Even in Turin, Italy the news of "Frontrunner" Hillary Clinton's astonishing win of the New Hampshire primary election on Tuesday has been jaw-dropping. On MyDD alumni Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller's new project OpenLeft, I posited these three reasons for her victory:
I think Clinton's win was due to (in order of relative importance on her making up the deficit)Last time I checked the upcoming primary schedule Clinton was expected to do well in the Nevada caucuses (Jan 19), Obama should win South Carolina (Jan 26). Clinton should win the two states who have had their delgates stripped (Michigan Jan 15 and Florida Jan 26) and who knows what the heck will happen on "Tsunami Tuesday" February 5th. It is doubtful that Edwards will win everywhere, but he should have enough delegates to deny a majority to eith Clinton or Obama! One thing is clear, the race will very much still be alive by the time I get back to the United States on Friday January 18th.
3) Absentee ballots (some fraction of voters had voted for Clinton when he NH lead was huge prior to the Obama bounce from Iowa).
2) Lying white voters telling pollsters they would vote for Obama and then not being able to do it when they got to the polling booth. Heck, they even lied when they came out of the booth! (exit polls put the vote split at 39-39--Obama got 2 percentage points less--that's your lying deficit.)
1) Too Much (Polling) Info: all the polls saying that Clinton was going to lose big made NH voters (especially women and white voters) who would have voted for Obama decide that they could risk voting for Hillary. I think if we lived in a country (i.e. France) where publication of polling data within 72 hours of the election is illegal, Obama would have won.
2 comments:
You pegged it, this whole Obama mania reminds me of the Tom Bradley mania and all the positive polls that said he would be the first black governor of California, that is of course until election day, and he was trounced by one of the worst governors the state has ever had.
I'm not so sure the voters lied.
I think the media lied. For instance, they never reported that up to 37% of the people polled were undecided, yet they said Obama had a 10 point lead. If we had been given all the polling data, this wouldn't have been considered an "upset".
Hillary was "supposed" to win New Hampshire. That it was so close is a victory for Obama. They get the same number of delegates from NH anyway.
As for making polling data illegal 72 hours before voting, I think it ought to be illegal period. It certainly can serve to make people vote differently than they otherwise would.
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