-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=17576&pod_id=7 Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=17576&pod_id=7">[ I N S I D E ] A Hard Day's Night: John Ellis'…</A> ----- A Hard Day's Night: John Ellis' Firsthand Account of Election Night It was as hairy as it gets in the news business. But it was especially so for George W. Bush's cousin, who manned the Fox News election desk. EXCLUSIVE by John Ellis Monday , December 11, 2000 10:52 a.m. INSIDE MAGAZINE GET YOUR SUBSCRIPTION 1 PM: THE MARATHON BEGINS I was standing near the doorway, talking to my wife, Susan, who had dropped by for lunch, when I heard someone say: ''Here we go.'' And in a rush, Green Room One came alive with adrenaline and the clacking of keyboard commands. I walked over to my workstation and sat down. After reciting the decision-desk prayer (Please, God, do not let me screw up), I typed in ''GS25 FL P'' (for ''get state screen #25, Florida, Presidential'') and hit return. Gore was ahead in Florida. I typed in ''GS25 MI P.'' Too close to call in Michigan. I typed in ''GS25 PA P.'' Too close to call in Pennsylvania. ''Jesus,'' I said to no one in particular, ''this is tight.'' The clock said 1:14 p.m. We spent the next 90 minutes looking at every screen in every state where the Voter News Service had posted early Election Day voter poll data (the infamous ''exit polls''). We also scanned the key contested races that would determine which political party would control the U.S. Senate. First Lady Hillary Clinton was comfortably ahead. Thankfully, that was one we wouldn't have to sweat. Just then, the phone rang. It was my first cousin, Texas Governor George W. Bush. 'Ellis, Bush here,' he said in his best Texas drawl. 'Here we go again.' Bearing down on us was a ''first-wave'' briefing at 3 p.m. for on-air talent, producers and executives, a logistical briefing for Fox affiliates at 3:30, ''second-wave'' numbers that would be posted in the system at 4 p.m. and a rebrief for talent, producers and executives at 5 p.m. In between were phone briefings for Fox News Channel and employees in New York, Washington, and in the field. The election night broadcast itself would begin at 6 p.m., as polls closed in Indiana and Kentucky. Six people crunched the numbers. Dana Blanton, director of polling for Fox News Channel, and Margaret Ann Campbell, an independent consultant, constituted the poll-analysis team. Their job was to prepare ''packages'' of poll stories, two-minute segments that drew from both the national and state exit polls, which aired every 30 minutes throughout the night. Tony Snow, the Fox News anchor who served as the on-air poll analyst for election-night broadcasts, narrated these packages. The poll-analysis team was so efficient and so professional that I literally did not talk to either Blanton or Campbell throughout the entire 10-hour broadcast. The Fox News Channel's decision-desk team -- the group that ''projected'' winners and losers throughout the night -- consisted of four people. The most senior member was John Gorman, president of Opinion Dynamics Corporation and arguably one of the best pollsters in the country. A Democrat, Gorman had worked with me on a variety of consulting projects in the past, and I trusted him completely. More importantly, Gorman brought an astonishing wealth of political knowledge and experience to the table. The second key player was Arnon Mishkin, a partner at the Boston Consulting Group and former colleague of mine (during the mid-1980s) at the NBC News Election Unit. Mishkin had started in politics as a protege of David Garth, the legendary New York political consultant. He was exceptionally smart and unafraid of cutting against consensus. Like Gorman, he had great connections to key Democratic players. While I did not share their Gore leanings, what we did have in common was our love for the work. The third member of the team was Cynthia Talkov, a statistical wizard who had worked at both Opinion Dynamics and at the Voter News Service, the consortium set up in 1990 by the Associated Press and major national TV news organizations to perform exit polling and other data-collection services. Her VNS experience was invaluable to us. We needed someone who knew the system inside out, knew the details and pitfalls of each and every estimator on our screens, and knew exactly who to call when we had questions that could only be answered by VNS employees. Smart, tough and decisive, Talkov was a passionate Democrat. The fourth player was me. I had served as head of the Fox News Channel decision-desk team since 1998 and was responsible for managing the projection process. Having worked at the NBC News Election Unit for 11 years (1978-1989) and having covered politics for most of my adult life (from 1994 to 1999 as a columnist at the Boston Globe), I knew my way around election results and felt confident that we could, if we kept our wits about us, maintain our unblemished record. The Fox News Channel decision desk had made it through the midterm elections of 1998 and all the primaries of 2000 without a single inaccurate projection. Overseeing these two teams was John Moody, the vice president for news. An intense former Time magazine correspondent, Moody's job was to make sure that the decision-desk team had reached consensus on each and every call, and that all of us were confident the calls were accurate. Projections of winners and