More Coverage! CALLS: CASEY, MENENDEZ WIN
(The Last Thread For A While)

Buchanan Holds In Florida, Negron May As Well: Possibly two more off the sure or possible R loss list.

Geraghty's Source... Sayd Allen's victory is "in the bag."

With 85% precincts in, Allen's ahead by 1%.

Burns, Barrow Both In Position To Win In Georgia: Burns more so. Barrow's at 50/50. A pick up of two Republcian seats in Georgia sure damn might be helpful if this gets closer than it looks now.

Chocula, Northrup Projected Losers: Northrup by about 4 points.

Chocula's bad news. If Indiana holds for Republicans in the ninth district, we may be looking at a limit-your-losses scenario where Republicans can still squeak by... or at least fall into the minority by just a handful of seats.

If we continue seeing the endangered Republicans all fall, then it's a stupid bloody Tuesday.

FOXNEWS JETTISONS EXIT POLLS: Barone announces they have reviewed exit polls results against actual tabulated votes in surveyed areas, and found a persistent six to eight point Democrat skew.

Confirmation Bias! With just over 5000 -- five thousand -- votes actually counted, MSNBC has no problem calling Maryland for Cardin.

Despite the fact that even among those 5000 votes, Steele has a 57-40 lead.

I guess MSNBC really buys into its exit polls. Because it simply has no votes in yet at this moment to make this kind of call.

I suppose it might be exit polls of African Americans... but still, those are exit polls. How do they know that blacks felt comfortable telling pollsters, "Yeah, that's right, I voted for the black guy, more or less just because he's black" ?

This strikes me as very, very strange. Barone usually gives reasons for these calls -- he'll say this or that county is a bellwhether, and it just didn't give enough votes to this candidate.

But 8000 votes? What?

Confirmation Bias? Remember that previous biases -- and bad exit polls -- can cause the news desks to call Democratic winners early, and yet take all night to call Republican winners.

The exit polls -- almost certainly off by six or seven points -- are part of the data-set that go into making these calls.

A Bad Night... and yet we could still hold the Senate.

We've lost the seats we expected to lose. All the seats we'd had serious hopes about holding (or picking off, as is the case with Michael Steele) are still too close to call.

Obviously, we'd like to be so far ahead that we could get some quick calls on these, but apparently not.

We need to hold Tennesse (likely), Virginia (iffy), and Missouri (who knows), or maybe lose one more of those and pick up Maryland, if we want a 51-49 majority with none of that "power sharing" bullshit we had when Jeffords flipped.

...

The Last Thread... Tushar thinks it's a good idea to stop making new threads, to just update in this one. Okay, fair enough. I'll just start putting updates above.

Casey, Menendez Projected As Winners... Kean actually is just behind by 4%, but I guess they know he just didn't do as well in his strong areas than he needed to do.

As a general rule, I'm not posting stuff like this, as I assume you can watch TV the same as I can. I'm more focusing on signs of of where this is all going.

Still, there you go.

Still watching Ann Northrup slip behind in KY, and Chocula slip more and more into projected-loser territory in Indiana.

On the other hand, Corker's up by nine at this point, and Burns in GA-12 is ahead, too -- perhaps one of the few Republican House pick-ups of the night, if he stays ahead.

BARONE: AT LEAST A SIX-POINT DEMOCRATIC OVERSAMPLE IN THE EXIT POLLS.

Just FYI. Could very well mean we hold Virginia and Missouri, maybe even by a relatively comfortable margin.

Anyway, this is shaping up, it seems, to be at worst a 52-48 flip-round in total vote share. Okay, at worse, 53-47. It's nothing like the blowout the exit polls were showing.

....
Another liveblog: Six Meat Buffet, too.

Dave From Garfield-Ridge is liveblogging too, and is especially concerned by the strong showing of Dr. Zaius in Indiana-4 (running on the Damn Dirty Ape ticket).

A couple of IRC chats have been set up. I don't know what these are, but the kids seem to think they're pretty cool.

ArmedGeek set up one for Ace of Spades readers:

host: lenny.lscode.net
port: 6667
channel: #aceofspades

Matthew Sheffield at NewsBusters set one up too:

live.newsbusters.org
irc server
link address is irc://live.newsbusters.org

I don't know what a damn word of those things mean, so don't ask me.

Turnout "Ridiculously High" In Montana For GOP... and more stuff at HotAir.

Why Allah is still citing exit polls, I don't know. Even if we're losing many races, we just don't seem to be losing by the margins of these exit polls. They seem too unreliable to even cite at this point as regards close races.

posted by Ace at 09:23 PM

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