D-Day »
It’s a Crazy… Day
Give us the results of the exit polls
It is all about the exit polls:
Two-by-two, polling specialists from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press will go into rooms in New York and Washington shortly before noon Tuesday. Their cellphones and BlackBerrys will be confiscated; proctors will monitor the doors; and for the next five hours, these experts will pore over exit-poll data from across the country.If all goes well, only when they emerge from their cloisters will the legions of ravenous political bloggers have any chance of getting their hands on the earliest indication of which party will end up controlling Congress.
“The demand for info is intense, and if the safeguards aren’t steel doors bolting people inside a room, it will get out,” says Marc Ambinder, associate editor of National Journal’s Hotline OnCall. “The insatiable appetite for this info will overwhelm the ability to keep it secret.”
The extraordinary security is a result of mix-ups that prompted grumbling about the accuracy of exit polls after the 2004 presidential election: Bloggers posted data from early exit polls, incorrectly calling some states for Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry and indicating that he would unseat President Bush.
This year, media executives figure the secret will keep less than half an hour. “Based on past experience, I expect that I’ll have exit-poll data soon after it’s released from multiple sources,” Taegan Goddard of the newsy independent blog Political Wire says in an email.
More:
Consequently, for much of Tuesday, bloggers will likely be chattering mostly about secondary issues, such as voter turnout and problems with new electronic voting machines.But at 5 p.m., waves of exit-poll data will begin flowing to newsrooms via limited-access Web sites. For the bloggers, the scramble will be on to get the data first, hoping for an email from a friendly source.
This is the first American election I am watching as closely as I am: I only started blogging this year, thus before I – being a foreigner – was not as obsessed with it as I am now. I had a lot to do today, but I tried to read blogs and newspapers in between classes. Bloggers are absolutely going crazy. Speculation, fear and hope rule the day.
It’s a crazy, yet great day.
7 Responses to “It’s a Crazy… Day”
I feel your pain, Michael. Without the MSM calling elections minute-by-minute based on incomplete (at best) exit poll numbers, whom are we supposed to laugh at tomorrow?
Though midterm elections are usually a snore, this one foels as politically charged as when Gore was in a virtual tie with Bush in Florida —and we were all hanging by a chad for weeks!
I no longer have much faith in the polls (which vary up to 14 points!) and the pundits ( most of the best of whom have fairly lousy track records for predictions), and now will only be satisfied with results. Hopefully the results will reflect our actual votes, who knows this year?
I’d prefer no exit polls, no media calling elections.
It’ll never happen, but I do not see what possible good they can give.
Interested: they only serve one purpose: satisfying our curiosity.
BOA: I can give you a list with lots of people we can laugh at tomorrow. lol
Kim, we’ll see, but indeed – it has this strange sensation over it. Something seems to be in the air tonight…
Okay, i stole that last sentence from a song, but dang, it’s a good one.
What does the something feel like MvdG? Maybe we can get prognostications from East of the Atlantic, LOL! Yes, I’m sick of the pundits and polls, but one more prediction won’t hurt/////What do you think the final tally will be for the House, Senate and Governors races? (Just pls don’t predict a Repugnican victory in Maryland, my home state. I’d have to move to Canada.:)
Kim I think that everything insinuates (once one makes sense of it) that the Dems will take the House (quite comfortably 30+ or something) and the Republicans (you seem to have accidentally misspelled it) will hold Senate.
My gut feelign however, is that the Dems will take both the House and the Senate.
btw personally i greatly like the image i used lmao