Exit Polls

With 82% of precincts reporting, Kerry is leading by 13 points in New Hampshire. I've been watching the coverage since 8pm on CNN and MSNBC, and at no time since they started putting numbers up has Kerry's lead been less than 12. This is about in line with the tracking polls released this morning.

However, during the first hour of coverage all the commentators have been talking about a narrow Kerry win, something around 5-7 points. The tone of the NH stories on the evening news, before the polls closed, backed up the thesis that Kerry would win, but that it would be a tight race. Even after hard numbers had been out for an hour, though, and Kerry's lead wasn't going away, pundits were still making it sound like a close contest.

I'm going to ignore the issues of whether this numbers game was good for Kerry or good for Dean. What's amazing about the coverage is that we kept getting the exit polling numbers in the context of the coverage, which did show a close race, even though the real numbers were different. A large chunk of the evening's reporting was based on numbers that weren't really real, and contradicted by numbers that were. Let's hope the election coverage next week is more professional.