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New Hampshire: Why were the polls wrong?
Any poll has a margin of error of 3 or 4 points. The New Hampshire Primary polling was an average of seven polls. Okay, that reduces the margin of error, but doesn’t make it go away. The polls were all not just wrong, but wildly wrong. But only for the Clinton/Obama race. The polls predicted: Clinton 30%, Obama 38%, Edwards 18%. Actual results: Clinton 39%, Obama 36%, Edwards 17%. So, the difference, to be precise, is that the polls understated Hillary’s numbers, and hit the others pretty well. What happened here? There’s an old phrase in statistics, garbage in, garbage out. If people don’t tell the truth to the pollsters, they can’t poll. Why wouldn’t they tell the truth? It’s the Tom Bradley or Douglas Wilder effect. The term Bradley Effect derives its name from a 1982 campaign involving Tom Bradley, the long-time mayor of Los Angeles, California. Bradley, who was black, ran as the Democratic Party’s candidate for Governor of California against Republican candidate George Deukmejian, who was white. The polls leading into the day of the election consistently showed Bradley with a lead. However, Bradley narrowly lost the race. Post-election research indicated that a smaller percentage of white voters actually voted for Bradley than that which had said they planned to vote for him, and that voters who had been classified as “undecided” had gone to Deukmejian in statistically anomalous numbers. Similar voter behavior was noted in the 1989 race for Governor of Virginia between black Democratic candidate L. Douglas Wilder and white Republican candidate Marshall Coleman. In that race, Wilder prevailed, but by less than half of one percent, despite pre-election poll numbers that showed an average lead for him of nearly nine percent. You see in Iowa, they polled people walking into a room, and then they had to stand up and express themselves publicly. They couldn’t go hide and squirm in that little booth and do their little thing. People in New Hampshire were dishonest. Up to 10% to 15% of the voters didn’t give an honest answer to the pollsters. In New Hampshire a Democratic voter steps into a booth, draws a curtain, and faces the ballot and his or her own interior thoughts about race, America, and realistic possibilities. Here’s a screenshot of a round up of all of the latest polls from RealClearPolitics.com tonight, and more, to get an idea of the serious concerns here… For a closer look, here’s Zogby’s predicted numbers, for both the Republicans and Democrats: And here are the latest numbers from the MSNBC website (the numbers seem to be identical over at CNN and elsewhere): As you’ll note, the numbers in Zogby’s latest polls, for all but Clinton and Obama, seem to have been dead-on the money for both the Republicans and Democrats. Edwards, for example, was polled at 17% in Zogby’s poll, and he received exactly 17% in the MSNBC numbers, with 63% of precincts reporting. So are we to believe that only those voters who preferred Obama previously, decided to change to Hillary at the last minute? How can one draw such a conclusion? It’s easy. Race is the most evident explanation for the disparity between all of the advance polling, the exit polls, and the actual results of the election. Virtually every poll prior to the election showed Barack Obama with a strong lead over Hillary Clinton. Even Clinton’s own campaign was predicting an 11 point loss to Obama. Yet when it came down to the voting, Clinton won by a 3% margin. There’s really only one conclusion. When people were polled before they voted, they said they were going to vote for Obama. When they were in the privacy of the voting booth, they actually voted for Clinton. They wanted to look like they were open-minded, but when it came to actually acting, they chose based on race. The only explanation is the main distinguishing difference between Clinton and Obama: race. When push came to shove in a very white, very Democratic New England state, they chose the white woman over the black man. Not being forthright with the pollsters shows at least some awareness that they ought to be voting on a color-blind basis, but clearly that moral impulse didn’t go very deep and was overwhelmed by fear or caution or plain old racism when they had to make a real commitment. The problem isn’t limited to Democratic voters. Independents seem to have faced the same choice and made a similar decision. Despite telling pollsters they heavily favored Obama right up until the start of the primary, when it came to voting, independent voters seem to have flocked to John McCain, the whitest and safest alternative they could find. Exit polling shows further support for this trend, with older voters — especially women over 40 — voting heavily for Clinton and staying away from Obama in droves. Clearly that is a demographic who may be a little scared by his message of change, as well as the color of his skin. Does this make the American voter a racist or America a racist nation? Well, weigh all the facts even if race figures in as part of the voter’s decision, it’s clearly something people are self-conscious about, and just one of many factors they are taking into consideration versus their own self-interest. 
In the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary one ugly truth shines through. Race is clearly still a serious problem for the Democratic Party and for many Democratic and independent voters in New Hampshire and perhaps nationwide.
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January 15th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
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February 27th, 2008 at 10:56 am
In retrospect of the subsequent link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/26/AR2008022603715.html?hpid=topnews
will the poll numbers change dramatically between the two candidates?
February 27th, 2008 at 10:58 am
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