No One is Reading This - Thank Heavens as I go out on a limb!

Well it is 8:40pm election night - polls have been closed for 40 minutes and results are starting to come in. More interestingly, the exit polls are now available.

According to a posting at http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/11/nj_do_not_pub.php by Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic, the exit polls say that turnout ratio by party is:

Democrats: 43%
Republicans: 31%
Independents: 27%

(Rounds to 101%)

Key point - in the polling as I noted in an earlier post, independents were shown as 35-38% of turnout (compared to their 46% of voters.) But IF the exit polls are right (and are being reported right), their turnout is MUCH lower than that at only 26-27% of all voters. This is not great for Christie.

But what is great for Christie is that those independents are overwhelmingly for him - 58% to 33%.

On the other hand it may be a bit of a wash that 43% of voters were Democrats and 31% were Republicans. That puts Democrats +9 over their registration and Republicans +11 over theirs.

As expected, the exit polls show partisans voting for their guy, and also show a large drop for Daggett from the pre-election polling.

Here's what the exit polls show as the vote breakdown:

Democrats: 85% Corzine, 8% Christie, 7% Daggett
Republicans: 89% Christie, 7% Corzine, 4% Daggett
Independents: 58% Christie, 33% Corzine, 8% Daggett

So we can do the math. If the exit polls are correct (Warning - they are subject to error, I just don't know in which direction!) we get the following:

Corzine: 47.6% (.85*.43 + .07*.31 + .33*.27)
Christie: 46.7% (.08*.43 + .89*.31 + .58*.27)
Daggett: 6.4% (.07*.43 + .04*.31 + .08*.27)


This isn't a prediction, just a calculation - and it doesn't account for the rounding that exists in the exit poll - which given a less than 1% potential margin, could really matter!

So that's what it looks like from the exit polls. Long night?