It looks like that this isn't the week for pollsters. First, Hillary Clinton's strategist Mark Penn dismissed the one correct poll in Iowa, although I bet he's happy he underestimated his boss in New Hampshire. But now, the TV networks are doing a bit of a post mortem after their polls showed Barack Obama surging to a double-digit victory in New Hampshire The polls were right on the Republican side but wrong on the Democratic side. ABC News' polling director, Gary Langer, promised a "careful, empirically based analysis" to find out what went wrong.
There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.
Read on for more mea culpas.
Technorati Tags: New Hampshire
Langer went on to say:
A starting point for this analysis will be to look at every significant Democratic subgroup in the New Hampshire pre-election polls, and see how those polls did in estimating the size of those groups and their vote choices. The polls' estimates of turnout overall will be relevant as well.
In the end there may be no smoking gun. Those polls may have been accurate, but done in by a superior get-out-the-vote effort, or by very late deciders whose motivations may or may not ever be known. They may have been inaccurate because of bad modeling, compromised sampling, or simply an overabundance of enthusiasm for Obama on the heels of his Iowa victory that led his would-be supporters to overstate their propensity to turn out.
My take on it is that until Iowa, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a comfortable lead over Obama in most states and in national polls. The polls, apart one by the Des Moines Register, didn't show Obama's surge. Five days later, the New Hampshire swing to Obama was fast and volatile. These voters didn't have a solid allegiance to Obama, and they were open to changing their mind again. And really, the 24-hours-cycle compresses time and tends to make people forget the solid front-runner position that Hillary Clinton has enjoyed for most of the lead-up to the primary and caucus season. Iowa made this a race instead of a Clinton coronation, and New Hampshire only reinforces how competitive this will be.
I like Tom Brokaw's patient attitude that hearkens back to an age before snap polling and 24-hour news channels. We'll have to wait to listen to the people, not the polls.
