From Politweets:
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson ended his campaign for the presidency Wednesday after twin fourth-place finishes that showed his impressive credentials could not compete with his rivals' star power.
He was not able to build the momentum and came in a distant fourth place in Iowa and New Hampshire. Richardson didn't get quite 5 percent in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday and came in with just 2 percent in the Iowa caucus last week.
Richardson planned to announce the decision Thursday, according to two people close to the governor with knowledge of the decision. They spoke on a condition of anonymity in advance of the governor's announcement.
New Hampshire Smacks
Washington Mindset On Its Head
January 9, 2008 — The Washington mindset was smacked in the head by voters in New Hampshire Tuesday.
In the Democratic contest, Sen. Hillary Clinton stopped the Obama train with a stunning victory that left every pollster with egg on their faces. (After successfully polling both caucuses in Iowa, InsiderAdvantage chose to skip New Hampshire as our team, with a collective 100 years of experience, deemed New Hampshire voters “impossible to poll.”)
That said, with Michigan already in her pocket (other candidates fell prey to the DNC’s edict not to participate, thus leaving Clinton the only candidate on that state’s ballot) and a new InsiderAdvantage poll showing Clinton ahead in a critical Florida beauty contest that will give her a bump just a week ahead of “Tsunami Tuesday,” her campaign gains huge new life.
Here are the real talking points from outside the Washington D.C. bubble that people will be buzzing about today:
• Did the Des Moines Register's poll create a false sense of inevitability for Obama? Moreover, did the way-out-of-line polls in New Hampshire follow the Des Moines methodology - thus creating a false impression that Obama was headed for a big win?
• Does the media have the first clue about South Carolina politics? Our Lee Bandy sure does and he had a big laugh at commentators talking about how popular John McCain is in South Carolina.
• Does the national media recognize that hundreds of thousands of Floridians will come out to vote in the Democratic Primary in that state and will attack the DNC if it fails to relent and allow the Florida vote to count? Again, a state, where in last night’s InsiderAdvantage/ Majority Opinion poll, Clinton held a comfortable lead.
• Even if he wins Michigan, can Mitt Romney survive likely defeats in both South Carolina and Florida?
• Can Rudy Giuliani wait until Florida to gain momentum that will carry him to win in Feb 5th contests? And if he rises in the polls in Florida, does he not cut into Giuliani, leaving a fairly strong evangelical crowd to perhaps build on a possible South Carolina win by Huckabee.
• How will the “mystery pollster” possibly deal with so many bad polls in New Hampshire?
And finally, will the many networks which for years asked for our polling methodologies please provide theirs to us. So far they are batting darn near close to zero. We are a little worried about their numbers not meeting Internet News Agency standards. After all, our job is to be right.
New Hampshire's Polling Fiasco
January 09, 2008 12:05 AM
There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.
But we need to know it through careful, empirically based analysis. There will be a lot of claims about what happened - about respondents who reputedly lied, about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests. That may be so. It also may be a smokescreen - a convenient foil for pollsters who'd rather fault their respondents than own up to other possibilities - such as their own failings in sampling and likely voter modeling.
There have been previous races that misstated support for black candidates in biracial races. But most of those were long ago, and there have been plenty of polls in biracial races that were accurate. (For more on past problems with polls in biracial races, see this blog I wrote for Freakonomics last May.) And there was no overstatement of Obama in Iowa polls.
On the other hand, the pre-election polls in the New Hampshire Republican race were accurate. The problem was isolated to the Democratic side - where, it should be noted, we have not just one groundbreaking candidate in Barack Obama, but also another, in Hillary Clinton.
A starting point for this analysis will be to look at every significant Democratic subgroup in the New Hampshire pre-election polls, and see how those polls did in estimating the size of those groups and their vote choices. The polls' estimates of turnout overall will be relevant as well.
In the end there may be no smoking gun. Those polls may have been accurate, but done in by a superior get-out-the-vote effort, or by very late deciders whose motivations may or may not ever be known. They may have been inaccurate because of bad modeling, compromised sampling, or simply an overabundance of enthusiasm for Obama on the heels of his Iowa victory that led his would-be supporters to overstate their propensity to turn out. (A function, perhaps, of youth.)
Prof. Jon Krosnick of Stanford University has another argument: That the order of names on the New Hampshire ballot - in which, by random draw, Clinton was toward the top, Obama at the bottom - netted her about 3 percentage points more than she'd have gotten otherwise. That's not enough to explain the gap in some of the polls, which presumably randomized candidate names, but it might hold part of the answer.
The data may tell us; it may not. What's beyond question is that it is incumbent on us - and particularly on the producers of the New Hampshire pre-election polls - to look at the data, and to look closely, and to do it without prejudging.
January 9, 2008
Gary Langer is director of polling at ABC News, where he's covered the beat of public opinion for more than 15 years – conducting and analyzing ABC News polls, evaluating data from other sources and setting the news division's standards for poll reporting. He's the first and only pollster to win a News Emmy, for his second national survey of public opinion in Iraq.
Final Suffolk U/7NEWS Statewide Poll of likely primary voters in New Hampshire (conducted 1/6 through 1/7) finds:
Among 500 likely Democratic primary voters, Sen. Barack Obama runs at 39%, Sen. Hillary Clinton at 34%, former Sen. John Edwards at 15%.
Among 500 likely Republican primary voters, former Gov. Mitt Romney runs at 30%, Sen. John McCain at 26%, Mike Huckabee at 13%, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani 11%, Rep. Ron Paul 5%.
All other candidates receive less than five percent each. The margin of sampling error is 4.4% for each subgroup.
