mbro,

I’m at a loss to see what it is you are struggling with here. The quote Roger gave us was:

But exit polls gauging voter sentiment showed that though he continued to enjoy overwhelming support from his conservative base, he had made only limited progress at expanding his reach among voters beyond it.

Relative to Roger’s Place (which I believe gives suitable context Roger’s post) and even in the general sense, this single sentence from Mr. Brownstein is crawling with abject stupidity.

Firstly, the wild inaccuracy of yesterday’s exit polls are a non-stop topic of discussion for the MSM (of which Mr. Brownstein is apparently a member in good standing). So for starters we know that the exot polls failed to guage voter sentiment with any reasonable degree of accuracy. At this point we can discount any “evidence” produced by said exit polls. Assuming Mr. Brownstein is sentient he is also aware of this little interesting disconnect between drawing accurate conclusions and yesterday’s exit polls.

But Mr. Brownstein, brave soul that he is, forges ahead nonetheless and presents us with conclusions he has drawn from the demonstrably useless exit polls. Now we know that Mr. Brownstein is either subsentient or disingenuous.

The conclusion the brave Mr. Brownstein wishes to share with us is “[Bush] continued to enjoy overwhelming support from his conservative base, he had made only limited progress at expanding his reach among voters beyond it.”

We know this conclusion is likely false because the exit polls were demonstrably useless. We have confirmation that it is, indeed, false because many (the preponderance?) of regulars here at Roger’s Place are “beyond” Bush’s “conservative base”.

Related to this matter and somewhat fortuitously, the TV is on and I can hear it in the background where a talking head is yapping about how one of the surprises the Dems faced was that Bush managed to reach beyond his base. Fascinating indeed.

What am I missing?