What Went Wrong With New Hampshire Polling?


January 9th, 2008

Gary Langer director of polling at ABC has some interesting thoughts and questions about the polling fiasco in New Hampshire:

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.

John Zogby offers up six points to look at with the New Hampshire numbers:

5. Going into the New Hampshire primary, we certainly did see Clinton holding on to a significant lead among women and older voters. But we were focusing on Obama’s massive lead among younger and independent voters. We seem to have missed the huge turnout of older women that apparently put Clinton over the top.

Zogby notes that Clinton’s numbers did go up in his polling for the last 24 hours after her debate performance but they were trending polls and averaged in the massive leads they saw after Obama’s win in Iowa.



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