Free Republic

The Republican National Committee on Thursday unveiled new rules for the party's 2016 presidential nominating process, but the changes are expected to protect the traditional schedule and status of early-voting states. The first nominating contests of the GOP presidential primary calendar are reserved for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada -- and all are scheduled for February. But the party is also proposing new, stiffer penalties to prevent other states from moving up their election schedules in an attempt to gain greater influence. The RNC has failed in the past to prevent state parties from moving up their primaries,...

One thing that irritates me of media coverage of the primaries has been the analysis of exit polling and reporting of demographic trends based on this polling. They all race to announce their guess of the primary winner and then they break down how this race voted for that candidate or how this age group felt about the economy, etc. The naive viewer might assume all this stuff came off the ballots. I never hear mention that this comes from exit polling, the sample size, the error rate of exit polling etc. Curious how serious we should take this kind...