While working through this year’s “what to expect on election night” posts, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to do a brief refresher on exit polls and projections.

To start with, projections have no legal meaning.  Legally, there is no winner until several weeks after the election when canvassing boards certify the official results.  Instead, a projection is a media company’s prediction of who will be the winner once all votes are counted.

In practice, all of the media companies isolate their projection team from those reporting the election results.  Thus, the number crunchers do not know what the talking heads are saying.  On the other hand, the number crunchers aren’t idiots.  They know what the expectations are and what races are probably going to determine who wins. Continue Reading...