During the early hours yesterday things were looking pretty grim for the Republicans. In fact, early on last night, I told my wife "Don't bother watching TV, it's over. Kerry's got it wrapped up decisively."

The other news networks, while not publicly saying it, gave plenty of hints that Kerry had won the election. 

Why? Because the exit polls gave Kerry a large margin - 51% to 48%.  Which turned out to be completely the opposite and more importantly, outside the margin of error (11,000 respondants should have a 2 point margin of error).

So what happened? That is something that will hopefully come out. But basically females were over sampled. Females sampled were 54% of the respondants. In my opinion, they should have known better. But that's not the whole story.

There are many on the right who believe, perhaps with some reason, that this was just another example of the media trying to turn the election towards Kerry.

When you have CBS's memo gate, and then CBS also attempting to run that "missing explosives" story (which turned out to be false). And all kinds of other one-sided reporting. 

So what effect would faulty exit polls have? Big time in get out the vote drives. The operatives on the ground almost certainly felt pretty deflated as the early exit polling came out. Maybe deflated enough not to bother going out as hard to get voters to the polls in those key states.

Who knows, so what do you think?