There’s been much speculation as to why all the pollsters got the New Hampshire primary so wrong, at least on the Democrat side of things. For the Republic primary, the polls were decently accurate, indicating that the general process and methodology were sound. So what went wrong?
The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times open their pages to two analysts—Karl Rove in the Journal and Andrew Kohut (president of the Pew Research Center) in the Times —to try to explain ” Why Hillary Won ” and why pollsters have been ” Getting It Wrong .”
They both point to the same underlying phenomenon: Hillary won the blue-collar vote, and Obama won the white collar vote. Rove put it like this:
Sen. Hillary Clinton won working-class neighborhoods and less-affluent rural areas. Sen. Barack Obama won the college towns and the gentrified neighborhoods of more affluent communities. Put another way, Mrs. Clinton won the beer drinkers, Mr. Obama the white wine crowd. And there are more beer drinkers than wine swillers in the Democratic Party.
They interpret this data, however, in pretty substantially different ways. Rove suggests that Hillary’s and Obama’s respective campaigns and debate performances resonate with different classes in different ways.
Mrs. Clinton won a narrow victory in New Hampshire for four reasons. First, her campaign made a smart decision at its start to target women Democrats, especially single women. . . . Second, she had two powerful personal moments. . . . Third, the Clintons began—at first not very artfully—to raise questions about the fitness for the Oval Office of a first-term senator with no real accomplishments or experience. . . . The fourth and biggest reason why Mrs. Clinton won two nights ago is that, while Mr. Obama can draw on the deep doubts of many Democrats about Mrs. Clinton, he can’t close out the argument.
Kohut, on the other hand, doesn’t talk much about the substance of their platforms or campaigns, but suggests that there is actually a well-established phenomenon at play: “Another possible explanation cannot be ignored—the longstanding pattern of pre-election polls overstating support for black candidates among white voters, particularly white voters who are poor.”
He goes on to attribute part of the victory to ignorance and racism that pollsters don’t adequately take into account:
Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites. Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.
So which is it? What explains New Hampshire? Is it a substantive difference in the campaigns, or latent racism? Or both? Have Rove and Kohut each picked up half the story?
