Sorry for the lack of Post-Decision Posts on this dreadful day, but I’ve been experiencing technical problems with posting, wasting valuable time I should have spent screaming in my sleep.
Weighty analysis of the election will have to await the dawn’s early light. But I did want to explain the bizarre backstory of the odd tone of so much Election Night analysis in the blogosphere.
Us Washington Insiders, and many other Political Savvies, spent much of November 2 staring at black-market exit poll data that showed Kerry winning the popular and electoral vote. Throughout much of the evening, the networks seemed to be covering a different election, in which Bush was marching inexorably towards victory, and Kerry was only carrying the bluest of blue states.
Righteous in our wisdom, most of us Democratic Insiders spent hours shouting “Call New Hampshire! Call Pennsylvania!” at the nearest television, while phoning non-insider friends and family members to let them know the Red Tide on their living room screens was a chimera.
While many of those uncalled states did indeed eventually break to Kerry, the ironic truth is that all our unenlightened friends and family, bereft of exit poll data, had a better sense of what was actually happening than we did. Sic Transit Gloria, so to speak.
Alan Abramowitz has offered a quick read on why the exits were off, but the bottom line is that we all got bamboozled by the scientific mystique, and the special cache, of being able to know something that others would not know for, God, six or seven hours!
The folks at Edison who conducted the ’04 exits quickly tried to atone for the embarassment they caused the chattering classes yesterday, by usefully re-weighting their data to reflect the actual results. This step preserves the value of the exits for their more legitimate and enduring use as tools for interpreting why voters did what they did, once it’s clear what they did.

The Ohio Secretary of State’s office has released an official talley of provisional ballots issued in each county of the state yesterday. The total is 135,000. Bush’s current margin in the state is 136,000, and many overseas (largely military) absentee ballots haven’t been counted.
I’m sure people better informed than me are triple-checking these numbers, but we can all do the math.

I’m going to do a quick post on this because you’re not likely to hear anything about it from the talking heads on the tube: there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on in state races around the country. Democrats apparently won control of the Oregon Senate, the Washington Senate, the Vermont House, the Colorado Senate, and the North Carolina House. Republicans appear to have won control of the Oklahoma House, the Indiana House, the Tennessee Senate, and the Georgia House.
In gubernatorial contests, there was no clear partisan pattern. Democrats held West Virginia, Delaware and North Carolina easily; the GOP held North Dakota, Vermont and Utah easily. Dems knocked off an incumbent in New Hampshire, and won Montana, but lost the governorship in Missouri and Indiana. Washington, which Dems currently control, is still disputed, with less than a 1,000 votes separating the candidates.
If you can see any clear pattern in these results, you’re obviously in better mental shape than I am this morning.

Well, sports fans, after three big hours of sleep, I’m probably feeling like a lot of you–especially those of you suffering from an Exit Poll Hangover. More about that later, along with lots more about non-presidential results from yesterday.
But despite what you are hearing from many quarters this morning, the presidential contest has not been decided, and in another example of Things I Wish I Hadn’t Been Right About, it’s all coming down to provisional votes in Ohio. Forget about Iowa and New Mexico; they just don’t matter. If Kerry manages to pull ahead in the final vote in Ohio, then all the hype, all the red ink on the network maps, all the stuff we’re going to (ironically) hear about Bush’s popular vote margin, are irrelevant; Kerry will be inaugurated as POTUS 44.
Can it happen? Sure, though the stupidity of our electoral system makes it hard to know whether the odds resemble a full court hook shot at the buzzer, or something a little more likely.
Bush’s “final” margin in Ohio is about 130,000 votes. Nobody knows exactly how many provisional ballots were cast in the Buckeye State yesterday, but Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican with no particular reason (other than national media exposure) to guess on the high side, says the number may approach 175,000. For reasons too numerous to go into right now, Kerry will get a very high percentage of those ballots if they are counted. There are also maybe 100,000 absentee ballots that haven’t been counted yet, with no real indication how those may cut. And finally, there were enough election-night irregularities in Ohio–including lots of extraordinary delays in allowing people to vote–to suggest a statewide recount would be in order, especially given the high stakes.
So far Bush has eschewed a definitive victory claim, but as the picture in Ohio gets clearer, we may see the White House and its media allies go into full cry about all the godless liberal trial lawyers who are trying to “steal” the election by completing the count. And the situation will not be helped by the leisurely pace that Blackwell seems to be signalling for adjudication of provisional ballots.
But John Kerry did not create the mess in Ohio; it’s been building for months, and many of us have been frantically signalling for quite some time that getting a full and honest count there might be very difficult. So let’s wait and see, and in the interim, gird up our loins for a serious effort in the immediate future to bring this country into the modern era of election procedures. It’s insane that we are once again in the dark about the identity of the president-elect on the day after.

