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+--- Thread: Hillary winning at 39% .... (/showthread.php?tid=46874)
Hillary winning at 39% .... - decocritter - 01-09-2008
obama 36%
Re: Hillary winning at 39% .... - Kiva - 01-09-2008
how is it that polling is that far off? Either the polling methods stink (likely) or it's rigged (possible, but kinda conspiratorial)..
kiva
Re: Hillary winning at 39% .... - decocritter - 01-09-2008
I don't think anyone will ever know what people will do once inside the voter's box.
Many people change their minds, or don't tell.
Re: Hillary winning at 39% .... - (vikm) - 01-09-2008
[quote Kiva]how is it that polling is that far off? Either the polling methods stink (likely) or it's rigged (possible, but kinda conspiratorial)..
kiva
I wondered the exact same thing. Even with the error variance figured in, it seems conveniently remarkable.
Re: Hillary winning at 39% .... - freeradical - 01-09-2008
People intentionally lie to political pollsters perhaps?
Re: Hillary winning at 39% .... - PeterB - 01-09-2008
I think you guys are conveniently forgetting a few things:
1) New Hampshirites are notoriously conservative when it comes to actually voting, in the sense of not picking a non-established candidate (e.g., they would pick McCain over Romney)
2) Women for the most part like Hillary, especially non-married women
3) Hillary's husband is very popular in that state
4) Polls are notoriously unreliable; check sampling methods and sample sizes
5) The independents were all favoring Obama, but not all of them voted for him
Re: Hillary winning at 39% .... - (vikm) - 01-09-2008
PeterB, I concur on most of what you said except the polls are almost never off by that much. There have been very few instances (although it does happen) where everyone... including both camps have been off that much.
Re: Hillary winning at 39% .... - PeterB - 01-09-2008
(vikm), it DOES happen.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/05/nh.poll/index.html?eref=rss_politics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_poll#Potential_for_inaccuracy
Re: Hillary winning at 39% .... - michaelb - 01-09-2008
the polls were remarkably off this time, but my memory is that some of them had margins of error of around 5%, so actually the result could be within that.
I don't think we will ever know. The people I know in NH were still undecided or deciding yesterday. My guess is that at least for some people, undecided between Hillary and Obama, decided to vote for Hillary in the end because they thought that Obama was going to win by a lot, and wanted to give Hillary some support, or thought they could vote for Hillary after all not expecting her to win. Some independants, thinking Obama was a lock, might have voted on the republican side for McCain as well.
So I would guess the polls showing Obama with a large lead impacted the results significantly in the last day or so (so they were accurate on the day of the poll, more or less).
Re: Hillary winning at 39% .... - lafinfil - 01-09-2008
Being an open primary a lot of analyst speculated that many independents seeing that Obama appeared
to have it won, decided to vote for McCain because of their dislike of Romney.