What Happened with NH Polls?
How could the polling in New Hampshire been so egregiously wrong? What happened?
I need to think about this a bit as the day goes on, but…was it simply the Tweety Effect?
How could the polling in New Hampshire have been so wrong, totally wrong, across the board? Going into primary day, almost every single poll showed Barack Obama with a double-digit lead over Hillary Clinton. The only number coming out of last night’s results that made any sense at all was John Edwards. Pre-election polls had him at around 20%, and that’s right where he landed.
Talk amongst yourselves - and definitely give Brad Friedman a read this morning.
More thoughts on the amazing disconnect from TMV.
I’ll check in with more thoughts later.
I believe I’ve already made a comment about the “fix being in”.
I’ll try to work up another about “media manipulation”.
Not quite true. The polls predicted where Edwards and Obama fell, but failed to predict Clinton (or Biden, for that matter).
Polls predict Obama with around 36% - Obama gets around 36%
Polls predict Edwards with around 18% - Edwards get around 17%.
Polls predict Richardson with around 6% - Richardson gets around 5%.
Polls predict Clinton with around 30% - Clinton gets around 39%. Polls fail.
Polls predict Biden with around 2.5% - Biden gets less than 1% - Polls fail.
http://www.pollster.com/08-NH-Dem-Pres-Primary.php
Add those numbers on Pollster.com together and you get about 94% - those are averages of a bunch of different polls, so Clinton picked up almost all of the undecideds within the margin of error. Possible? Sure - if there was a large chunk of undecideds who liked Clinton but didn’t want to tell the pollsters that because of the “Hillary is the Devil” crap that they have to put up with from their spouses and neighbors - whether they’re on the right or left side of the political spectrum.
Like a Bradley Effect, but with a female candidate instead of a black one.
Richard, you might want to check Joe Cannon’s post at Cannonfire wherein he asks, “Is it paranoid to posit that vote manipulation occurred last night?” Further down, he states, “Brad Friedman makes a tentative case for the vote-rigging thesis, here and here(links at site). He notes that the ballots were counted on Diebold optical scan machines…”
Do the exit polls show it breaking for Clinton? Or were they also so “horribly wrong” as they “were ” in 2000 and 2004? Remember we accept exit polling and the same methodology behind them in judging whether a foreign election was fair. So I ask again, how come we did not get up in arms in 2000 and 2004 when there was such a huge discrepancy? I don’t think the Clinton team did anything nefarious, I think if this was a vote counting Diebold problem that they trotted it out early so that if the polls and exit polls in Nov show an absolutely different outcome than the votes counted. Then they’ll be able to see, oh that wasn’t so off, it happened the same way in NH in Jan. Hand counted ballots broke for Obama, electronic ballots broke for Hils, I do appreciate BradBlog and others staying on this.
And I wouldn’t put it past any Republican opperative to prefer running against a Hillary in the general with her high negatives than in fearing a run against an Obama. FWIW.
I’m still an Edwards supporter, but I gotta say after the media pile-on against Hillary this last week, I was damned mad and prolly would have voted for her yesterday, just to spite the misogynists like Chris Mathews. And if any media pundit had said anything like what they were saying in my presence, I woulda kicked ‘em in the shins. Andrea Mitchell, I’m talking to you, too.