News-Record.com

The conservative-leaning Civitas Institute did themselves some exit polling following last weeks election. Despite the partisan nature of the group (no doubt they were rooting for Republicans to win) their polling seems to have been conducted in a pretty straight up fashion.

Civitas surveyed 800 folks who actually voted in the election. Basically, they were trying to figure out why exactly Republicans lost en mass in races from Congress on down the ticket.

Update: Click here to see the powerpoint of the poll results.

Here’s what they found:

• The war in Iraq locked in a lot of voters early and those voters didn’t move from their opposition to President Bush or his Republican allies.
  
• Republican voters, even self-identified “very conservative” voters, did some ticket splitting in this election. The “very liberals” remained more solidly in the Democratic camp.
  
• Only 33 percent of actual voters said the Jim Black scandal made any sort of difference in how they voted.
  
• Among actual voters, improving education, making health care affordable and illegal immigration were the top three issues in state-level races. Illegal immigration was particularly important to conservative voters.
  
• The problem Republicans had in those state legislative races was that voters only heard them talking about illegal immigration. Voters said they heard Democrats talking and doing something on the health care and education fronts, but not so much the Republicans on either of those issues.

It’s an old saw in political circles that in order to win elections, you have to tell the voters a story. What the Civitas data appear to show is that the voters in the state legislative elections wanted to hear three stories. Democrats did an adequate job of telling all three while Republicans did not.