Charles Apple

It was primary election night here in Virginia. And Maryland and D.C., too. Perhaps you dealt with it yourself. They called it the ‘Potomac Primary.’

I’m hoping I’ll decompress enough to go to sleep in a while. I’m beat.

Here’s what we did tonight. Page one is on the left; the full-page numbers graphic is on the right. As always, click for a larger view:

When I was setting up our little charts for page one, I left enough room for the little bars to reach 70 percent. I had no idea that Barack Obama would actually finish with the kind of numbers he did tonight:

Chesapeake: 71.5%
Norfolk: 71.5%
Suffolk: 76.8%
Portsmouth: 77.0%

I kept adjusting the horizontal scale, thinking there was no way these numbers could get any higher. But they did. Several times. He really cleaned Hillary Clinton’s clock.

Page One was designed by Robert Suhay, with our DME, Deborah Withey, setting up in advance the “real people” across the top and, with me, the numbers piece down the right.

I put together the inside page. Tonight, I scraped the numbers out of the wires and dished them off to the incredibly patient — and fast — Bob Voros, who managed to make sense of everything without missing any of our deadlines. I plugged in the numbers for the A1 rail. John Earle took care of all the other daily assignments, freeing up Bob and myself to concentrate on elections.

And none of this would have worked out if it weren’t for tonight’s unsung heroes, our copy desk support. Laura Michalski and her boss, Brian Cleveland, somehow backed us up and kept us from making some pretty stupid mistakes.

Or, rather kept me from making some pretty stupid mistakes. I don’t think Bob made a mistake all night.

It was a pretty weird election night. Maryland’s returns were held up when bad weather north of here led to traffic problems. A judge issued an order keeping the state’s polls open an extra 90 minutes. We also ran into a problem when the count from Virginia Beach — our most populous city — got stuck with something like 30 percent of precincts reporting. It turned out to be a problem with the state board of elections’ web site. AP’s election results site saved the evening for us.

And, of course, we never really got sufficiently updated delegate counts. But such is the nature of primaries. Hell, if you noticed, the AP was moving updated delegate counts before the polls even closed tonight. Those weren’t Potomac Primary results; those were delegates from this past weekend’s primaries, finally shaking through the system.

If you’re in Virginia and want to see the primary results from a primary — but still, as of this moment, unofficial — source, check out the State Board of Elections site. You can find overall totals, by city or county and even by precinct.

If you’re frustrated by the delegate allocations that seem to take forever — and don’t make it into the next day’s paper following a promary — or, worse yet, delegate totals that differ from news outlet to news outlet… well, join the club.

There was a really good, brief article in USA Today last week about why this happens. I can’t find it right now, but here’s a similar piece from The Wall Street Journal’s Numbers Guy.

And, of course, you can read all about the ‘Potomac Primary’ in The Virginian-Pilot.

I think this did the trick. I’ve now put myself to sleep. ‘Night, all…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 3:36 am and is filed under Charles Apple, Graphics, News design, Newspapers, Virginian-Pilot, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.