolithic group anyway).

It's hard to know. But Congressman Ron Paul is like a prophet to his supporters. He sees darkness on the horizon, unless we reject modern conveniences and compromises (on a constitutional-legal level, not societal, in his case) and go back to the ways of an idyllic (and mostly nonexistent) past. The Tea Party utters much of the same rhetoric. They reject big-government conservatism and big-government liberalism. For them, fiscal issues are the most important, and getting the deficit back under control our first priority. Ending fiat money sounds good and a balanced budget has no downside except for special interests and enemies of liberty.

But one fifth of the people who oppose all that supported Congressman Paul yesterday. Unbelievable.