Presenting live election returns as a sporting event makes for good television. At 9pm, Barack Obama & Mitt Romney are tied in the popular vote! The Virginia, Massachusetts and Montana Senate races are tied! Who will win? You have to stay tuned to find out!

But watching election returns minute-by-minute gives a biased view towards the states and even the precincts that count their votes early in the evening. Watching early totals presents a skewed presidential picture in any year, as California (6.2 million Obama votes) doesn’t even close its polls until 11pm ET.

This year the problem was even more pronounced than usual as voters in Democratic precincts faced significantly longer lines than voters in GOP precincts. In 59 voting divisions in Philadelphia, Obama beat Romney 19,605 to 0. That meant Democratic precincts were likely to report results later – and in some cases hours later – than their counterparts in Republican areas. Races that seemed surprisingly close early on turned out to be the solid Democratic wins everyone but Fox viewers expected.

So how has what we know about the election changed since Tuesday night?

• In the presidential race, the usual California lateness was compounded by slow vote counts in New York and New Jersey, both struggling in the wake of Sandy and both heavily Democratic. While Obama’s margin over Romney was around 2 million votes on Wednesday morning, today Obama’s lead stands at more than 3.4 million votes – a victory margin a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t posted since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
• “What’s going on in Virginia?” was a frequent theme on Election Night, as early returns had both Mitt Romney and George Allen leading. But Obama and Kaine came back as the night went along and now you wouldn’t even call the Senate race all that close – Tim Kaine ultimately won by 6 percent (over 186,000 votes). Meanwhile, President Obama won by 3 percent.
• It was a similar story in other Senate races. In Massachusetts, it took hours for the race to be called for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, but the final results show Warren soundly beating Scott Brown by 8 percent. The Montana Senate race wasn’t called until late Wednesday morning, but the final tally has Democrat Jon Tester beating Republican Denny Rehberg by 4 percent – not a blowout to be sure, but much more comfortable than you’d have thought on Election Night. (Side note: How has the media “called” Arizona for Republican Jeff Flake when over a quarter of the ballots, many from Democratic areas, still haven’t been counted?)
• And in the House, while networks raced to declare “PROJECTION: GOP MAINTAINS CONTROL OF HOUSE!” early, today the story is of Democratic pickup. Democrats have already gained 6 House seats and are leading in 4 of 5 uncalled races.

The danger comes when folks start using the election returns to make up their minds about what happened in the election. What you see before 11pm ET isn’t a proportional representation of what will happen later in the night – you have to watch those early numbers with a grain of salt. And that salt’s just the right color since it’s mostly Mitt Romney’s angry old white guy America counting the ballots early on.

So on future Election Nights, have fun watching the early returns roll in, but don’t make up your mind about the results until every vote’s been counted.

Does Nate Silver ever sleep, or even rest? Apparently not. Even after a grueling election season in which he (rightfully) became a superstar, and also somehow found time to write and promote a new book (The Signal and the Noise, which I’m currently reading), he’s still hard at work. The latest example: this past Saturday night (as I said, he never rests), Silver posted his rankings of “the 90 polling firms that conducted at least one likely voter poll in the final three weeks of the campaign.” You can see those on the “flip.”

But first, here are Nate Silver’s rankings of the “roughly two dozen polling firms that issued at least five surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign” (click on the image to “embiggen!”). As you can see, Gallup wasn’t just bad, it was abysmally, disastrously off course – both inaccurate AND wildly biased (towards Republicans). Sadly for Gallup, this election cycle wasn’t a fluke; as Nate Silver points out, this debacle makes “three poor elections in a row” for Gallup. So much for being a respected pollster anymore, at least by anyone who knows anything (e.g., not many pundits or much of the corporate media).

Other than Gallup, other godawful pollsters were – shocker – Rasmussen (both inaccurate and heavily Republican biased), Mason-Dixon (inaccurate and Republican biased), and American Research Group (ditto). The best pollsters, interestingly, were ones that much of the “mainstream” media (e.g., the Washington Post, whose own polling unit was mediocre at best) disdain, such as internet pollsters Google Consumer Surveys, RAND Corporation, Ipsos/Reuters, and Angus Reid. Also doing very well were live phone (including cell) pollsters IBD/TIPP, Mellman, CNN/Opinion Research, Quinnipiac, and Marist. Robodialer PPP, which for whatever reason the “mainstream media” insists on calling a “Democratic” firm (do they identify Rasmussen as wildly biased towards Republicans?), turned out to actually have a 1.6-point Republican bias. Pretty funny. Anyway, check out the list of pollsters with a minimum of 5 polls in the last 21 days of the election, and when you’re done, head to the “flip” for the longer list, and a few more comments by yours truly (including on the utterly abysmal, laughable, Roanoke College polling unit).

A few more thoughts on these pollster rankings. First, note that almost all the polls had a bias – not towards Democrats, as the crazy “unskewed” folks would have us believe, but towards Republicans! I mean, it’s not even close; there is a significant pro-Republican bias, even among supposedly pro-Democratic polling firms like PPP. So much for THAT theory!

Second, to quote Nate Silver, “I’m not as certain about the future for automated telephone polls.” Instead, surprisingly, it’s the internet pollsters of all people who seem to be doing better in this day and age. Fascinating.

