Hrm.
Well, that was unexpected…I must say, if nothing else, “false hopes” had a really good night. But, hey, I guess I should’ve known better. As The Wire continually reminds us, despite all evidence to the contrary, maybe a new day is never dawning. (You know, I should really develop some new interests. Maybe it’s time to become a gardening blog or something.)
Anyway, looking at the numbers, it looks like the difference voters in New Hampshire were women, who returned to Clinton’s corner in droves (47% to 34%), and older voters, who’ve been there all along (65 and over: 48% to 32%, 50-64: 39% to 30%, 40-49: 44% to 33%.) Well, at least the kids are alright. (18-24: 60%-22%, for Obama.)
That all makes a certain amount of sense, I guess. Women more readily see Clinton as a candidate of change by her very nature, and, as I wrote at great length about over the weekend, many older voters seem to buy what she’s selling regardless: another eight years of cautious, obfuscating, Grand Theft Auto-blaming and very “experienced” incrementalism.
To be honest, on its face, New Hampshire going Clinton doesn’t bother me all that much. It’s an older, whiter state, and for all its vaunted independence, it’s usually just contrarian for its own sake, like bad Slate columns and Armond White. Once Clinton became the underdog after Iowa, it was a natural pick-up for her.
What does concern me, tho’, is the bizarre polling problem we saw tonight. Some polls are occasionally wrong, sure, but every poll — not one poll, every poll — had Obama up between five and twelve points this morning. Ok, well, there were a lot of undecided voters, and clearly most of ’em broke for Clinton. So be it. More disconcerting, however, exit polls — taken after the votes were made, mind you — also had Obama up by five. So, how did we finish down two at the end of the night (with the polls still getting the GOP race exactly right?) How did every poll miss out on that seven point swing, a swing based on post-voting data? I suppose it’s still an open question, but the elephant in the room is the Bradley Effect, and, I gotta say, I’m pretty disgusted right now with my fellow white people. Vote for who you want to vote for, but don’t lie about it before or after the fact. If someone has a better explanation about the disparity in exit polls, I’m all ears. Update: Pollster has a good overview of the various prevailing current theories.
As for what explains Clinton’s victory, I must confess: even given what I said above, I’m at a bit of a loss. This is mainly because I thought the polls reflected, you know, the actual standings. The only real possible game-changer lately, other than just a collective New Hampshire uprising against media expectations (which is stupid – it was their poll answers creating and driving those expectations), was the “Diner Sob”, as Slate is billing it, the other day. Apparently, a sizable majority of New Hampshire’s older/women voters looked in to Clinton’s heart at that moment, and liked what they saw. Iron Eyes Cody for President! I dunno…admittedly, I’m feeling rather Menckenesque at the moment. Still, I’m reminded of Bernie Birnbaum, John Turturro’s character in Miller’s Crossing: “What were you gonna do if you caught me? I’d just squirt a few and then you’d let me go again.“
Bleah. A no-good, lousy night, to be sure. Unless you’re John McCain — for him, the news is great on both sides of the ledger. If the current paradigm wins, so do Republicans. Now, I have no real inclination to vote Republican, but the fact remains: When it comes to campaign finance reform —the change issue — McCain has far, far better creds than Clinton.
Still, it’s not over yet, and adversity builds character, right? We’ve split the first two games, and now attention moves to Nevada and my home state of South Carolina. Neither are necessarily unfavorable terrain for Obama, so if he can weather the post-New Hampshire bounce over the next week, we’re still good to go. But it’s definitely harder now, no doubt. Florence, come to our aid! (For old times’ sake, if nothing else.)
By the way, New Hampshire? Eff you, you tired, gaseous windbag of an “independent” state. Robert Frost, Alan Shepard, and Christa McAuliffe notwithstanding, you haven’t contributed anything to the polity since Daniel Webster. From now on, I’m hiking in Vermont.
Thanks for writing your thoughts. I hoped things would be different this year but now it’s more of the same. I want to see Bloomberg run. I can’t vote for Hillary.
Given gender gap, Bradley effect would suggest that white women more likely to be racist than white men. Really? I just don’t think so. I barely watched/read any of the media coverage over the last few days, and enough rank misogyny got through to me just by osmosis that I would have been hard-pressed not to vote for HRC just to express my sheer fed-upped-ness with all of that bs (and I’ve been for Edwards, if anyone, all along). She’s being held to a different standard entirely from what I can tell. I think Digby’s right – it’s the Tweety effect.
