DOI: 10.3886/icpsr04181.v1
title: National Election Pool General Election Exit Polls, 2004
title: Version 1

description: Election data for 50 states and the District of Columbia were collected through interviews conducted with voters as they left their polling places on election day, November 7, 2004. The Oregon election data were collected solely through pre-election telephone interviews because voting in that state was conducted entirely by mail. Part 1, Combined Data, is an aggregate of all of the other datasets in this collection. Part 2, National Data, contains data collected from a national sample. National sample respondents were asked a series of questions about their electoral choices, the issues surrounding the elections, and the factors that influenced their decisions. Questions focused on the direction of the country, national security, terrorism, the war in Iraq, the state and future of the nation's economy, gay marriage, and the George W. Bush presidency. Background information on national respondents includes age, race, gender, Hispanic descent, sexual orientation, age of children in household, marital status, political party, political orientation, employment status, education, religion, and family income. Parts 3-53 contain data collected from the individual state and District of Columbia surveys. Telephone surveys were conducted with absentee/early voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington State. Respondents were asked for their opinions of President George Bush, presidential candidate John Kerry, and the United States Congress, as well as for their vote choices in the relevant gubernatorial, senatorial, and congressional elections. Those queried were also asked whether they supported state-specific proposals, such as state funding of stem-cell research in California and defining marriage only as a union between a man and a woman in several states. Background information on individual state respondents includes age, race, gender, education, voter participation history, political party, political orientation, and family income.
description: Respondent weights are included with each data file. These values can be found under the variable name WGT in all of the data files in this collection, with the exception of the combined data, where this value can be found under the variable name XSWGT. These weights should be applied in all analyses. Unweighted tabulations will be seriously misleading and should not be used.
description: Voters casting a ballot in the 2004 United States general election.
description: The statewide samples were selected in two stages. First, a probability sample of voting precincts within each state was selected that represented the different geographic areas across the state and the vote by party. Second, within each precinct, voters were sampled systematically throughout the voting day at a rate that gave all voters in a precinct the same chance of being interviewed. The national sample is a subsample of the statewide sample precincts. Pre-election telephone interviews were conducted in 12 states with large populations of absentee and early voters and in Oregon, where voting is conducted entirely by mail. The samples for the telephone interviews were selected using random-digit dialing (RDD) in these 12 states. Absentee or early voters were asked the same questions asked at the polling place on election day. On election day, the results from the absentee/early voter telephone surveys were combined with the data from the exit polls so as to ensure that those two groups were represented in the data in the same proportion as in the actual vote totals. The Oregon sample was a dual frame design using both registration lists and RDD sampling. An RDD sample of Oregon telephone numbers was selected. Any telephone number already on the registration list was eliminated from the RDD sample. The result was a dual frame design that represented every voter in the state of Oregon with a land-line telephone only once. Individuals were selected by name from the registration list. This part of the sample was 622 interviews, while 280 interviews were completed from the RDD portion. Each RDD residential number represented a household. One individual was selected at random within each RDD household. The relative size of these two groups are estimated from the registration list.