Stephen Green remarks
Well, it looks like New Hampshire voters defied expectations by failing to defy expectations.
The hype the last week has been (apart, of course, from Dean’s Iowa disaster followed by his near-miraculous recovery as predicted here last week) that NH voters are a cantankerous lot, prone to proving the pollsters wrong just for the sake of sticking it to the pollsters.
But not this year — the results were almost exactly in line with Zogby’s numbers yesterday and this morning.
Yep. Ditto the Iowa caucuses, for that matter. All previous evidence pointed to “organization” being the important thing, polls be damned. Not so much.
There are at least three possible explanations for this: 1.) Pollsters are getting better at filtering out the noise and counting only people likely to follow through on their stated intentions. 2.) These are two isolated incidents that, when taken out of context, look like a “trend” when in reality they are just two isolated incidents. 3.) We’re reading history wrong, emphasizing the handful of times when the voters confounded the pollsters and ignoring the numerous times when the predicted winner won.
The three aren’t mutually exclusive.
