Exit Polls

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian voters repudiated a return to the communist past yesterday, propelling pro-democratic President Leonid Kuchma toward a second five-year term over Communist challenger Petro Symonenko, according to exit polls.Voter surveys from Ukraine's third presidential election since the Soviet Union disintegrated eight years ago showed the 61-year-old president with more than 58 percent of the vote, compared with 36 percent for Symonenko, Ukraine's Communist Party leader. Final results weren't expected until today.

I feel compelled to respond to the Democrats' continual gloating and condescension concerning the 2012 election typified by Raymond Hoff's recent letter to the editor ("Republicans make themselves easy to beat," Nov. 24). Perhaps if would be more useful to focus not on why Republicans lost, but why Democrats won. One illustrative fact is that while President Barack Obama won slightly more than 50 percent of the popular vote, 62 percent of people interviewed in exit polls stated that the country was on the wrong track.

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Democrat Edwin W. Edwards grabbed a lead over Republican David E. Duke in the bitterly fought Louisiana governor's runoff last night, according to network exit polls.Mr. Duke, the former Klansman and neo-Nazi making his boldest bid yet for higher office, was apparently unable to surmount his own resume of hate and the unified opposition of the political establishment, including President Bush.Louisianians appeared to have chosen to put their state once again into the hands of Mr. Edwards, a suave, 64-year-old politician who had asked for a chance to redeem a personal history of gambling, womanizing and close brushes with the law.The comeback-minded ex-governor built his coalition on a base of virtually unanimous support from the state's black voters, who cast between one-quarter and one-third of the total statewide vote.

Congratulations, ladies. You kept the barbarians from the gate. On Tuesday, Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, who famously said that a woman's reproductive system shuts down during "legitimate rape" and prevents conception, lost by 15 points to incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat who was considered an easy target by the tea party. She won women voters ages 18 to 44 overwhelmingly. And Richard Mourdock, who said that if a woman does become pregnant during rape, it is something that God intended, lost the Indiana Senate race to Joe Donnelly.

In a sign that the media's method of calling elections has improved markedly in the past four years, exit polls that mistakenly predicted a John Kerry victory never made it onto the nation's airwaves and news wires as voting took place around the nation. But this year the media found a new means of disseminating bad information that proved equally damaging - leaking its early polls to the presidential campaigns and Internet sites, creating an underground buzz of ill-informed insiders that affected the stock market, network news coverage and much of the political world's midday mood.

LA PAZ, Bolivia -- Citizens of this deeply divided Andean nation went to the polls yesterday in a bitter election featuring a leftist presidential hopeful who has vowed to torpedo U.S. anti-drug efforts here and be a "nightmare" for Washington. Unofficial results from several exit polls indicated that Evo Morales, the leftist, had garnered as much as 45 percent of the vote, well ahead of his principal challenger, former President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, who the polls suggested had garnered about a third of the vote.

Bill Clinton played saxophone on Arsenio Hall's TV show and took his case for change to fans of rap and "death metal" music on MTV.Mr. Clinton also was the first major-party presidential nominee to be born after World War II.Meanwhile, the economy was in the toilet and billionaire outsider Ross Perot was keeping the race entertaining.So, many pre-election analysts figured Mr. Clinton was a shoo-in to earn a heavy "youth vote" Tuesday.Did it happen? The answer is a definite maybe.There is no doubt that the Bill Clinton-Al Gore Democratic ticket turned around the 1980s trend of young people, like the population at large, favoring the Republican Party.

BERLIN -- A former labor activist from the Solidarity trade union appeared to have come in first in Poland's hotly contested presidential election yesterday, but exit polls indicated that he would not win the majority he would need to avoid a runoff in two weeks. Donald Tusk, 48, an unabashed free-market supporter who advocated a 15 percent flat tax for Poland, received 38.4 percent of the vote, according to exit polls last night commissioned by Polish state television. The official vote tally was not expected until today.

PHOENIX -- The critical question emerging from Steve Forbes' surprising victory over Sen. Bob Dole and Patrick J. Buchanan in the Arizona primary is whether unique circumstances here delivered the upset, or whether the elements that produced it can be replicated in other states.The answer is that Arizona was unique, but some aspects of Mr. Forbes' appeal could travel well.Arizona, with its many comfortable-to-well-off retirees, was a ready audience for his pitch for a flat tax, which would end taxes on the interest and dividend income on which many of them live.

WASHINGTON -- The top moguls of the five chief television networks and the Associated Press faced the music here the other day. The House Energy and Commerce Committee reminded them that they had made a mess of election night in Florida and asked them what they intended to do about it. Their collective answer, given individually in turn, was that they would keep doing what they've been doing, only better next time. That is, "projecting" the winner, state by state and nationally, based on data provided by the Voter News Service, a consortium created and financed by them.

