Race and Class in NH
Andrew Kohut, the reliable Pew pollster, has an op-ed piece in Thursday’s Times that seems like the probable explanation for the polling failure in the Clinton/Obama race in NH
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/opinion/10kohut.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
Update: Eugene Robinson has an assessment of the race issue and the Bradley effect in his Washpost columan today (Friday). His are the first comments I’ve seen about Clinton’s get-out-the-vote operation suggesting that was part (and only part) of her victory. Take a look:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/10/AR2008011003274.html
UPDATE 1/12/06 This from John Judis at TNR
But an additional factor may have been at work. Some of the polls seem to have significantly underrepresented the women’s vote. For instance, the Suffolk University/WHDH poll, which surveyed voters on Sunday and Monday and came the closest to predicting the final result, estimated a 39 to 34 percent Obama win by working off the assumption that 53 percent of primary voters would be women. According to exit polls, though, the breakdown was 57 percent women to 43 percent men. If you rejigger the Suffolk/WHDH poll to take into account the real mix of women to men, what you get is something like 38 percent Obama and 35 percent Clinton–which is within the 4.38 percent margin of error for the final results.
That may not be the reason why other polls got the result so wrong, but the under-representation of woman voters, coupled with the volatility of the electorate (as evidenced by the last minute shift of college-educated women voters), is a far more plausible hypothesis than the one that Kohut, Sullivan, and Robinson provide. This is not to say that there weren’t people who did not vote for Obama because he is black. But, clearly, a hidden racist vote is neither an explanation for Clinton’s victory nor the pollsters’ error in predicting it. A closer reading of the evidence also has the benefit of not accusing half of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters of being racists. Whole thing here:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=17dabbce-95ad-40c1-805c-5c12d0158ba8
I found this column very insightful along E J Dionne’s. Issues of methodology in who responds to polls and why seems to need real research. I also viewed John Zoby on Colbert last night who, I think quite honestly, said that he had idea of how the process of being polled or the publication of the headiness of polled numbers that far ahead of time influences the electorate! Incredible! I’m not sure how our society can better use thgis kind of data, but at least this chastening of polls, pundits, and all of us is healthy.
Hit the wrong key proofreading! As you probably know, that reference is to “John Zogby” who had “NO idea” of effect. Apologies ofr othern typos and omissions!
The unmistakeable assertion being made here is that white working-class racism must be the reason that Kohut and his colleagues were confounded. Thank the Archie Bunkers of New Hampshire, is the unspoken message. I’m certainly not going to deny that a black candidate makes many whites uneasy, but the class-and-education numbers that Kohut cites aren’t being considered seriously enough. For reasons that I frankly can’t fathom, Clinton was able to cast herself as the champion of working-class people, especially working-class women. Why they didn’t vote for Edwards genuinely puzzles me: Clinton is no friend of unions or of the working class, considering her openly pro-corporate agenda. Apparently, gender trumped class among working-class women. Maybe this will change if Edwards (or, much less likely, Kucinich) is able to demonstrate to working-class men and women that Clinton really is, as Huckabee memorably put it, like one of the people who laid them off.
Obama is clearly perceived as the candidate of upper-middle class centrism, a perception that I can confirm from my own experience here in Pennsylvania. He’s this year’s feel-good contender: eloquent platitudes, an astonishing ability to divert attention both from his basically Clintonesque domestic agenda (ex., sitting down with pharmaceutical firms to achieve a health-care policy) and from his interventionist foreign policy (confirmed both by his remarks about Pakistan, his double-talk that we can pull out of Iraq “but leave troops behind to guard important sites,” and by his call for adding 100,000 troops to the military). Add his appeal to “young people” and his mythological status as a candidate who can “make history” (God am I tired of these cliches), and it seems that he’s the darling of those who like talk of “change” as long as nothing, well, changes — in other words, urban and suburban centrists (however “liberal” or “progressive” they consider themselves).
All of which is to say that, if you vote for Obama, you’re voting for Clinton; and if you’re voting for Clinton, you’re voting for the economics of corporate power, with some stirring (or lachrymose) twaddle about “change.”
Then there is the “Wilder Effect”, a.k.a. the “Bradley Effect”:
“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.” (Courtesy of Wikipedia).
Is this a valid theory? I believe that there is a lot of truth in it, especially given the sometimes overwhelming atmosphere of political correctness (which by the way is, I think, a Marxist term that originated in the Soviet Union).
I don’t know if this is relevant in NH. Most of the polls got Obama’s turnout right. It was Hillary’s that was way off the mark.
So long as we are all speculating: There were five days between Iowa and NH. HRC had been leading in NH for MONTHS. It was, until Iowa, always considered to be “her” state. What I think this demonstrates is that, in addition to the usually polling complexities, you have the fact that this was a very dynamic context in which many people were actively trying to make up their minds over the course of the time period in which pollsters were trying to gauge sentiment. If there had been five weeks between Iowa and NH, I have no doubt the polling would have been much more accurate. All of these issues related to class, race, gender, etc., are equally present in Iowa, where the polls were reasonably accurate. And as for the Wilder effect: Doug Wilder WAS, after all, elected to be the governor of Virginia. Furthermore, in Virginia, the pollsters “know” from experience that the margin of victory in gubernatorial elections is often much smaller than the pre-election polls show, even where both candidates are white, because it is very difficult to accurately model actual electoral participation. This held true last year when Kaine was elected. So I was always skeptical about the so-called “Wilder” effect being a function of race and race alone.
P.S. No one has mentioned the outsize turnout in NH. Polls frequently make assumptions about who will participate. In addition, in the NH primary, they not only have to predict who will vote, but whether they will decide to vote in the R or the D primary, and then, who they will vote for. If any of those assumptions are incorrect, then the poll will be less accurate, and the more assumptions that must be made, the more likely it is that at least one of them will be wrong.
What impact do “cell phone only households” have on polling. Not that that is necessarily relevant to the race/class question. But if pollsters cannot call such households it will skew the outcome. Won’t it?
Pollsters are very concerned about cell phone only households and try to factor that in …. but since such households tend to be younger demographically, not reaching them should have meant there was even mopre support in NH for Obama (who scores best among younger voters). Thus, it was not likely a factor here.
Columnist Robert Novak says this today: Those exit polls were so wrong because they grossly understated the female vote in New Hampshire. Had the turnout of women there, which constituted an unprecedented 57 percent of the Democratic vote, been plugged in to exit results, a two-percentage-point Clinton victory would have been forecast. If Novak is right, the problem was mainly one of not predicting that as many women would vote as actually did.
Robert–
Did Robert Novak happen to mention if his friend Valerie Plame voted in NH?
Just curious. ;)
Anybody seen anything about the Clinton campaign’s “pull” operation, that is, active help for voters her campaign knew would vote for her, if they go to the polls. Car ride, babysitter, etc.