WASHINGTON—Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire's Democratic presidential nominating contest confounded pollsters, who found themselves trying to explain how opinion polls got it so wrong.
Chastened experts said on Wednesday they would have to closely analyze their forecasts against the results of the New Hampshire primaries to learn why they were so right about resurgent John McCain's win on the Republican side but so wrong about Clinton's win among the Democrats.
Ahead of Tuesday's vote in New Hampshire, an early battleground in the state-by-state process to choose candidates for November's election, pollsters had widely predicted Illinois Sen. Barack Obama would beat Clinton in the Democrats' contest, with many foreseeing a double-digit margin.
In the event, the New York senator and former first lady beat Obama, edging him out by under 3 percentage points.
In an era of instant analysis, everybody had a theory on why the polls got it wrong—from the humanizing effect of Clinton's teary eyes while campaigning on Monday to the suspicion that New Hampshire voters get a perverse satisfaction from doing the opposite of Iowa voters.
"It's really a case study in the limits of momentum," said University of New Hampshire political analyst Dante Scala, commenting on pollsters' predictions that Obama would keep surging after a decisive win in the Iowa vote last week.
LAS VEGAS—After a much-needed win in New Hampshire, Democrat Hillary Clinton received a new challenge on Wednesday when Nevada's most influential union endorsed rival Sen. Barack Obama's U.S. presidential bid.
The Culinary Workers Union, whose 60,000 members service the famed hotels and casinos on the Las Vegas strip, is a major political force in the state, which holds the next Democratic contest on Jan. 19.
Clinton, the New York senator hoping to become the first woman president, had led in polls in Nevada and courted the union and Hispanics, which make up 45 percent of the union's membership, so the decision will be a disappointment to her.
"It's a little bit of a surprise," said David Damore, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. "A lot of people expected, especially after Clinton's turnaround in New Hampshire yesterday, that they would go for the establishment candidate."
Democrats moved up the Nevada primary to third for 2008 because the Western state, with its large Hispanic population and diverse mix of people, was seen as more representative of the rest of the United States than Iowa and New Hampshire.
The Culinary Union endorsement is also a setback to former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who worked hard to build labor support in the key primary states and finished third in New Hampshire, well behind Clinton and Obama.
Nevada is considered a political swing state that could go either Republican or Democrat in the general election in November, and it has backed the winner every year since President Richard Nixon in 1972.
In New Hampshire, large numbers of voters decide late, a trend even more pronounced this year because the Democrats liked all their choices, said University of New Hampshire political scientist Andrew Smith.
And since many surveys either stopped 24 to 36 hours before New Hampshire started voting, or rolled three days of data into one final average, they couldn't pick up or reflect the late pro-Clinton trends.
Late Deciders
Women came out in large numbers for the former first lady, and she did particularly well among those 65 and older, winning 48 percent of their vote in the Democratic contest.
"Clinton did very well among women," Smith said. "And the late deciders broke for Hillary."
John Zogby, who does the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll, said the 18 percent of New Hampshire voters who reported making up their minds on Tuesday "is just an unprecedented number."
The flood of information on the Internet can shape how voters' loyalties can shift quickly, an effect that may have been amplified among New Hampshire's undecided voters, said Susan Herbst, a polling expert at Georgia Institute of Technology.
"There's more movement and more fluidity of people and their opinion," she said. "That's a good thing. It means that people are thinking."
Before last week's Iowa caucuses—notoriously hard to predict because of their unusual rules and the role of second-choice candidates—the pollsters collectively shrugged their shoulders and concluded "who knows?" Obama won solidly.
But in New Hampshire the pollsters thought they were on more solid ground when they detected an Obama "bounce."
One issue making it hard for pollsters is that this is a history-making contest with no past parallels—Obama would become the first black U.S. president, and Clinton the first female U.S. president.
Herbst said the "public-private gap," the difference between what voters say and do, has long been tough for pollsters to gauge.
But ABC's polling director Gary Langer wrote in his blog at http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenumbers/ that he doubted the wrong results would trace back to race.
He said pollsters need to look not just at factors like race but at "their own failings in sampling and likely voter modeling."
"It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why," he said.
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