Exit (Polling), Stage Left

Exit polling turns out to have gone 0 for 3 on election day. Kerry failed to win a landslide. The Hispanic vote did not hit 44% for Bush. And as I speculated, the methodology in the great "moral values" poll was flawed. I have focused mainly on the last here, but Captain Ed's post today cuts to the chase: "I always thought that the 'moral values' meme provided a too-easy simplification of the presidential election. The media loved it because it gave them a handy way to discredit the red-state voters as a bunch of ignorant hicks who wanted to create Jesusland out of Middle America. The Christian conservatives, intriguingly, played along with the mass media in order to magnify the clout they showed in their support for George Bush. No one asked why the war wouldn't be first in the minds of vote[r]s, during wartime when our soldiers face real bullets and our homeland had been attacked."

With the Left AWOL these days, it's nice that there is enough objectivity in various quarters of the Right that: (1) the Republicans as a whole aren't likely to succumb to the sort of complacency or wishful thinking of the sort that the "Hispanic vote" numbers might have engendered, and (2) no one faction is going to get away with taking all the credit for the win.

-- CAV