Power to the People! The biggest primary upset so far in my mind was the pollster/pundit "pros" getting "wronged" by the voters in both Iowa and New Hampshire. There's been a lotta "Doh, maybe we're not as smart as we thought we were." I love it. I'm overjoyed when people (especially voters) start making up their own minds in our media saturated culture. Here's a few examples of post election excuses and tongue-tied explanations from some of these distinguished prophets and mind readers for your reading pleasure....
Here's Zogby backpedaling :
- 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.
Hey, maybe all those older gals got cell phones for Christmas and you couldn't get a hold of em cuz they weren't listed anywhere.....
We expected that Obama would receive the lion's share of independents and drain the Republican primary of these voters. It now appears that, perhaps with a sense that Obama had a lock on the Democratic side, independents felt free to vote on the Republican side and reward their hero, John McCain
All your Great Polling Numbers and Methodology led to bad guesswork? Huh?
We will pour through the data and try to come up with something more definitive, but those are my early observations. There is much speculation that Senator Clinton's crying incident may have offered voters -- especially women -- a peek at the human side of someone who is often seen as scripted. I think she also scored points during the ABC debate Saturday night when she declared, amid a discussion about the country's desire for a change in direction, that electing a woman would represent a big change in itself. Her numbers did go up in that last 24-hour period.
blah blah blah, Clinton teared up, there were too many undecideds, the sun was in our eyes. Back to the drawing board smarty pants.
"William the Wrong" excuses himself with his typical pithy response Bill Kristol, on HRC:
"It's the tears. She pretended to cry, the women felt sorry for her, and she won"
And here's NYT's Janet Elder figuring it all out for us:
In short, the pre-primary telephone polls were not wrong, they were slow. Events moved so quickly that the polls simply could not keep pace. The odd convergence of two historic candidates, a woman and an African American; a compressed calendar with only five days between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary; and a constant rat-a-tat of significant events, including Mr. Obama’s historic victory, Mrs. Clinton’s debate performance, Mrs. Clinton’s unusual moment of welling-up with tears, all conspired against pollsters.
"There was a woman and a black guy in the race? That's a big WTF of an excuse. Hey Janet, Maybe people aren't paying as much attention to these "experts" anymore. Could that possibly be a factor? And what about cellphones? How can anyone get a realistic cross section of the vote when I'm guessing way more than half of these voters don't have listed landlines?
ABC's Poobah of Polling, Gary Langer seems to be reaching for a more honest analysis:
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.
I audaciously hope the real reason for the disconnect between the experts and the electorate has something to do with voters digesting the vast sources of information, and honestly reaching their own conclusions while in their respective caucuses and voting booths.