Why did Indian exit polls get it so very wrong?

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India’s exit polls predicted a clean sweep for Modi, with BJP winning more seats than the 2019 election (i.e., more than 303 seats) and close to 400 seats for the NDA coalition. The election commission is yet to make its final announcement, but BJP only won 240 seats, and the NDA coalition will land at about 295. It seems they are all set to form a government led by Modi.But why did everyone call it so wrong? One argument is media bias in favor of Modi. A second is preference falsification by voters/surveyors/media etc. But I think the third possibility, that the sampling was faulty and the data were bad, is more likely. And I think they erred because constituency sizes are very large, and small sample sizes need to be either very precise or lucky to get it right. And very precise sampling is difficult because of the paucity of overall census data. Modi government’s decision to postpone the 2021 census may have been to their and their supporters’ detriment.I hope political scientists and data scientists will dig into this in the coming weeks and months. But until then, my hunch is that it is a sampling problem possibly exacerbated by lack of census data.Share1. Media BiasAndy Mukherjee, prescient as always, told us to take the exit polls with a pinch of salt. He called the exit polls more “psychological warfare” against the opposition, calling big numbers in favor of Modi because of “partisan role of media moguls.”While Andy is right that media bias is a problem, it is not the reason for faulty exit polls. The media’s bias stems from Modi’s position of power, rather than ex…