Free Republic

The Democrats emerged from Tuesday's recall election with two consolation prizes. The first is that they flipped a seat in the Wisconsin state Senate, taking control of that body (which won’t convene again until after the 2012 elections). The second, and most frequently cited, is that exit polls found President Obama ahead of Mitt Romney by seven points in Wisconsin. As Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos summarized, “[a] seven-point lead, Obama over 50 percent, despite lacking participation of one of Obama's biggest constituencies (young voters), does not suggest a particularly close race this November. If Republicans want to dump their millions...

NEW YORK - Warren Mitofsky, a survey researcher who pioneered the use of exit polls to cover elections and helped develop the sampling method used in most modern telephone polling, has died. Mitofsky, who was 71, died Friday in New York City of an aortic aneurysm. Joe Lenski, Mitofsky's partner in exit polling for the last two national elections, confirmed his death Saturday. Mitofsky started conducting exit polls in 1967 for CBS News and developed the projection system and analysis system used by CBS and later by a consortium of news organizations that conducted national exit polls. "He was the...