Third, one Virginia pollster, Roanoke College, ranks close to the bottom in terms of both average error (they only did one poll in the final 21 days of the election, but man was it a bad one – off by 8.1 points!) and also bias (8.1 points in the direction of Republicans). Ouch. Sadly, this finding isn’t an aberration, as Roanoke College’s polling efforts have been wildly erratic, with all kinds of “internal” problems, and just a horrible track record in general. In the future, until proven otherwise, these polls should be ignored (along with Christopher Newport University’s, not to mention any poll that’s conducted over several weeks, as a lot of these college polls are…). Anyway, enjoy the full list, and thanks to Nate Silver for his continued hard (and impressive) work!

( – promoted by lowkell)

Yet another glimpse into the impenetrability of the right-wing world of illusion: anything –even a wholesale rejection of most of America– is preferable to having to change one’s deluded belief system.

The beliefs in question concern President Obama. But more fundamentally they concern a completely false picture of the nature of the moral choices to be decided through the American political system. This distorted picture serves very well the interests of Big Money in America: they’re entitled to all they can get, and anything that calls that into question must be denigrated as the grasping of losers for what they don’t deserve.

Here are some passages from Eric Boehler, on put it in the blog post on Media Matters, about the attack on the electorate elicited from the right from the failure of the voters to ratify what the right wing has been spewing about President Obama for the past four years:

During Obama’s entire first term they depicted him as a business-hating, class warfare socialist who despises the American way of life.

But if that’s true, why did Obama just score his second electoral landslide in four years?

Either 60 million voters just rejected the Noise Machine’s endless, and often hysterical, claims about Obama, or all of those voters are part of the socialist problem in our “maker vs. taker” society. Faced with that choice, and refusing to admit their messaging futility, the right-wing media have opted for the latter: Americans are the real problem!…

Never hesitating to question whether they were the ones out of step with the mainstream, and if their Doomsday warnings about the center-left president were too extreme to be taken seriously by most voters, far-right talkers and writers set their sights on the populace and berated the nation for picking the wrong candidate, and for being selfish, thoughtless people on the prowl Tuesday for ‘free stuff’ from their ‘Santa Claus’ government, as Rush Limbaugh put it.

‘People feel that they are entitled to things,; Bill O’Reilly lamented on Election Day, as he launched a pre-emptive attack on voters. Led by Hispanics, blacks and women, O’Reilly claimed there’s a whole country filled with moochers who vote Democratic.

‘Put bluntly, the takers outnumber the makers,’ blogged John Hinderaker.

Have we ever heard such a contemptuous, post-election attack on American democracy?

Voters weren’t simply misguided in choosing Obama and the Democratic agenda, we’re told they revealed themselves as deeply flawed people.

*****************

Andy Schmookler, until recently the Democratic nominee for Congress in Virginia’s 6th District, is an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, Andy moved with his family to Shenandoah County in 1992.  He is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

It’s so funny to watch this stuff now (it actually was then too, but it’s much funnier now). Heck, even at the time, there was absolutely ZERO evidence of “major momentum” for Republicans in Virginia, as “Virginia Victory 2012” chairman Pete Snyder (note: believe it or not, this guy’s been talked about as a possible Republican LG candidate in 2013!) claims. It’s also hilarious to listen to Snyder on how the first debate supposedly caused a “seismic shift” in the election (because Romney was sooooo awesome at that debate, and Obama was soooo horrible, blah blah blah), but when people saw Romney unfiltered by the “liberal media,” they just swooned! LOL. I mean, seriously, how much are they paying Pete Snyder to just say whatever crap they tell him to say? Hopefully a lot!

As if all that’s not pathetic enough, Snyder – trained under the wing of one of the worst liars in the country, Frank Luntz, natch – proceeds to repeat a few of the pants-on-fire big lies that Republicans loved to trot out in the 2012 campaign, about Democrats supposedly decimating the military, the juvenile/mindless “teleprompter” attack, etc, etc. Again, how does Snyder spew this crap with a straight face, about how Bob McDonnell’s been such a great success as governor, with “approval ratings soaring through the roof” (huh?!? based on what evidence?!?). Wow.

Beyond Pete Snyder being a lying liar, the broader point here is that this is the Republican echo chamber in a nutshell. Of course, the video above is from Faux “News,” which had Romney supporters so delusional come election day, they truly believed they were going to win, that Pennsylvania was in play (on another show, Snyder actually said that too – lol!!!), that the polls were all skewed, that the liberal media was biasing everything, that hordes of conservative Christians would come marching forth to save the day, etc.

Of course, none of that happened, and instead President Obama won reelection easily (a “landslide” by Republicans’ own standards), while Democrats actually GAINED seats in the Senate and the House. So how does all this delusion and utter disconnect from reality (just like they don’t “believe” in climate science) serve Republicans, exactly? Not well, that’s for sure. But hey, if they want to keep living in la-la-land, wasting hundreds of millions of the Koch brothers/Sheldon Adelsons’ money, etc., more power to ’em I suppose.

P.S. One possible consequence of sane Republicans finally waking up from la-la land is a possible GOP civil war. We can only hope…