Election 2018 Open Thread - Part 1

[Mr. Morden]

A reminder about the timing of the exit polls: The Edison Research exit poll, which is what most of the networks use, is being conducted right now, and at 5pm Eastern (just under 2 hours from now), Edison will be sharing their preliminary results with the networks.  So then, starting at around 5:10 or 5:15pm or so, we'll start to see various news stories pop up along the lines of X% of the electorate is whites with a college degree, or Y% approve of Trump's performance as president, or whatever.  But they will not release the full toplines of the exit poll for individual races until the polls start closing.

The wrinkle this year is that both Fox News and the AP have split off to do their own thing.  They will not be using Edison, but are instead going with a new system called VoteCast, that's mostly based on online and phone polling.  Details here:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/6/18067982/exit-polls-results-start-2018-midterm-elections

I don't know when we'll start to get VoteCast numbers.

[Mr. Morden]

I think I saw that they are going to start doing phone interviews so they can capture early voters.

That's been a part of the exit polls for probably something like a decade now, at least in states where early voting is common.  Once early voting started to become a commonplace thing, they had to start supplementing the Election Day interviews with phone calls.  I don't know the timing of when the calls are made though.  Presumably they've been made throughout the last few days.

[Mr. Morden]

I remember in 2004 the people on FOX were talking about how Bush just couldn't close to deal on being re-elected. That was at about 5:55.

And in 2004, the exit polls were overly optimistic for Dems and were predicting Kerry would win. But of course, it didn't work out that way when the actual #s came in. So that illustrates both that the coverage is colored by early exit polls, but also that the exit polls can be wrong.

2004 was back in the era when the exit polls started leaking around noon eastern time, so they were *very* early and incomplete.  After that fiasco, they reformed their practices, and don't release any exit poll data until 5pm.

[Mr. Morden]

Exit poll: