Reply #18: But CBS said the blog community wasn't credible? [View All]

[kuozzman]

This is good for a laugh:

SHOW: CBS Evening News 6:30 AM EST CBS
November 3, 2004 Wednesday

SCHLESINGER: Yesterday, a few of those early numbers leaked to some bloggers, and today there are a few red faces in cyberspace where some of the information was published.

Mr. JOE LENSKI (Edison Media Research): It's not supposed to be leaked to the campaigns or to characterize who's ahead or who's behind during the day. That's not the purpose of the first wave of exit poll data.

SCHLESINGER: The Internet published numbers showing a close race, but one that Kerry was on the way to winning. According to one post, Kerry would win not just Ohio, but Florida as well.

Unidentified Woman #2: We're waiting for hard data to confirm...

SCHLESINGER: Networks, including this one, struggled with the early numbers, but resisted the temptation to call races based on exit polls. We did report the optimism in the Kerry camp early in the night. Of course, that optimism turned out to be misplaced, based largely on early exit polls that are notoriously unreliable.

Mr. LENSKI: The first wave of data has smaller sample sizes and is only interviewing people that voted that morning. So they're not necessarily going to accurately reflect the entire day's worth of interviews.

SCHLESINGER: Election experts have warned for years that poll numbers are given too much credibility by a nation eager for quick information. This year, it was Internet bloggers who learned the hard way not to consider those numbers a snapshot of voter attitude when they're really just a small part of a much larger picture. Richard Schlesinger, CBS News, New York.

DAVID GERGEN: I sure as hell never anticipated doing early morning television like this. That's for -- no. I didn't anticipate this. I don't think any of us did. We looked at the polls over the last few weeks. The conventional wisdom was the president gets 48, 49 percent in the final polls, he's not going to get much more than that, maybe 1 percent more in the actual election.

I have yet to hear a theory of the case, in effect, for what happened, why it really happened. I mean we have individual states we looked at, we know where he is, but something happened here that's pretty dramatic. And it's -- for the Democrats, it's more than just the candidate. Now, I would make this argument.

The white vote is about 80 percent of the national vote. Bush won by 15 percent. The last time around he won by a much smaller margin. That went up considerably. But the Democrats haven't won a majority of the white vote since 1964, in a presidential election. They haven't won a majority of the national vote, 50 percent or more, since 1976. You know, this is a party that's got some serious questions of how do you get a majority of Americans to support it. It's a big, big question. Since 1994 in the congressional elections, this is the sixth one now, they, in six congressional elections in a row, I don't think they've broken 48.5 percent of the total vote.

They'll say here came John Kerry with a war that clearly wasn't popular, mixed, at best; with an economy that, while getting better, was still somewhat troubled, and particularly in places like Ohio, where the unemployment rate was higher than the 5.4 percent national average, and still he couldn't ultimately deliver.

And so I think one of the other pieces you're going to hear is are we choosing the wrong candidates? Are we choosing the Ivy League educated, you know, straight, tall and erect guys who ultimately aren't connecting in the way that Bill Clinton did, aren't connecting maybe in the way that a governor from Plains once upon a time did. And I think you're going to hear that critique again that we've got to choose not only policy, but personality going forward.