Pollster Scott Rasmussen also has a
story
on what went wrong with the New Hampshire polls on Hillary Clinton (the Republican
polls were right on the nose and the Obama polling was also right on). Why did
Clinton do 10% better than expected? Rasmussen says that his polling showed that
38% of the voters made up their minds in the last three days, an unusually large
number. He also says the he polled on Monday (which nobody else did) and saw the
race tightening up considerably. He also believes the Clinton get-out-the-vote
operation was extremely effective. Finally, he knows that trying to determine
who will vote in a primary is always difficult, but that at the last minute
large numbers of women decided to vote to support the only woman ever to be
a serious candidate for President.
Andrew Kohut, President of the Pew Research Center, has a different
explanation.
He believes that the refusal rate among poor whites is much higher than among well-off whites
and that poor whites tend to have more prejudice against black people than do well-off whites.
If this is true, it could explain why all the pollsters got it wrong: poor whites did not
want to participate in surveys and were undersampled.
The main problem with this reasoning is that it is hard to see why poor whites
were willing to talk to the pollsters in Iowa but not in New Hampshire. Rasmussen's
story seems more plausible: there really was a lot of movement in the last day or two.
Bill Richardson has given up his quest for the White House. He didn't do a very good job at it.
The big question now is he going to run for Pete Domenici's open Senate seat. If he does,
he will face a fierce primary challenge from Rep. Tom Udall. On the other hand, he could
endorse Hillary Clinton and hope she offers him a job, as her husband did (he was Bill's
ambassador to the United Nations and later Secretary of Energy).
He is extremely popular in New Mexico, a key swing state, and if he campaigns hard for her
there and brings in the state (and maybe some of the neighboring states like Nevada, Arizona,
and Colorado), surely Hillary would be very grateful.
Welcome
FAQs
Donations
Icons for bloggers
Previous elections
Electoral coll. graph
Cartogram
Animated maps
Data galore
All Senate races
Hot House races
Political websites
Articles and books
Political humor