"Who did you vote for President in 2008?
Obama: 47%
McCain: 46%"
Are people lying or is it a bad sample or both?
People lie all the time on questions like that. Six months into 1993, the %age of people who admitted in polls that they voted for Bill Clinton was notably down from the real #, because he was unpopular. When the president is unpopular, people don't admit to voting for him, even in an anonymous poll.
Exhibit A: My mother claims to have voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I could have sworn she voted for George Bush at the time.
Given that a vote for Nader
was a vote for Bush, the story works.
