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He's baaack. While the USA girds for problems today, Nicaragua, a tiny Central American nation with a troubled electoral history, conducted a presidential election Sunday that former president Jimmy Carter, one of the observers, called a much more careful and...
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Do vote. Of all the ads this election year, among the most attention-grabbing and cynical is one put out by the senior citizens group AARP. Its message: Don't vote....
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Often early. You wouldn't know it from the mind-numbing barrage of last-minute political ads, but fewer voters are waiting until Election Day to cast their ballots....
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Man vs. man. Machines aren't the only things that could come between voters and their civic duty. In many states, human beings are doing the job depressingly well....
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Thoughts for Election Day Dicey machines, shady tactics and a blast from the past Today's elections won't just be a referendum on which party controls Congress. They'll be a test of whether American voting procedures, revamped at the cost of...
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Hooray! Election Day is here. By all means, do not read the newspaper, Jack Shafer advised Slate readers yesterday. Why not?The only newspaper with less genuine news than the Monday-before-the-election edition is the Tuesday-day-of-election edition, as we'll see in six or seven hours from now when the bulldog editions reach convenience stores and hawkers outside of bars. Nothing will have changed between Sunday night, when the Monday paper went to bed, and Monday night, when Tuesday's got tucked in. But across the country, tens of thousands of column inches will be sacrificed by talented, exhausted writers pumping nothingness out of the void and calling it news.On that note, Happy Midterm Election Day. UPDATE: Also, Howard Kurtz can tell you right now what will be in tomorrow's newspapers.
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(CBS)It"s finally here -- Election Day! And you know what that means right? Well, for the most part, it means a day of sitting around twiddling thumbs if you"re a political junkie or involved in covering the results in any way. Of course our attentions will turn toward stories that pop up here or there - tales of voting problems, speculation about turnout in key places and what that might mean, even the weather will get a turn in the pundit spotlight before the day is out. It"s a day to talk - and talk, and talk and talk - about pretty much nothing at all. This is why there is so much angst about the exit polls this year, or more precisely, about the lack of them. We looked into the role exit polls play in election night "calls" yesterday and noted this year"s twist - the "quarantine room." Unlike years past when early exit poll numbers began circulating around news rooms, this year all the data will be locked up until 5:00pm on the east coast. Why is this being done? Well, simply put, it"s almost irresponsible to let them get out any earlier in today"s media landscape.
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On Sunday the New York Times went out of its way to run a lead editorial explaining why, for the first time in history, they refused to endorse even a single Republican this year. Today, the NYT publishes a list...
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John Fund has an an excellent guide of where to watch tonight (which includes a nice plug for RCP, btw). I'll be watching two places: Indiana and Kentucky, as previously mentioned, and also upstate New York. New York features races...
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Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz write the cover in today's Washington Post: As the 2006 campaign staggered to an angry close, national security and the Iraq war dominated the final-day debate of midterm elections in which national themes, not simply...
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Bill Clinton swooped into Rhode Island yesterday to try and help push Sheldon Whitehouse across the finish line. Chafee said it was a sign that Democrats were pressing "the panic button," but Whitehouse played up Clinton's visit as a sign...
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HOUSE: 222 D, 213 R (D +19) On the Republican side, RCP's Final House ratings list thirteen seats in the Leans Democrat category, fourteen in the Toss Ups column and twenty seats rated Leans Republican. On the Democratic side, 2...
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One of the biggest stories this election cycle was the "racist" ad run by the RNC against Harold Ford in Tennessee. Condemnations came fast and hard from the left, with critics decrying it as a despicable attempt by Republicans to...
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The final round of polls on the generic ballot question show such wide divergence it is hard to draw definite conclusions. However, a look at a chart of the RCP Generic Average does seem to offer visual proof that there...
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I spent a couple of nights at a hotel only a half-mile or so from Chicago's Midway Airport last week. Not a serene experience, believe me. So I was intrigued to learn that a team of engineers from MIT and...
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(AP)I know, fellow political and news junkies - it's a tough day. All this waiting. I just got an instant message from a friend demanding exit poll results. ("I must have exit polls! I am going crazy!") While I won't be providing those - and no, I don't have them, so stop asking - I can at least pass along one small bit of distraction to help you make it through the day. Via the Editor's Weblog, we have a chart from the News-Record in Greensboro, North Carolina explaining the difference between "How the Editor thinks the Newsroom Works" and "How the newsroom really works." The latter includes such activities as "Surf YouTube," "Bitch about blogs," "Flirt with new staffer" and - I'm sure some of our commenters will love this - "Insert the day's bias." Anyway, have a look, have a chuckle, and sit tight. We're almost there.
