Sooo... what happened in the 2008 Democratic NH primary?

[Nym90]

Definitely an interesting question as to how many pollsters could've gotten the race so wrong, especially considering polling in New Hampshire should (you'd think) be a science by now with how much experience the pollsters have. It wasn't just one bad poll, literally everyone got it wrong.

I think you'd have to look at the internals of the polls and compare them to the demographic data on election day. Oversampling of the college vote and undersampling of the blue collar vote is a good theory, but some numbers to back it up would be nice.

The "Bradley effect" argument doesn't cut it in retrospect since it didn't turn up anywhere else. In fact, if anything Obama tended to, overall, do a little better on election day than in the pre election polls in the primaries (my guess is because the youth vote tended to probably be less likely to be considered likely voters than they actually were, that incorrect assumption being based on past history). That's part of why the New Hampshire result is even more inexplicable now than it was at the time.

I think the undecideds did break for Clinton, and probably some of the independents who could vote in either primary voted more for McCain than expected since, after the results of Iowa, he "needed" their vote more than Obama did (assuming that an independent voter preferred a McCain-Obama general election matchup). Problem with that theory is that the Republican polls in New Hampshire were basically dead on.