Voters swept Republicans out of power in 2006 and 2008, and they swept them back into power in 2010. This doesn't mean that the electorate is swinging wildly from left to right but that voters are anxious and unhappy, and they want change they're not getting. Republicans might be tempted to view their victories as a validation of the course they've pursued during the last two years, but they do so at their peril — and to the detriment of the nation. As much as constituencies in the GOP may want to view the election as a repudiation of health care or a validation of the tea party movement, neither appears to be the case.

For the first time in more than a quarter-century, unemployment in the United States has reached double digits - bad economic news for America, now having shed jobs for 22 consecutive months. And bad social news for the Americans who are out of work, for their families and for their communities, especially when we consider data that tells us 35 percent of jobless men and women have been looking for work for more than six months. It's bad political news for President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress, who continue to make the mistake of treating unemployment as an afterthought rather than the most serious issue facing the nation.

Democrat Barack Obama rolled to victory in Maryland yesterday by getting an overwhelming percentage of the African-American vote and running about even among whites, winning handily in the Baltimore area and suburban Washington, according to exit polling. Obama, the first African-American nominee of a major American party, took almost 95 percent of the black vote in Maryland, exit polling showed. The Illinois Democrat won among voters of all levels of education in one of the most one-sided contests in the country.

For months, young people have knocked on doors, made phone calls and given money to support Sen. Barack Obama. Yesterday, they finally had a chance to vote for him. "It's like cool to vote now. It's a fashion statement," said Lola Olakanye, 22, a senior at the University of Maryland, College Park, who left class early to go home to Silver Spring to vote. "If you don't vote, you're lame." Young voters turned out across the country yesterday in numbers unprecedented in recent history, exit polls found, a surge propelled by anxiety over the economy, frustration with the war in Iraq and, perhaps most of all, a sense of connection to Obama.

Q: Which of these best describes your vote today for U.S. Senate? I strongly favor my candidate ............................. 61% I like my candidate but with reservations ............28% I dislike the other candidate ..................................9% Q: In your vote for U.S. senator, how important was the issue of terrorism? Extremely important .............................................31% Very important ......................................................32% Somewhat important .....

With a host of very close races and the embarrassment of premature calls in 2000 and 2004 still fresh in viewers' minds, networks and major cable channels began reporting the midterm elections last night with great caution. But that did not ultimately deter some of them from projecting winners such as Benjamin L. Cardin in the Maryland race for U.S. senator on the basis of exit polls - a process that has caused problems in the past. Early in the evening, with the TV audience all to themselves as the polls began to close, cable channels CNN, MSNBC and Fox not only held off on any major projections, they qualified virtually every number presented.

WARSAW -- Poland held its first fully free parliamentary vote since World War II yesterday and elected a fragmented legislature, exit polls showed, with the balance of power held by parties that campaigned for easing the country's economic reforms.The vote appeared to reflect a restless dissatisfaction, with seats divided evenly among peasant, religious, nationalist, communist, center-right and center-left parties. Voter turnout was estimated at only 40 percent.The results -- with the nationalists and peasants faring far better than in last year's presidential election, in which 60 percent of the electorate voted -- suggest a revival of Poland's pre-World War II past.

Downplaying the harm down to Gov. Bill Clinton in the Connecticut primary, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ronald H. Brown said, "I've never known a nominee who wins everywhere, every day." You can tell he's a Democrat. George Bush has won everywhere every day this year. Four years ago, Mr. Bush won everywhere every day after a single loss in South Dakota in February. Ronald Reagan won everywhere every day in 1984 and almost did in 1980.One of the Democratic Party's greatest weaknesses in presidential politics is this instinct to turn on its front-runners, as the voters did in Connecticut Tuesday.

Maryland voters carried their unhappiness over the war in Iraq to the voting booth yesterday, exit polls show, helping Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin against Republican Michael S. Steele in the race for U.S. Senate. Sixty-two percent of voters interviewed as they left polling places said the war was either extremely or very important to them in the race between Cardin and Steele. Only 15 percent said it was not at all important in choosing a successor to retiring Democratic Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes.

Antoine Thomas said he ignored race and voted on the issues yesterday when he cast his ballot at Deer Park Middle Magnet School in Randallstown. Thomas, who said he is unaffiliated with a political party, split his ballot by voting for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican, and Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, the Democrat in the U.S. Senate race. Thomas, who is black, said he pondered voting for Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, the Republican Senate candidate. While it would it make him proud to see a black elected to the Senate, Thomas said he couldn't muster a vote for Steele.