I made a dark-thirty trip to the airport this morning to get some friends on a plane for a vacation.  Returning home, I was channel surfing and came upon a talk radio station with a guest journalist, Ellen Ratner.  She is about my age and a self-proclaimed liberal – having been a Bernie supporter.  She is new to me but has covered the WH for 26 yrs. Since hearing her this morning, I have looked at some of her work.  While she certainly holds views that I don’t share on many issues, I believe she is a true, sincere, objective journalist. With my short history with her, I would lift her up as someone that is able to have strong political views, but keeps herself “pure” in terms of reporting.

In my “Clinging to Guns and Religion” article, I mention that all participants in the exit poll consortium get briefed at 5PM EST on election day.  I go on to say that I read the Fox staff on lection evening as not solemn, but not speaking hopeful words for Trump either as I expected as they tried to build drama and hold viewers.  I now have more details to explain why we saw what we did.

Ellen Ratner said this morning on the radio that at 6:30PM on election evening, she received a summary of the exit polling from a Clinton Campaign friend who had received it at 5PM.  The exit polling summary showed Clinton winning Florida and Pennsylvania both by 5pts. Ratner said, “People lie on exit interviews.”  I am not sure of the mechanics of the exit polling, but I find “lying” sort of strange. I can picture a natural sampling bias as possibly Trump supporters simply preferred not to participate at the same level that others did. Regardless, with network anchors and analysts believing Clinton would win Florida and PA by that 5% margin, that does explain what we observed in the early reporting on election evening.

Ratner believes the super increases in the Obamacare premiums and things like CNN (Donna Brazile) passing debate questions to the Clinton Campaign were major issues. She believes the electorate in general has a general sense of fairness and getting an early look at debate questions clearly violates ethics rules. She believes these two things were much more important than the Trump video or WikiLeaks email releases.

She did share a personal story that people within the Clinton Campaign were terribly “arrogant”.  She applied for credentials to both victory parties.  She got the Trump party credentials quickly but was denied Clinton credentials. She said she had covered the WH for 26 years.  How could she be denied credentials?  She contacted a large Clinton financial supporter who interceded for her twice, yet she never got credentials.

Here is Ellen Ratner BEFORE election day.  https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+ellen+ratner&&view=detail&mid=6F01B3B30D565997FDED6F01B3B30D565997FDED&FORM=VRDGAR