The title of the article says: "Exit Survey of MA Voters Confirms Lack of Enthusiasm Among Progressives." I don't doubt that. A later place in the article calls the "survey" a "poll," but it doesn't seem like a rigorous exit poll by a polling company. It's more of a poll conducted post-election within the Martha Coakley supporters and advisers to find out where the campaign failed.
I was quoting from Simon in CODE RED, who said no exit polls were done. That's why he decided to use the voters who had voted on paper and whose votes were counted openly and transparently (65,000 voters in 71 communities) in order to see what the likelihood of the differences between the sample and the rest of the voters would be. As Simon says, "We would expect the handcount results to fall within 1.0% of the opscan results with better than 99.9999% confidence."
Simon is at Election Defense Alliance <http://electiondefensealliance.org/> and would perhaps want to know about this poll if it indeed was a rigorous exit poll whose results are highly reliable (except for the inevitable "adjustment," of course, after the fact).
I'm not acquainted with the facts on the ground in MA during this election, but the result for the Handcount group, a 2.8% margin for Coakley, seems reasonable, even if the candidate was not a good candidate, given that the voters in MA were 68.7% Democratic. Republicans these days have no trouble whatever winning elections in places where they have the majority of voters, even if the candidate is not a good one, where their majority is far less than the almost 70% Dem majority in MA.
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