On Election Day this November, pollsters will haunt voting booths, scrambling to call the new U.S. president—and the winners of other races—before the official results. Those polls can offer deep and unexpected insights into how Americans tick, and for the past decade, political science department chair and professor Brian Krueger has sought to unravel their reams of data. In the process, he’s quashing dearly held political fictions:

White voters with less money tend to vote Republican. Yet exit poll data show that during the past few decades, low-income whites have generally given a higher percentage of their vote to Democrats than high-income whites have.

Presidential candidates need to secure independents to win the White House. “There is enormous focus on independent voters prior to elections by the media,” Krueger says. “But in the last election, independents preferred Romney to Obama, 50 to 45 percent.”

〉〉 Read more about Krueger’s work in the current issue of the research magazine Momentum at web.uri.edu/researchecondev.