I love the Huffington Post. Blogs should strive to be more like newspapers, i.e. regular producers of high quality content. The way to achieve this is to have a huge number of commentators who will collectively create a large number of posts per day.

Some of the posts, though, are mildly disconcerting. Kevin Hassett, "director of economic policy studies" at the AEI writes the following on the why the exit polls went for Kerry:

....while there are many patterns in the data that suggest something other than fraud, for me, the most interesting finding is that exit poll completion rates were strikingly low for polls taken by college and graduate students. When college kids did the interviewing, a higher percentage of interviewees refused to cooperate.

He references the Edison/Mitofsky report for this claim. Below I've reproduced the relevant table from the report (page 45):

Interviewer Education	Completion Rate	Refusal Rate	Miss Rate
High School or Less	0.52	0.36	0.11
One to Three Years of College	0.53	0.37	0.11
Four Year College Degree	0.55	0.34	0.11
Some Graduate Credits	0.57	0.34	0.10
Advanced Graduate Degreee such as M.A., M.B.A, or Ph.D.	0.60	0.32	0.08

The dude is on crack.

( Now, to be fair, Hassett could have actually made similar claims that would be supported by the data - for example, he could have cited correlation not between completion rates and interviewer education, but between within-precint-error and interviewer education. If this is indeed what Hasset meant, I would make the following remarks: a. Hardly surprising as a misunderstanding of the basic variables in question is exactly what I would expect from an AEI scholar. b. The pro-Kerry bias is present in varying strenghts for every education level and every age. If you accept the idea that members of each party are more likely to talk to some demographics and not others, then finding a pro-Kerry bias for whatever demographic you think is most Republican should be deeply disturbing for you. )