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(AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)If the Democrats take control of the House and Republicans maintain a majority in the Senate, as many pundits are predicting, one of the big stories following the midterm elections will be the potential for legislative gridlock. And while the stagnation might cause grumbling among many Washington-watchers, at least one group may be just fine with the possibility. You may already know that, if you"ve caught any one of the many articles speculating about what the election means for Wall Street. It seems that the market, like a disillusioned Daily Show watcher, is responding to the prospects of a Democratic sweep with a collective shrug. Why? Because what irks many a columnist most - gridlock in Congress - is actually swell news for investors.
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Our friends at Couric & Co. are having a banner day today, and we wanted to direct you to a few of their posts. First is CBS News Director of Surveys Kathleen Frankovic's insider account of her day. "I"ll be sitting in the CBS News Decision Room with several brilliant statisticians, political scientists, and political mavens, looking at the results, and projecting the election results," she writes. "We"ll use the exit polls, but we will also use polls of absentee voters, actual votes in sample precincts and throughout the state to make projections." Frankovic's "first look" on what's happening over at the "Evening News" today, in which she explains the situation behind the scenes, is also worth a look. (Just click on the box.) There's also Katie Couric's post on the political process and what lies ahead today. She says CBS News will try to keep "our eyes on the big picture," since "[t]oo often, we"ve immersed ourselves in political minutiae; we can"t see the forest for the trees." It's a bit more for you to read and watch while you're waiting for the results to come in this evening. Hey, what else are you going to do on a day like this - work? Yeah, didn't think so.
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(AP)Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will be hearing the case of Gonzales v. Carhart, which is effectively a constitutional test of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. With the case approaching, CBS News Senior Vice President, Standards and Special Projects Linda Mason sent an email to the CBS News staff regarding the terms "late term abortion" and "partial birth abortion." Mason wrote that CBS News should use the term "late term abortion" when referring to the procedure in question, not "partial birth abortion." I asked her why. "We thought that 'partial birth' is a color phrase for people who are anti-abortion rights," said Mason. "This is a procedure usually done after 20 weeks. Therefore, 'late term' is appropriate. Now, some colleagues have come back to me and questioned this because the name of the law before the Supreme Court is the 'Partial-Birth Abortion.' When people refer to the case, they should call it by the correct name. But a CBS reporter should call the procedure a 'late term abortion.'"
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(AP)It's 6:50, and I've already heard some variation of this comment twice on the "Evening News": "They say all politics is local, but it doesn't look that way in this year's election." I've seen the sentiment elsewhere around the Web today as well, and I am sure we'll hear it more than once on various stations as coverage continues tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, it seems the 2006 mid-term election has its first official clich . Feel free to work it into your election drinking game.
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(CBS/AP)By 8:30, CBS News had called the U.S. Senate race in New Jersey for Democrat Bob Menendez. If you went to the Election Results page for the race at that time, however, it showed Republican Thomas Kean with more actual votes - 13,442 to Menendez' 12,629. (Of course, those numbers changed as the votes continued to come in.) Seem odd that the race would be called for the candidate in second? Yeah, it does to us too. But "the call" is nothing if not mysterious, as we explained in an earlier post. You might want to read it if you're confused about how the networks are making these calls. It's not going to clear things right up by any means, but it might make the process seem a bit less arbitrary.
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I've been trying to keep close tabs on the Senate race in Missouri. My sources on the ground say turnout appears to be heavy in the suburbs outside St. Louis (St. Louis county) which may or may not be bad...
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A key race to watch right now is Kentucky 3. This is the last of our toss up races and a win here for the Democrats would not be very good news for Republians. With 64% reporting it is 50%...
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The InTrade markets continue to trade and it will be wild to watch as the numbers start to come out. In the five critical Senate races we're watching the markets have been relatively stable. Talent appears to have a little...
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What is wild about today is how wide the potential range could be in the Senate. I touched on this on Saturday with the observation that it was not far-fetched that Republicans could keep their losses to only three in...
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