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| Home Front: Politix |
| New Hampshire's Democratic Party Polling Fiasco |
| 2008-01-09 |
| Maybe the nutroots are right - sort of. Seems as though something is fishy with the numbers, but the problem may be so far under their noses they can't see it. 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. But we need to know it through careful, empirically based analysis. There will be a lot of claims about what happened - about respondents who reputedly lied, about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests. That may be so. It also may be a smokescreen - a convenient foil for pollsters who'd rather fault their respondents than own up to other possibilities - such as their own failings in sampling and likely voter modeling. There have been previous races that misstated support for black candidates in biracial races. But most of those were long ago, and there have been plenty of polls in biracial races that were accurate. (For more on past problems with polls in biracial races, see this blog I wrote for Freakonomics last May.) And there was no overstatement of Obama in Iowa polls. On the other hand, the pre-election polls in the New Hampshire Republican race were accurate. The problem was isolated to the Democratic side - where, it should be noted, we have not just one groundbreaking candidate in Barack Obama, but also another, in Hillary Clinton. 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. (A function, perhaps, of youth.) Prof. Jon Krosnick of Stanford University has another argument: That the order of names on the New Hampshire ballot - in which, by random draw, Clinton was toward the top, Obama at the bottom - netted her about 3 percentage points more than she'd have gotten otherwise. That's not enough to explain the gap in some of the polls, which presumably randomized candidate names, but it might hold part of the answer. The data may tell us; it may not. What's beyond question is that it is incumbent on us - and particularly on the producers of the New Hampshire pre-election polls - to look at the data, and to look closely, and to do it without prejudging. |
| Posted by:gorb |
| #10 But they sure do vote for the Dems, wx. Early and often. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2008-01-09 17:56 |
| #9 Dead voters never get polled. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2008-01-09 13:20 |
| #8 Watching Fox they refused to call the race early because they said two precincts came in %99 for Hillary and that didn't seem possible. They never repeated that statement. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2008-01-09 12:06 |
| #7 Hillary cried Obama died |
| Posted by: mhw 2008-01-09 11:20 |
| #6 Or the polls were like they were during the last presidential election. About as correct as a liberal. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2008-01-09 09:34 |
| #5 Do any of the candidates have experience with that kind of thing? Sure - like the busloads of college kids who showed up to vote in Iowa over winter break. ;-) |
| Posted by: lotp 2008-01-09 09:02 |
| #4 IIRC when you show up to the polls in NH, all you have to declare is an intent to establish residency in order to get to vote in the primary. Someone else can correct this point. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-01-09 08:40 |
| #3 Or it could be more "independent" voters were shipped into NH from Massachusetts by some candidate's get out the vote efforts. That might explain ballot shortages as much as the weather. Do any of the candidates have experience with that kind of thing? Hmmm. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2008-01-09 08:35 |
| #2 Maybe people are finally taking Mike Royko's advice and lying to pollsters. Or maybe a lot of pollsters are asking the wrong questions. I've gotten a few issue phone polls over the years, and in no case did their canned list of questions match my concerns well. |
| Posted by: James 2008-01-09 08:33 |
| #1 Notice the careful, cautious, nuanced approach when it's the Dem candidate who surprises. LOL |
| Posted by: lotp 2008-01-09 06:24 |