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SLATE' s exit poll.

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Saturday, Nov. 9, 1996, at 3:30 AM ET
(478 words; posted Friday, Nov. 8; to be composted Friday, Nov. 15)
The message of the election
SLATE's little corner of WorldVote 96, the cyberspace "exit poll" organized by Mindscape, produced some interesting results. For a complete report, go to the site. One we draw attention to here is the answer to a question about ticket-splitting. More than two-thirds of the participants claimed to have split their tickets, voting for a presidential candidate from one party and a House or Senate candidate from another. Only 10 percent said they did this because they prefer divided government. Fifty-nine percent chose the goo-goo option: "I vote for the person, not the party." Very high-minded, of course, and fully in keeping with at least one strand of the post-election conventional wisdom: that the voters were saying they're sick of partisanship and don't trust either party to control both elected branches. (See "The Week/The Spin.") Trouble is, SLATE's readers are either lying or highly uncharacteristic, and the alleged bipartisan "message" from the voters is highly implausible. Very few voters actually split their tickets. One out of seven, according to the Washington Post, voted for Clinton plus a Republican for Congress. Divided government actually came in third, after all-Democratic and all-Republican ballots. It "won" only by denying a majority to either of the other two options. By the logic that interprets the election results as a plea for bipartisanship, Ross Perot should be our next president.
Another chance to vote
The size of our special print-out edition (which you can download here or schedule a weekly e-mail delivery of) has been growing, as we add new features (and as Harry Shearer's "Dispatches" from the O.J. trial get more and more exciting). The print-out edition, formatted like a traditional magazine on standard-size paper, is a great way to read SLATE for those who'd rather do without the interactive features for the pleasure of curling up away from their computer screens. In looking for ways to keep it under 30 pages or so, we're thinking about deleting the "links" sections at the ends of most pieces--since you can't, after all, link from a piece of paper. On the other hand, many readers enjoy these passages as mini-essays about the Web (and we hope they entice some print-out readers to give the online experience a try). What do you think? If you have strong feelings one way or another, let us know at letters@slate.com.
Corrections
Susan Estrich, currently dueling Stuart Taylor in a "Dialogue" about Paula Jones, the woman who is suing President Clinton for sexual harassment, was campaign manager for Michael Dukakis in 1988, not Walter Mondale in 1984. In Frank Foer's "The Culture of Impotence," the Impotence Institute of America was described as a for-profit impotence clinic. It is in fact a non-profit impotence information center. In keeping with our policy on such things, the errors have been magically erased in cyberspace, but we hereby confess and apologize for them here.
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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and the founding editor of Slate.
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