Sonja: I don’t want to give up on the Dems just yet, but I’m inclined to agree.
Lyn: What rank misogny do you speak of? And what is the basis of this call of a different standard, as applied negatively to Clinton? Examples would be great. If Senator Obama, down 10-15 points in the polls, had had an emotional moment akin to Clinton’s, he’d have been rode out of town on a rail, Ed Muskie style.
And why would you presume that white women vote less “racistly” (Is that a word? It should be) than white men? Please explain. In the past, that statistic has never borne out. If anything, the opposite is generally true, a sad reflection, if you will, of the white patriarchy’s divide-and-conquer nature. It may not make any sense at first glance, but, historically, the movements for women’s rights and black equality have rarely been on the same page, and committed women have been just as — if not far more — likely to indulge in racism. It’s the dilemma of the zero-sum game. See Anthony and Stanton’s Gilded Age alliance with George Francis Train, or — for the converse — the SNCC-“prone” fiasco. (For the former, note Ellen Du Bois’s Feminism and Suffrage.)
I didn’t say “less”, I said for the Bradley effect to hold, given the wide gender gap, white women would have to be more racist than white men. If you think white women are sufficiently more racist than white men to have caused this polling discrepancy, then we just disagree on that. And yes, I know that one of the arguments some used in the suffrage movement was that black men shouldn’t have had the vote before white women did.
As for her “emotional” moment – I watched the actual video of it – and frankly I didn’t really see much there *at all* beyond post facto media histrionics. Again, I guess we disagree. And given how the media reacted to it, I’d say they *did* try to drive her out of town on a rail. Unlike, say, how they react to Mitt Romney, who’s apparently been blubbering all over the campaign trail.[1]
I know you don’t see the rank misogyny in the coverage, but from my perspective it’s really not too subtle. As I said, I’m trying not to pay attention to much of the coverage generally, but the simplest example is every time someone uses the terms “calculating” or “ambitious” to apply as a implicit pejorative to HRC. There are much worse examples (just listen to Chris Matthews for more than a few minutes – I believe the word “castrating” has been used). Anytime I catch any of the coverage and so-called “analysis”, it’s invariably infuriating — and I think the older a woman is, the more she’ll have seen plenty of that particular flavor of bullshit in her own life and to me that goes a long way toward explaining the NH results. But I don’t particularly care to get into a whole feminist critique of language and standards because it’s been done, and if you don’t buy it, you don’t buy it.
On the general issue of what standards are applied to whom, if you’re sanguine enough to believe that the media establishment is over its reflexive and habitual Clinton-hating, and if you think we’re living in some post-sexist utopia, well, again, we just disagree on that, too. (I also think the media holds Democrats generally to different standards then Republicans, fwiw.)
[1] http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/12/19/candidate_has_another_teary_moment/
Clinton-hating by the media? It seems that until Iowa, the whole “inevitability” idea was swallowed hook, line, and sinker. I do agree that her “crying” was blown out of proportion — she got a little choked up, she didn’t cry. Still, it just goes to show that the pundits have no idea what is happening in this election, whether they’re pissing me off by saying Hillary will win or consoling me by saying Obama will win.
As far as the GOP goes, I love seeing Romney get punished, but I’m not a huge fan of “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” McCain either.
I hope the media is not willing to let go of its Obama lovefest because of a narrow loss in NH; the general antipathy toward Clinton may help dampen any bounce that results from the win. I too am disturbed by how wrong the exit polls were, although exit polls had Kerry up all day in 2004 (whatever that means).
I was just thinking this morning — maybe it’s not the Bradley Effect. Maybe it is not so much that people didn’t want to admit that they were NOT going to vote for Obama, but rather that people walking out of the polls did not want to admit that they HAD voted for Clinton. I’d be ashamed, wouldn’t you?
More than anything, the NH results show that the race is still wide open, for both the Dems and the GOP.
As for polling discrepancies, I didn’t notice as much, becuase I tuned in to the coverage pretty late in the day, when it was “too close to call.” It may be something far less sinister that the Bradley effect…maybe Gastonia has a point, and maybe it’s just that Obama voters vote early, and Clintoners vote late.