losers were communicated to the broadcast control room through Moody. Throughout the night, he also kept us posted on what the other networks were doing and saying. (Although we had a TV monitor in the room, we had turned the sound off and only used it to compare the on-air Electoral College vote count with that of our laptop spreadsheets.) News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch watched the coverage in an executive hospitality suite with Fox News chairman Roger Ailes. Ailes kept in touch with Moody throughout the evening, but left us alone to do our work. All of the network and cable news divisions (and the Associated Press and their clients) were dependent on the Voter News Service for data. It was VNS's job to conduct Election Day voter polls in every state, but also to gather sample precinct data in every state and collect so-called ''raw'' vote totals from every county in America. As the data came in, VNS personnel inputted it into the Election Information System, which analyzed the data and provided statistical estimates of probable outcomes. The decision-desk teams at NBC, CBS and CNN (one team), ABC, AP and Fox News Channel all made their projections based on identical data provided by the Election Information System. 2:15 P.M.: CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS The competition to be first with a call was intense. But that would come later. At 2:15, the Fox News Channel decision-desk team was still trying to make sense of the first wave of Election Day voter poll numbers. I hated first-wave data, having been misled by it on too many occasions. (The most famous example of bad first-wave data was the infamous ''tie'' in the 1992 New Hampshire Republican presidential primary. President Bush ended up defeating Pat Buchanan by 16 percentage points.) Yet it was impossible to ignore. The first-wave data, I thought to myself, are telling me that Gore might just win. Mishkin, Gorman, Talkov and I all agreed that the first-wave data indicated that it would not be an early night. Gore couldn't amass the necessary Electoral College votes until at least 11 p.m. ET (when the polls closed in California), and Bush's prospects were, if anything, not much better. To make matters worse, Talkov wasn't happy with what she was seeing on the Election Information System's Decision screens. In state after state, the system was showing large numbers of what VNS termed ''bad'' precincts, which meant that as much as 10 percent of the data might be wrong or ''corrupted'' in some way. Just then, the phone rang. It was my first cousin, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. ''Ellis, Bush here,'' he said in his best Texas drawl. ''Here we go again.'' And it was true. George W. and I had been talking on Election Days going back to when he first ran for Congress in 1978. We had been through his father's primary and general-election campaigns and his own primary and general-election campaigns. I was glad to hear from him. Judging from the early data, I suspected I would need his help as the night wore on. Governor Bush was, as always, considerate of my position. He knew that I would be fried if I gave him anything that VNS deemed confidential, so he never asked for it. He made a point of getting the early exit-poll data from other sources before talking to me. Sure enough, he had the exact numbers from key states. ''Looks tight, huh?'' he asked. ''I'm gonna have to call you back,'' I said. ''I've got briefings to do. But I wouldn't worry about early numbers. Your dad had bad early numbers in '88, and he wound up winning by 7 [points]. So who knows?'' ''OK,'' he said, ''call me back when you can.'' He gave me his private number at the residence in Austin. The speed with which VNS exit-poll data leaked was one of the marvels of the modern, Internet-connected world. But there was no time to think about that. What loomed large at that point was the 3 p.m. briefing. It would be upstairs in the executive conference room and everybody who had anything to do with the election night broadcast (our coverage was being carried simultaneously on the Fox News Channel and the Fox TV network) would be there. I couldn't go up there and tell all those people I hated early numbers. I had to give them a sense of what the evening would be like, what the most probable outcomes might be. I turned to Dana Blanton and asked if we had the first one-third sample from the nationwide Election Day voter poll. The national exit poll was something they could sink their teeth into. Although it was only at one-third completion, it was based on a large enough sample size to generate roughly 3,000 respondents, making it truly indicative of what might follow. ''It'll be up at 2:40, and I'll get you a printout the minute it comes in.'' She was good to her word. I read through the results quickly. The top line was Bush 49-Gore 48 (which immediately struck me as wrong; too light on Nader, Buchanan and the other third-party candidates). But the numbers that hit home were those on ''early deciders'' (Bush 50-Gore 48) and ''late deciders'' (2-1 for Gore). There had in fact been a Gore surge at the end. It really was going to be a long night. At 2:55, I left Green Room One and headed upstairs to the Executive Conference Room. 3 PM: THE FIRST-WAVE BRIEFING One of the great things about giving an early exit-poll briefing is that no one is ever late to the meeting. As I looked around