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FRAUD! FRAUD! FRAUD!

OK, that was a rhetorical headline. But it seems as though some people are shocked that polling in a primary can be wrong. The Dallas Morning News article says:

Curious about the "wildly inaccurate" polls that put Mr. Obama in a double-digit lead going into Tuesday's primary, blogger Brad Friedman, a Los Angeles-based election-fraud watchdog, questioned the results as soon as they arrived, and all day Wednesday.

Humorously, there were several polls out that day and not all of them had a double digit lead for Obama. Also, the "track" on some of these polls tilted to Clinton on the last day. As Boston Globe noted:

"It was a total shock," said Scott W. Rasmussen of the independent Rasmussen Reports, whose final three-day tracking poll - a total of 1,200 likely voters through primary eve - showed Obama ahead by seven points, down from 10 the day before. "I can't remember a time when the entire polling industry showed a similar result and it was wrong," he said. Rasmussen said his sample of women voters was smaller, and not quite as enthusiastic about Clinton as the primary day exit polls seemed to indicate. He had other theories: Clinton's better field operation might have been more effective; the huge turnout may have swept up more casual voters who wouldn't have passed through "a pretty tight screen" Rasmussen used to determine likely voters. "But nothing accounts for a 10-point swing," Rasmussen said.

John Zogby of Zogby International, which recorded the biggest percentage margin before the primary - Obama by 13 points - offered several possible explanations on his website and promised additional study and explanation. Zogby conducted polling for the Reuters news service and the C-SPAN cable network. In New Hampshire, he theorized online, several factors came into play Tuesday: a large percentage of late-deciding voters; the compressed period of five, rather than the usual eight days, between the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary; and an apparent decision by many voters to not "endorse the Obama train without checking the engine." His final night of a three-day sample showed Clinton bouncing back at the end, but that was more than offset by Obama's swelling margins in samples the prior two nights, he said.

Zogby's polling showed the volatility of the race: In the five days after Iowa, his New Hampshire tracks flipped from Clinton up by six points to Obama leading by 13 points. Other pollsters missing the mark with results showing Obama leading Clinton were American Research Group (a nine-point lead), Suffolk University for WHDH-TV (five points), the University of New Hampshire for CNN/WMUR-TV (nine points), Marist College (eight points), and CBS News (seven points). The previous Suffolk poll had Obama up by one point; the UNH poll had the race tied two days before the vote. UNH also conducts polls for the Globe.

Full post as published by Election Updates on January 10, 2008 (boomark / email).