Given that Democrats had a very good night last night, it's worth taking another look at the exit polls to see how they fared, this time without the pressure of a vast and demoralizing reversal from earlier predictions. Now, it's worth remembering that these polls are taken after voting, so the effects of suppression and intimidation (the garden variety methods used to tilt the table on election day) won't show up. Further, this exit data came out around 5pm Eastern, so polls hadn't closed. But just for kicks, I've matched the exit data with the final vote tallies to see how the polls performed:
Bottom line? The polls, early as they were, did staggeringly well. Their largest misreads in Virginia and Montana, but the average margin of error was an astonishingly low 2.4%. Whatever problems bedeviled the polls in 2004 -- cue the usual argument pitting error against theft -- was fixed for 2006.