the room, I was struck by how far the Fox News Channel had come in the four years of its existence. Seated around the table were some of the best political analysts and commentators -- Brit Hume, Michael Barone, Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes -- in the business. The briefing went smoothly. After running through all the key state races, I trotted out the usual caveats: don't say anything about the size of the turnout, you'll only look foolish later; don't bank on these early numbers, they can change. If we call it for Gore, it won't be until 11 p.m. because he needs California -- which he will win -- to get over the top. If we call it for Bush, the earliest that might be is 10 p.m., but the way things look now, that ain't gonna happen. It's a close race, but we've got a lot of ''bad precincts'' in the state exit polls and the Nader number seems light in the national poll, so let's see what we see after the second-wave numbers come in. Hillary's going to win. Thanks very much for your time and attention. I then delivered a much-edited briefing by conference call to the news directors of roughly 50 Fox affiliated stations. VNS guidelines restricted what we could say to non-member companies. So I chose my words carefully. It was almost 4 p.m. The second-wave numbers would soon be up. I arrived back at Green Room One to find the Decision team already clacking away at the second-wave numbers. There were 17 e-mails from newspaper and magazine political reporters and editors of my acquaintance, all wanting to know if the election was as close as everyone was saying. I went back to my workstation and started keystroking through the new VNS data. The thing that no one ''gets'' about decision-desk work is that it has nothing to do with projecting winners -- it's all about eliminating losers. The goal is to eliminate as many races as possible from your to-do list, so that you can concentrate on the races that require full attention. Cynthia Talkov and I had taped a list of every statewide race in the country, organized by poll-closing times, above our computer screens. Our goal was to put black Magic Marker lines through as many of those races as possible and never think about them again. This was especially important because we did not have a big staff. CBS/CNN employ dozens of statisticians and analysts on election nights, as do ABC and NBC. The larger the number of undecided races, the greater their competitive advantage. The smaller the number of undecided races, the better our team would do. The second-wave data were all about eliminating losers. Rick Lazio couldn't possibly overcome Mrs. Clinton's lead: loser. Put a line through New York Senate. George Bush was a certain loser in California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey. Put a line through those. Al Gore was a goner in Indiana and Kentucky. Cross those out. The elimination game took about 50 of approximately 100 statewide races (presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial, initiatives and referenda) off the list. What we were left with pointed to a Gore victory. He was ahead in Florida, ahead in Pennsylvania, ahead in Michigan and making his numbers-the expected percentages-in his naturally strong states. Bush, on the other hand, wasn't making his number in Florida, wasn't making his number in Georgia, wasn't making his number in North Carolina, Louisiana or Ohio, wasn't making his number in Colorado, wasn't making his number in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire or Maine. Dominoes tend to fall in one direction on election nights. The dominoes all seemed to be falling Gore's way. What made this more compelling was the fact that the VNS decision screens now showed many fewer numbers of ''bad'' precincts. The data had been cleansed. The national poll had been corrected. States were trending to Gore. 4:55 P.M.: GORE IN THE LEAD I gathered together the ''race status'' sheets for the presidential and Senate contests, as well as a copy of the updated national poll, and hustled upstairs. The 5 p.m. briefing was quick and to the point. The race was exceptionally close, but Bush was not meeting the targets everyone expected in a number of Southern and Southwestern states. Late deciders had definitely broken for Gore. There would clearly be no prime-time projection of a new president. I told the Fox affiliates they would be well-advised to stick with our programming after their local newsbreaks at 10 p.m. At 5:30, I walked outside to have a cigarette and call Governor Bush. He answered and immediately asked: ''Is it really this close?'' He already had all the new second-wave numbers and expressed disbelief at some of what he had been told. ''Yeah,'' I said, ''it's really close.'' ''Well, what do you think?'' he asked. ''I have no idea,'' I replied. And I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, it's almost 6 p.m. on Election Day and I have total access to every piece of relevant data regarding this election and I'm still not certain who's going to win. ''Well, keep in touch,'' he said. I returned to my post shortly before 6 p.m. Exit polls were pouring into the system now and the statistical estimators and models that analyzed the data were beginning to firm up. Gore was looking good in Florida, better in Pennsylvania, b <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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