The late worm may be turning. In Ohio, estimates are that somewhere between 125,000 and 200,000 provisional ballots–which aren’t being counted right now-have been cast. These could turn the state. The other states where exits polls showing Kerry beating Bush are trending towards Kerry in late returns.
Don’t believe the hype.

This has changed a bit, since the nets finally called PA for Kerry, but the picture of the presidential election coming across on the tube and the underlying reality are pretty different.
Unless you buy into the theory that the exit polls have systematically and nationally undercounted Bush’s vote, most of the key states still out lean Kerry. In Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin–states where the raw vote being shown on television gives Bush the lead–much of the key Democratic counties are still out. Kerry’s pulling ahead in New Hampshire. And we don’t know much from the west.
Turn off the tube, take a nap, and check back in the middle of the night.

The CNN web site has posted final exit poll data for Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. It has Kerry winning men by 52-48, and women by 56-43 in PA. He wins men by 52-47 and women by 58-41 in NH. But neither state has been called yet for Kerry. What do you think’s going to happen in these states in the end, Mr. Holmes?

Well, it’s clear the networks are not exactly going out on any limbs in calling races. The polls closed in South Carolina more than an hour ago, and they haven’t called it for Bush yet. At 8:00, briefly at least, Wolf Blitzer said CNN “didn’t have enough information”‘ to call the District of Columbia for Kerry (they did eventually).
But here’s the weird thing about the media web sites (at least the two I checked: CNN and MSNBC). They’re publishing exit poll data, including candidate numbers, when the polls close, whether or not they’ve made a call. What’s sneaky about it is they don’t show totals, just all the breakdowns. So you can check out Ohio, and see that the exits have John Kerry leading Bush among men by 51-49, and among women by 53-47. Doesn’t take a statistician to figure out that the final exits for Ohio show Kerry winning 52-48.
And Ohio, folks, is the ball game.

Well, the polls are beginning to close, and so far, the only competitive race that’s been called is a Kentucky House contestwhere GOPer Ann Northrup has survived again.
But all the evidence, actual and anecdotal, suggests a very close national election, with Kerry having an advantage in the presidential race.
There’s some buzz that fewer provisional ballots were cast today than some (including myself) had feared, and if so, that’s a good thing.

One of the weirdest phenomena of this election day is the drumbeat of reports on conservative web-sites (Drudge, National Review Online) and Fox News about how Democrats are intimidating Republican voters. There was a breathless anecdote on NRO a while ago about some Pennslyvania GOPer being forced to–gasp!–cast a provisional ballot.
Now I don’t know if these folks are just continuing the pre-election GOP so’s-your-old-man effort to establish moral equivalency for their own strong arm tactics, or it’s just all they can think of to write or talk about.
The latest conservative media security blanket is the claim that pro-Kerry early exit poll results are meaningless because the sample is skewed heavily towards women. I’d bet you a ride to the polls that many of the people promoting this interpretation were warbling just a few days ago about how Bush’s appeal to “security moms” has wiped out the gender gap.
I guess you reach for the bottle that gives you the belt you need.