Polling Pitfalls

   So what exactly went wrong with all the polls that smugly predicted Barack Obama would cruise to victory in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary?
   According to Lee Miringoff and Barbara Carvalho, two of the nation's top pollsters who run the Marist College poll, few considered the human factor of Hillary Clinton's mini-meltdown in a Portsmouth cafe.
   They wrote Wednesday that no surveys were taken on Election Eve, and that nobody measured the effect of Clinton's teary discussion of why she runs -- especially on the women who would eventually carry the day for the New York senator.
   "New Hampshire has a tradition of voting for women.  Democratic primary voters also like the Clintons," Miringoff and Carvalho wrote. "If the pollsters and media pundits erred, it was not in their weekend numbers but in not polling Monday and missing the impact of the unrelenting media coverage that characterized the Clintons as finished."
   In addition, they said nobody released poll results from Monday only -- the kind of numbers that might have measured Clinton's "cafe effect."
  "How New Hampshire voters were evaluating the race and the factors they were weighing in the last hours of the campaign were never measured," they said. "Even the exit polls, designed in advance, would not capture the final mood of the voters about the campaign.  As a result, explanations about what happened here are fueled more by conjecture than by the numbers."
   All of which says pollsters are people too, and mistakes are made. And it ranks as just one more element in a most unpredictable election year.

Robert J. McCarthy