LIVE NYC Exit Polls: NYC Dems Are Ready For a Break From Bloomberg

The first major round of exit polls was released late Tuesday afternoon, conducted by Edison Research. Exit polls are notoriously unreliable predictors, but for what it's worth, here's what we know so far:

-Only Democrats were surveyed. Republicans in NYC make up such a small sample size that no one bothered.

-One-third of Democrats said the economy and jobs were their top issue. One-fifth said education was their top issue. One in 10 said housing was most important.

-Two-thirds of voters thought overturning term limits in 2009 to give Bloomberg a third term was a bad idea. If Christine Quinn does poorly in tonight's race, look for lots of post-mortems on how her crucial role in overturning limits represented a death knell for her candidacy.

-About half of voters approve of the way Bloomberg is handling his job, but paradoxically, three-quarters said they were ready for the city to move in a different direction.

-Six in 10 voters said that Bloomberg's infamous Stop and Frisk program was an excessive method targeting minorities. Four in 10 said it made the city safer.

The upshot? Even among Democrats, Bloomberg remains somewhat popular — as I mentioned in my previous post on the Bloomberg legacy, nearly everyone has found something to love and something to loathe about the iconoclastic mayor. But after 12 years, NYC Democrats seem to know what direction they want the city to head in, and it's not more of the same.