If you turn on cable, radio news and talk radio right now there’s considerable amount of talk about the purportedly closely-held exit polls showing a big Democratic win: a Democratic takeover of the House and perhaps even the Senate.
One for-the-record hint is this:
In surveys at polling places, about six in 10 voters said they disapproved of the way President Bush is handling his job, and roughly the same percentage opposed the war in Iraq. They were more inclined to vote for Democratic candidates than for Republicans.
In even larger numbers, about three-quarters of voters said scandals mattered to them in deciding how to vote, and they, too, were more likely to side with Democrats. The surveys were taken by The Associated Press and the networks.
President Bush was at the White House, awaiting returns that would determine whether he would have to contend with divided government during his final two years in office.
Some sites have run more precise reports about what exit polls say. However, if there’s one lesson Democrats and Republicans and Independents should have learned from past election it’s this: it’s the official count that will count.
Still, if you’re interested in exit polls, Raw Story has some. This one suggests the Democrats could take over the Senate. This one states that the GOP is in trouble because the election turned out to be on national issues, not on local ones as Republicans had hoped.
That means President George Bush’s high-profile campaigning for Republicans — televised across the country — could have hurt his party as much as Senator John Kerry’s politically lethal bout of foot-and-mouth disease didn’t help the Democrats.
Some other bad news for the GOP:
—CNN reports that corruption was a major issue to voters who voted.
–AP’s exit polls say one-third of Evangelicals voted for the Democrats.
—AP is calling five out of six races for the Democrats in governors’ races.
And: Katherine Harris lost in Florida.
What sense can you make of this so far?
(1) It is — for now at least — the break-up of the Reagan Revolution coalition.
(2) It will give the Democrats an opportunity to regain or re-lose voters who held their noses and voted for Democrats to send a protest message to the people now controlling the Republican Party. Bush and his faction within the Republican Party have had their wings clipped and the clipping clearly wasn’t only done by Democrats.
ADVISORY: Until the final votes are counted, no one really knows what these final numbers are. That sounds a bit strange to have to say but each election night people assume it’s over before the final numbers come in.
You can safely say this: right now it is trending very well for the Democrats — and tomorrow President George W. Bush cannot call a press conference to say Americans have voted to stay the course.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.