Nightly Ramble: Election Day

Welcome, dear reader, to the most intense nightly read on the ‘sphere… Bit’sBlog’s Nightly Ramble.

Not a great deal going on, being election day. The whole of the news orgs are holding their breath until after this usually gets posted.  Let’s get to what we do have, though.

• Unlike some people, I’m not going to call this one. It’s simply too close to call. We likely won’t know what’s what until tommrow morning.
• To that point, Joyner correctly says:
  

  Somebody, whether Drudge or some other site, will likely leak the election results sometime this afternoon. While they’re impossible to ignore, you should do exactly that.

  He correctly cites a couple sources, and the jist of their comments amounts to Demorats get over polled in those things. I agree. I would point to Ohio ’04, whose exit polling claimed that Kerry was walking away with Ohio. A look at who is in the White House at the moment would seem to argue against that judgement.

  The McCain campaign agrees, given a memo released last night, and reposted, interestingly, by Drudge.:

  McCAIN CAMPAIGN MEMO: READING THE EXIT POLLS
  BILL McINTURFF, INTERNAL POLLSTER
  Mon Nov 03 2008 16:53:14 ET
  As we have seen in previous election cycles, the exit poll results do leak early and that ends up influencing the coverage of the race before even the first state polls close at 6:00 PM Eastern.

  However, we want to remind the campaign that the media’s own post-election study of the exit polls in 2004 showed that the exit polls overstate the Democratic candidate’s support. Therefore, we would discourage a rush to judgment based on the exit polls and wait until there has been a representative sampling of actual tabulated results from a variety of counties and precincts in a state.

  Here are the key points to keep in mind when the exit poll data starts being leaked:

  1. Historically, exit polls have tended to overstate the Democratic vote.

  2. The exit polls are likely to overstate the Obama vote because Obama voters are more likely to participate in the exit poll.

  3. The exit polls have tended to skew most Democratic in years where there is high turnout and high vote interest like in 1992 and 2004.

  4. It is not just the national exit poll that skews Democratic, but each of the state exit polls also suffers from the same Democratic leanings.

  5. The results of the exit polls are also influenced by the demographics of the voters who conduct the exit polls.

  After the 2004 election, the National Election Pool completed a study investigating why the exit polls that year showed John Kerry over performing 5.5 net points better than the actual results showed him to have done. Their conclusion was that the primary reason the exit polls was that Kerry voters and Democrats were more likely to participate in the exit polls.

  “Our investigation of the differences between the exit poll estimates and the actual vote count point to one primary reason: in a number of precincts a higher than average Within Precinct Error most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters. There has been partisan overstatements in previous elections, more often overstating the Democrat, but occasionally overstating the Republican.

  We believe that this will hold true this year. The recent Fox News survey showed that 46% of Obama voters said they were very likely to participate in the exit polls, while just 35% of McCain supporters are.

  In fact, even the 2004 exit poll report noted that higher turnout nationally and higher levels of voter interest in both 1992 and 2004 correlated with greater Within Precinct Error.

  The overstating of the Democratic vote did not only occur in the national exit polls, but also occurred in the state exit polls. The 2004 exit poll report cited that the Kerry vote was overstated by more than one standard error in 26 states, while the Bush vote was overstated in just four states. So we should also expect the individual state exit polls on Tuesday to be more Democratic as well.

  So given that turnout is expected to be even higher than 2004 and that Democrats are more likely to participate in the exit polls, this means we should expect greater fluctuation and variation in the exit polls from the actual election results.

  The 2004 exit poll report also showed that the greatest error in the exit poll came in precincts where the interviewer was younger. The completion rates were lower and the refusal rates and Within Precinct Error was higher when the interviewers were under the age of 35.[6] Complicating this is that nearly half the interviewers were under the age of 35, including 35% who were 18-24 and another 15% were 25-34.

  Conclusions

  Based on the previous exit poll results, we should expect once again that Tuesday’s exit poll data could overstate the Obama vote and under represent the McCain vote.

  It is important that the campaign make sure the media realizes this, so that when the exit polls do leak, people do not overreact to the early exit poll data. Rather than looking at the exit polls, we should wait until we start seeing actual election results from key precincts and counties to gauge who won the election.

  I copy that in total because if past is anything like prolouge, the link will be gone tommorow.

  My take here is that we’re not going to know the outcome of this until tommrow morning at the soonest. My advice? Sit back and relax.

• Of course, the issue of vote fraud rears it’s head. Down in Philly we see (By way of Glenn) that
  

  “GOP Election Board members have been tossed out of polling stations in at least half a dozen polling stations in Philadelphia because of their party status. A Pennsylvania judge previously ruled that court-appointed poll watchers could be NOT removed from their boards by an on-site election judge, but that is exactly what is happening, according to sources on the ground.”

  Well, gee… Philly. Isn’t this where they had more Democrat votes then registered voters in 2004? I mean, forget the history of Democrats buying votes, there. Fraud running wild in Georgia and Florida, as well. The government says it’s on high alert for vote fraud, we see the way government handles everything else it’s suppsoedly on high alert for, (the economy for one thing) it’s not exactly a case of warm fuzzies I get. If any of this stuff starts sticking, and I suspect it will, it’ll be Saturday by the time this ends.

•  Murtha is toast. Obama’s comment on bankrupting coal users doesn’t help much, given this is a coal area. As I noted yesterday, this is something Obama cannot counter, and I’m amazed they didn’t play this larger. It’s not just PA, but also Ohio, where the Ohio Coal Assn is a little concerned. Miffed even.  Even Greta had something on that last night.(Video)  the fact is where what Obama propsoes has been put into play, Europe, for example the thing has been a failure to beat about any description you can think up, as McQ notes. Be interesting to see how that plays in the votes for those states. It’s recent enough in it’s peaking, that it hasn’t had a chance to show up in the polling.
• Let there be no doubt as to what way the media leans. Hume, last night:
  

  The media have spent twice as much money traveling with the Obama campaign as with John McCain. The Politico newspaper reports Federal Election Commission records from the time they announced their candidacy through the end of September, show the press spent $9.6 million on hitting the trail with the Obama camp versus $4.4 million on McCain’s.The gulf in spending is due in part to Obama’s prolonged battle with Hillary Clinton and his costly trip to the Middle East and Europe, but the Politico says, “The gap shows more media interest in traveling on the Obama Express than the Straight Talk Express.”

  The most one-sided TV network was CBS. It spent $1.2 million traveling with Obama and just $222,000 on McCain. The most balanced was FOX News, which spent $496,000 on Obama and $313,000 on McCain.

  Gee, do you suppose this means anything? (Nod to McQ on the graphic)

Other stuff:

• Is there anyone who even keeps their Album covers, anymore? We started getting out of that habit with tape Cassettes, and now with CD’s mostly the disks are in some other storage medium before second play of the disk. So why on earth am I interested that Britney Spears’ album covers are supposedly ‘sexy’ again?  Seems to me we’re dealing avoiding the issue of the content of the disk itself not being worth a bucket of warm spit.
• Let there be no doubt of Schumer’s being a slimeball.