Thursday, November 4, 2004

Who let the blogs out?

I know the title is a cheap way to garner attention and it's definitely not an original headline!

I've been reading about the misinformation spread during Election Day regarding the exit polls that predicted a big win for Kerry. The mainstream media picked it up and it affected the late afternoon financial markets. When I began watching election coverage around 7:00 PM CST, there were still predictions of a big Kerry win.

To quote Maxwell Smart: "Missed it by that much!"

Dick Morris, on Wednesday's "The O'Reilly Factor," opined that the Democrats may have intentionally tweaked the exit polls to make it appear that Kerry was going to win big, thus encouraging Republican voters out west to shrug their shoulders and say: "Why bother." I seriously doubt that. I think the pollsters got some biased data and did not overlay their data with the actual votes. Once the networks figured it out, they stopped relying on them. The exit polls are good for showing what the hot button issues were and why one candidate did better on a particular issue. Bush did better than Kerry in "moral values" and "likeability."

It's been only 24 hours since Kerry conceded and Bush declared victory so, of course, speculation is already running rampant regarding the 2008 election! It sounds like Hillary Clinton has already earned the Democratic nomination so the Dems can save time and money and avoid holding their '08 convention. (I've also seen Howard Dean's name mentioned as Democratic party chairman.) I guess Rudy Giuliani's the choice of the Republicans although the moderates would prefer Arnold Schwarzenegger (if they can just get that pesky constitutional language changed)!

And so it goes...

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