Even the Exit Polls showed that Obama should have won, according to Chris Matthews on Hardball today. It's the first specific indication that we've seen that the raw, unadjusted Exit Poll data, which only corporate mainstream media folks, not mere mortals, are allowed to see, confirmed all of the pre-election polling which predicted an Obama win.
He introduced his segment today this way (video at right):
Good question. And one that we asked, verbatim, all night long last night.
"Why were the polls taken, of people coming out of the booth, so off?," Matthews tries to ask his guests again and again. And again.
All of them twisted and turned and contorted and grappled and speculated, coming up with every possible unverifiable, backwards-engineered explanation, save for the one that must not be named. The 600 lb. canary in the virtual living room...the fact that no human being has bothered to check what was actually on NH's vast majority of ballots (80%) which were "counted" by error-prone, hackable Diebold optical-scan machines, all controlled by one bad, horribly irresponsible private company, who has no business being anywhere near a public election...
We've yet to see that raw Exit data ourselves, as mentioned. But we're working on it. Even while we're still working on getting the never-released raw data from 2004, when the Exit Polls were done then, as now, by Mitofsky/Edison.
(BTW: They disavow their own Exit Polling from 2004. So, naturally, the MSM news consortium hired the same folks to do the job again in 2008. Perhaps it was the company's apparently spot-on Exit Polling in Ukraine, in December of 2004, cited as evidence of fraud by George W. Bush and Colin Powell, that the challenger should have won, rather than the incumbant, as the election results announced, in contradiction of the Exit Polls...but don't get us started.)
And yet, as all the talking heads continue to use data from those post-election-adjusted Exit Polls, as speculative reasons why Clinton was announced the winner ("higher than expected female turnout" "voters who make less than $50k"), Politico's Roger Simon, at the end of the Hardball segment, asks the question about NH '08, that we've been asking about 2004 for years: "If the exit polls got the results wrong, why do we think they got the demographics right?"
Did anything go wrong in New Hampshire? Who knows? The Pre-Election Polling indicates it may have. The unadjusted Exit Polling, at least according to Matthews, indicates may have. But until we realize we need to actually count ballots --- openly and transparently --- in our American elections, we expect these same questions and nightmares will continue, over and over and over, for a very long time to come...