Wednesday, November 08, 2006

The "show me" state, and more...

They're starting to call the Senate race in Missouri for Republican Jim Talent. But exit polls have Claire McCaskill 3 points ahead. Exits are never off by that much in a clean race.

(UDATE: The latest news has McCaskill ahead -- just barely.)

Jim Webb is ahead by roughly a thousand votes, according to MSNBC. The fewremaining precints in VA are the bluest. Webb may be able to pull this one off.

But even if he does, we must look into the possibility of election fraud. The exits had Webb ahead by a fairly comfortable amount.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

with all respect, with the amount of polling going on at the moment an exit poll being off by 3 or 4% is not at all statistically unlikely.

Joseph Cannon said...

Exit polls are not predictive. That is the key difference. In Europe, they are almost never off by more than one percent, and the agreement is usually much closer than that.

Anonymous said...

Chris Mathews has been in a foul mood all night (I wonder if he is worried about his job) and Keith has been trying to keep his smile and his disdain for Chris hidden.
It is so apparent and so comical.

Anonymous said...

I live in Europe, that's a myth. There was an excellent diary by Liz Feeble (sp?) about it on dkos a couple of days ago.

The thing is, if you take a poll with aa .01% confidence level, which is very strong, if you take 100 polls then statistically you're going to get one wrong even at that level. How many exit polls were taken today?

Anonymous said...

1% that should have been, or .01. Not .01% :)

Anonymous said...

The exit polls will not be off. Period.

Miss P.