Med: For the Bradley effect to hold, it wouldn’t be that white women were more racist than white men, so much as white women, for whatever reason, were less honest about voicing their preferences in a public forum. But, hey, you’re a scientist — as I said in the original post, if you have an alternate explanation as to how even the *exit poll data* could be this wrong in New Hampshire, and to why it seems to conform to a repeated phenomenon in this sort of race (See also Bradley, Wilder, Dinkins, Ford), I’m all ears.
Also I categorically dispute the notion that calling Senator Clinton “calculating” or “ambitious” is sexism. Perhaps she’s just calculating and/or ambitious. (These were adjectives often used about her husband too, and for good reason. And he’s not female.) You yourself posted on the national security trumped human rights moment. Were you succumbing to the nation’s sexism, or were you arguing that Clinton is calculating? Obviously the latter.
FWIW, I do not believe we’re living in a post-sexist utopia. Far from it. Nor do I think the media is reflexively anti-Clinton. I didn’t even think this when my *job* was to follow the anti-Clinton vagaries of the media, during l’affaire Lewinsky. Whatever Chris Matthews says (and you might as well cite Bill O’Reilly or Lou Dobbs — we’re talking one random, off the reservation pundit) the “Clinton-hating media,” as Liam pointed out above, is not much more than a talking point.
Gaston, I hope that was a part of it, although in a way that’s just the inverse of (and almost as sinister as) the same question. (If they were ashamed to vote for Hillary, then why did they pull the lever for her?) Regarding the Kerry exit polls, yeah, that was strange too…although the difference was nowhere near this big. I tend to fall in the “None dare call it stolen” camp for that one.
Eileen, the data seems to suggest some of that is true — early exit polling had Obama even higher (up 7, according to Fox, for example). But the +5 polls were late — even post-closing — data, so that doesn’t explain what happened.
This isn’t Dewey Defeats Truman. Nobody took a reliable poll in that race for months before Election Day. What we have here is 5-6 top of the line, 21st century polls saying Obama was up big the day of the race, and similar exit polls saying Obama won after the votes had been placed. (Polls, mind you, that simultaneously got the GOP side of the equation exactly right.) It seems many voters were lying about their preference yesterday, both before and after they voted. But again, if there’s a simpler explanation, I’d love to hear it. I don’t particularly like thinking we as voters are that lame.
This:
“Also I categorically dispute the notion that calling Senator Clinton “calculating” or “ambitious” is sexism.”
and this:
“we’re talking one random, off the reservation pundit”
I think reflect our (yours and my) fundamental differences regarding these times. The same words, as you well know, can have very different connotations in different contexts. (It’s like saying that just because someone called JFK “articulate” once it isn’t a much more loaded term when applied to Obama – come on.) And by the latter, I don’t mean just the Clinton nonsense, but that we have very different takes on the media, its role, and effects.
And ultimately, though, so what? Neither of us are going to vote for a Republican anytime soon and we’re pointed in basically the same direction with slightly different priority sets.
This ultimately strikes me as internecine intrapartisan bickering, and Barack probably wouldn’t like it. 🙂
[As for the polls — when I was following things closely last time around (’04) I saw enough squirreliness in the polling details that I don’t tend to put too much stock in any of them, and, personally, I wouldn’t hesitate to lie to a political pollster just because they annoy the crap out of me — and I’m from a neighboring state to NH and there are lots of ornery/contrary people like me in that neck of the woods… More substantively, if turnout was much higher than usual, they probably weren’t polling the ‘right’ people… I see neither ominous signs of latent racism nor tricksiness (anymore than usual that is), just an extremely imperfect “science.”]
Fair enough, Med. I hope you’re right. (Even if I’ve been told lately that hope isn’t something I should be engaging in.) Still…strange, then, that only the Dem side of the ledger was skewed.
Interesting (and funny) post. After Sen. Clinton’s unforeseen NH victory, many people are questioning the pollsters. There is so much to consider when exploring what goes into political polling. Predicting elections is one of the most difficult challenges in survey work. Generally speaking, election surveys actually do work fairly well (it’s worth remembering that the polling on the Republican side in New Hampshire was pretty accurate). For all their flaws, surveys are still one of the best available tools for figuring out what the public wants. Check out our Public Agenda blog at http://publicagenda.org/headlines/headlines_blog.cfm for more on this!