why that occurred. take a look at those who said they somewhat disapproved of joe biden s job performance, and then say, okay, who did they choose in their vote for congress? 11% of the electorate. it s an important size and voted for democrats by four points, so there s this portion of the electorate that didn t like what biden was doing but didn t hate it and decided to go with democrat. why? why did they decide to go with democrats? because this turned into a choice election. if you look at our exit polling and say, okay, did you have a favorable view of the democratic party, republican party, neither or both, and essentially what you see favorable views about the democratic and republican party were basically equal. they were basically equal, and so what occurred here was that voters were basically said we ll have a choice here. and we re going to actually kind of split our decision here. normally it s all about the party in power, but this election, for any number of reasons,
but, the republican stereotype is did not work. i am glad about that. i said this morning that i thought that our turnout seemed stronger than anticipated, that the democrats had done a really good job on early voting and republicans were depending on their vote coming out today. that is a big gamble. so, we had a couple of things in the field in our favor. the hidden factor that i think here is abortion. it came up as number two in the exit polls, very close to the economy as an issue that mattered, and i think that people just did not want to vote for anti choice republicans, even as they are struggling with their family budgets. cnn exit polling did show that abortion did dominate for those who dominate voted for democrat candidate. 44%. i ll store, you are hearing from realtime from a number of big republican donors. what are they telling you tonight?
trump without any of that flavor, and made himself a national figure through fights. but here s the thing, and this is one that i think the first data point we have a poll closing in 40 seconds. what might be a theme tonight, and i m going to talk to the republicans watching this. you don t need donald trump. you don t need him. he s a weight on you. we will watch candidates outperform donald trump tonight. over and over again. we will watch exit polling that he has a 37% favorable rating, it is crazy if they are about to go ahead and renominate this man, as elections come back outperforming him. at 7:30, zee got poll closings in north carolina and in ohio and in west virginia. again, the nbc news decision desk will give us projections as best as they can. some of these may be too early. some may be too close. they will not project a winner in a race until they re more than 99% certain that that will be the outcome of that race. you can have confidence in these projections. a
i was calling, i expected it to be more of a red surge than a red wave or red tsunami. so i think the polls were right in the senate they re really holding strong in the governor s races as well. i think they were a little bit off in the house. but at the end of the day, the republicans i think underestimated how important abortion was to the election. 27% of voters went out there and said that that was one of the most important deciding factors and there was some other lessons to be taken away as well. steve: i was reading some of the other networks exit polling. they said that abortion and democracy which a lot of people on the political right were not talking about, those were actually the big issues with the majority of the voters. so what was fascinating last night we had a group of voters here in studio who we were talking to, and when they were talking about democracy being at steak it just wasn t what i think everybody understood it to be. they weren t afraid that their vot
abortion and democracy were the two of the biggest issues with voters. when it comes to the state of pennsylvania, why did dr. oz lose? well, it looks like, according to the exit polls, it s because fetterman won. fetterman got 57% of the independents, fetterman got 67% of the hispanics, he got 57% of the women. and, remember, it was just last week we were talking about that wall street journal story that showed that there was a 27-point swing from suburban women from republican or from democrats to republicans. he, fetterman, won 57% of the women. and in the state of pennsylvania, most important issue, by far, was abortion, with 35% followed by inflation at 29% and crime was 11%. and that is what drove people to the polls. then when you look at the exit polling regarding herschel walker, in georgia, herschel