A slower, more cautious approach
From Bill Schneider
CNN
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ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) – The first election I covered for CNN was in 1990. Polls back then were very spotty on election night, and we had very few correspondents out in the field.
Now this, CNN Center here in Atlanta, is really election headquarters, especially when you consider all the people we have nationwide covering all these races.
We have much denser coverage than we ever did, more correspondents than before. And in the 2000 election, we learned to be much more cautious. We learned not to go out on a limb just to be first. We've learned to take nothing for granted. Those are very important lessons.
The Voter News Service failure this year that prevented us from releasing exit poll data is a product of those cautions. They were unwilling to release data that they did not have full confidence in because they didn't want to make the same mistake again.
In the past, exit polls have given us a lot of rich information -- including how and why voters of different ages, genders and ethnicities made their choices -- to have available on election night. But not this year. It's frustrating to me as an analyst, because I think there is a lot of stuff that we can't talk about because we don't have as much information.
I think there are going to be two recriminations after this election: One will be Democrats, and why couldn't they have gotten more of their candidates elected. The other will be sorting out what happened with VNS and why. I don't know if VNS is going to survive in its current form, but there are going to be a lot of tough questions asked about what went wrong and how we can get better exit poll data in the future.
This year, as compared to 2000, has been a harder job for political analysts. We have a lot of interesting things to talk about, but there is less information coming in from exit polls for us to analyze.
