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Sunday, October 31, 2010

AP back at work helping the Democrats

This morning, the Associated Press put out an article that was headlined as "Early voting confirms a tight race in Nevada --
Democrats appear to have blunted the surge of GOP enthusiasm in the Nevada Senate race" I was interested to see what had happened in the Nevada race, so I read the article -- three times! When I first read the article, I was puzzled since there was no mention of early voting or even and push by the Democrats in that regard. I read it again and again just to make sure that I had not missed something -- I had not, the article was silent on the subject in the headline. As a result, I did a quick check of the Las Vega Review Journal to see what the early voting stats were and found this: 379,589 people had voted by the end of the early voting. Democrats comprised 42.9% of the early voters and they are about 42.5% of the registered voters. Republicans comprised 41.1% of the early voters but are only 36.7% of the registered voters. The rest were nonpartisan or third party voters who were 16% of the early voting but are 21.3 percent of the registered voters. This means that the GOP turned out a substantially higher percentage of its voters for the early voting than the Democrats did.

Simply put, the AP headline was not only unrelated to the story, it was also factually incorrect. There was a marked enthusiasm gap that left GOP voters approximately 10% more likely to vote than Democrats.

It will be interesting to see the results from Nevada. My guess is that on Wednesday we will see a headline from the AP that reads something like this: "Angle outpolls Reid, but Reid still wins" I doubt that the AP will ever return to reality.

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