At this moment, it's all still too close to call. We have a lot of news sources tossing out exit poll data along with the caveat that it doesn't mean a lot. Hey, if it doesn't mean a lot, why are you reporting it?
Part of me hopes that the winner, whoever it is, wins by a large enough margin that no one can say he didn't win for real. But another part of me kinda hopes that one guy wins the electoral vote and the other guy wins the popular. Maybe if it happens again, it will finally rid us of the silly Electoral College and move up to just awarding the presidency to the guy who gets the most votes.
The Zogby Poll has just predicted Kerry will win with at least 311 electoral votes. I don't particularly believe that number and I'm wondering why Zogby made such a call at 3 PM on Election Day. Were any of his clients asking for a projection only hours before we have actual numbers? No other pollster seems to have made a "final call" after late Monday…why did Zogby put his ass on the line like that? Is it just that the stats he has are overwhelming and he wanted the prestige of being the only major pollster to forecast a Kerry landslide? Perhaps…but doesn't he run the risk of being laughed out of his profession if Bush wins?
I'm not saying he's right or wrong…though if he's right, it will mean enormous bragging rights. There have been others, of course, who have been saying for days or weeks that Bush can't lose or that Kerry will win big, but those all strike me as voodoo projections. If they're right, they'll be right the way one of those Magic Eight Balls is intermittently right. Years ago, I worked on a "reality" TV show that occasionally gave air time to people who claimed, via psychic means or otherwise, to be able to forecast the future. We were lobbied many a time by someone who had proof they'd correctly predicted the scores of all seven World Series games or the Dow Jones closing numbers for the last month. Closer investigation revealed that they were operating on Dumb Luck. The lady who called all the World Series games was part of a "Psychic Society" where several thousand alleged seers each predicted the totals…and she was the one who was right. (She thought it proved psychic powers. We thought it proved The Law of Averages.)
Zogby isn't quite in that category. He's using actual polls and voting models and a methodology built on science. Still, I can't help but think it's not as exact a science as he makes it out to be…so if he's right, there'll be a certain amount of luck in there. And whatever Internet sites prove to have gotten it right will have been even luckier.