Where did pollsters go wrong in New Hampshire?

BY REID J. EPSTEIN | reid.epstein@newsday.com

January 10, 2008

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Pollsters got the GOP primary here right and correctly forecast Sen. Barack Obama's turnout. So how could they be so wrong about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton?

The day after Clinton shocked Obama in the Democratic presidential primary, pollsters said pre-election surveys underestimated the number of older women who would vote, and panned the idea Obama's race hurt him in the vote.

Independent, late-deciding women broke strongly in Clinton's favor, reversing the Iowa data in which women favored Obama. While Clinton's display of emotion Monday in a Portsmouth coffee shop has been dissected to death, experts said Wednesday they don't know if that put her over the top.

"Whether it was the Clinton machine, speeches, debates, we don't know," said David Bohrman, producer of CNN's political coverage.

Peter A. Brown, assistant director of Quinnipiac University's polling operation, which did not survey New Hampshire, said pollsters' models accurately reflected Obama's support among independent voters but failed to account for the large Democratic turnout helping Clinton. "The assumption going in was that a large turnout would favor Obama," he said. "They underestimated the number of Democrats that would come out and vote for Sen. Clinton."

Brown said the New Hampshire polls failed for three reasons: a short window after Thursday night's Iowa caucuses that began on a Friday, traditionally the worst day to poll; a survey that began Friday and ended the day before the election, when people had a far better idea about for whom they would vote; and what he called the "ludicrous environment" of wild political speculation in the state in the days preceding the primary.

John Zogby, whose New Hampshire surveys showed Obama ahead by eight points, said late-deciding voters scrambled polls. "Eighteen percent made up their minds on the day of the election," Zogby said. "If that's a trend, that's a problem for pollsters."

One such voter was Hank Parkinson, a Nashua contractor. After voting for Clinton, Parkinson said he'd waffled between the three leading Democratic candidates on primary morning.

"I heard John Edwards on the radio and was going to vote for him," said Parkinson, 44. "Then a Barack guy came by my house and I switched. Then my cleaning lady came over and said she voted for Hillary, so that's what I did, too."

Zogby said he did not think people told pollsters they would vote for Obama, whose father was Kenyan, and then did not, as happened in several races involving black political candidates dating back two decades. Obama, he said, collected almost exactly the votes the polls had predicted. Clinton, he said, merely outperformed her numbers.

"Maybe voters in New Hampshire rejected the coronation of Obama," he said, "just as voters in Iowa rejected the coronation of Hillary."