SHOCK NEWS: Hillary Clinton wins New Hampshire!
My God, when was that? Five years ago, ten, twenty?
Just over one year ago? Surely not.
Where were you when you found out? I remember waking up (here in Blighty) to read the news on my laptop, blinking bleary eyes and shaking my head in wonder. I remember thinking, this really is the greatest election race ever held. I remember whispering God bless America or something similar. And fuck me, how did she do that?
Clinton's victory there turned the Obama-Clinton battle, already intensely exciting, into an epic. It was a reminder, if one was needed, that voters can be stubborn bastards who don't always vote the way the media expects or wants them to - and that you should never, ever, underestimate a Clinton. It was the end of Obama, airy phenomenon, and the beginning of Obama, battle-proved candidate.*
It was also, of course, a painful and embarrassing shock to the people who are supposed to abolish shocks, to iron out surprises: the pollsters. The polling industry, plunged into introspection, has put together a massive report to understand and explain how they got it so badly wrong. Mark Blumenthal has read it:
In other words, what happened in New Hampshire wasn't one thing, it was a likely lot of small things, all introducing errors in the same direction. Various methodological challenges or shortcomings that might ordinarily produce offsetting variation in polls instead combined to throw them all off in the same direction. Polling's "perfect storm" did not materialize this past fall, but that label seems more apt for the New Hampshire polling debacle.
(*Those of you who want to relive the moment should buy my book).
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