Outside the Beltway

Did Race Cost Obama New Hampshire?

James Joyner · Wednesday, January 9, 2008 · 13 comments

The pre-election polls universally showed Barack Obama beating Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. Reputable outfits screening for likely Democratic primary voters anywhere from 5 to 13 percent, with an average win of 8.3 percent. Even applying a +/-3 to both Obama and Clinton’s numbers, that’s a comfortable win.

Further, turnout was extraordinarily high, which the conventional wisdom had as good for Obama. “New” voters tend to be either independents or young people, both of whom were key Obama demographics.

So, what happened?

POLLING ERROR

The obvious answer is that polling is not any good. After all, nobody ever calls the Ron Paul supporters, right? (Although, oddly, they polls tend to predict Paul’s vote quite well.) But if you look at the numbers, the pollsters were uncannily accurate except for the embarrassing undercount of Clinton votes.

DEMOCRATS
	Obama	Clinton	Edwards	Richardson
RCP Prediction	38.3	30.0	18.3	5.7
Actual Vote (96%)	37	39	17	5

They also nailed the Republican contest:

REPUBLICANS
	McCain	Romney	Huckabee	Giuliani	Paul	Thompson
RCP Prediction	31.8	28.2	12.2	9.3	8.2	2.2
Actual Vote (96%)	37	32	11	9	8	1

Both McCain and Romney got more votes than expected, presumably because undecideds not included in the prediction tally broke for the frontrunners, figuring it was a two-man race. But the order of finish was exactly right and all totals except McCain’s were easily within the margin of error.

THE BRADLEY-WILDER EFFECT

There have been several notable elections in recent American history with major polling discrepancies in races involving a black candidate facing a white candidate.

Specifically, there have been instances in which statistically significant numbers of white voters tell pollsters in advance of an election that they are either genuinely undecided, or likely to vote for the non-white candidate, but those voters exhibit a different behavior when actually casting their ballots. White voters who said that they were undecided break in statistically large numbers toward the white candidate, and many of the white voters who said that they were likely to vote for the black candidate ultimately cast their ballot for the white candidate. This reluctance to give accurate polling answers has sometimes extended to post-election exit polls as well.

Researchers who have studied the issue theorize that some white voters give inaccurate responses to polling questions because of a fear that they might appear to others to be racially prejudiced. Some research has suggested that the race of the pollster conducting the interview may factor into that concern. At least one prominent researcher has suggested that with regard to pre-election polls, the discrepancy can be traced in part by the polls’ failure to account for general conservative political leanings among late-deciding voters.

As Obama booster Andrew Sullivan observes, “Tonight is the first primary – not a caucus. People get to vote in a secret ballot – not in front of their largely liberal peers, as in Iowa. They may have told the pollsters one thing about voting for a black man, but in the privacy of the voting booth, something else happens.” David Kuo concludes, “despite all the talk of how little race matters in this campaign, it is clear that race is still a big deal in bi-racial campaigns.”

Plausible, perhaps. But this isn’t a general election contest between a black liberal and a white conservative but rather a primary contest among Democratic Party liberal activists. And Obama isn’t really black, anyway. Just ask Alan Keyes. Or Christopher Hitchens.

Plus, as the tables above demonstrate — and Matt Yglesias explores at greater length — the polls got Obama’s numbers just right; it was just Clinton who got an unexpected late surge.

CLINTON CRIED, OBAMA DIED

One theory that’s gaining credence — and Clinton herself seemed to allude to in her victory speech — is that she was humanized by Monday’s incident wherein she teared up in her passionate response to a question about the travails of the campaign. In my contemporary analysis of the incident, I suggested that it could only help.

But 9 points for crying? A rise of nearly a third? That seems incredibly unlikely.

THE CHRIS MATTHEWS EFFECT

Kevin Drum and others have suggested that there may have been a voter backlash against the media’s piling on about a Hillary loss, constantly playing the aforementioned crying video, and so forth.

As Matt Yglesias said, “I don’t think pissing off Chris Matthews is a good enough reason to pull the lever for Clinton, but I can certainly understand the impulse.” Me too.

But nobody’s watching Chris Matthews anymore. And, really, it’s hard to figure that there are that many people who are undecided the day before an election who are going to get up off their coach, stand in line, and vote.

ALL PUBLICITY IS GOOD – JUST SPELL HER NAME RIGHT

One commenter on a blog I was reading this morning noted that, with all the talk of Hillary’s pulling out of the race, Hillary’s emotional breakdown, Bill Clinton railing about unfair treatment, and so on that the coverage was wall-to-wall Clinton. That’s a lot of free exposure.

The only problem with that is this is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about. She’s been in the national spotlight since 1992. Even people who only casually pay attention to politics (which is to say, most people) have rather firm ideas about who she is.

HILLARY’S MESSAGE SUNK IN

Mike Potemra, a follow writing at the Corner of whom I had not heard until this morning, may well have hit the bullseye:

[W]e should be encouraged that voters can stand up against an emotional 24/7 media Valentine for one candidate, and vote instead for a person they think will be a steadier and more reliable Commander-in-Chief (especially important in time of war).

The Clinton machine has been hammering the message since Iowa that Obama, for all his charm, is simply not yet ready to be president. Maybe, just maybe, people listened. It’s not, after all, that hard a case to make.

WOMEN ARE A MAJORITY

Clinton is a woman. She did very well among women. There are a lot of women out there. You do the math.

*BALLOT PLACEMENT:

Jon Krosnick thinks at least three percentage points can be explained by the vagaries of ballot placement.

Our analysis of all recent primaries in New Hampshire showed that there was always a big primacy effect — big-name, big-vote-getting candidates got 3 percent or more votes more when listed first on the ballot than when listed last. Until this year, New Hampshire rotated candidate name order from precinct to precinct, which allowed us to do that analysis.

This year, the secretary of state changed the procedure so the names were alphabetical starting with a randomly selected letter, in all precincts. The randomly selected letter this year was Z. As a result, Joe Biden was first on every ballot, Hillary Clinton was near the top of the list (and the first serious contender listed) and Barack Obama was close to last of the 21 candidates listed. Thus, I’ll bet that Clinton got at least 3 percent more votes than Obama simply because she was listed close to the top.

Most, if not all, of the pre-election telephone polls rotated name order from respondent to respondent, which meant name order did not distort their overall results. Failing to incorporate the name order effect that probably happened in the voting booth is therefore probably partly responsible for the polls’ inaccuracy.

As bizarre as it seems that people would bother to go out into the cold (as is historically the case for the NH primaries, although not yesterday) to vote in the primaries without having a firm idea for whom they were going to vote, the data show that many in fact do precisely that. A very interesting issue, then.

One wonders why the rotation practice was abandoned? Presumably, cost? They may need to change back if this bears out.

ALL OF THE ABOVE? NONE OF THE ABOVE?

In social science, looking for a single variable to explain outcomes tends to be problematic. Likely, it was a combination of the above factors, and quite probably some not listed, that explains what happened yesterday.

What do you think?

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*Added late. Usually, I add updates to the bottom but the nature of this post benefits from a more standard flow.