So Right, Yet So Wrong

It seemed like a sure thing. National polls put Republican John McCain several percentage points ahead of Mitt Romney in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary-and they were right. McCain's win, with 37 percent of the vote, resurrected his fledgling campaign and threw the race for the Republican nomination wide open. But on the Democratic side there was a disconnect. Polls showed that his Iowa victory had propelled Barack Obama to a significant lead over Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the New Hampshire vote. But when the dust cleared, Clinton had eked out a stunning three-point upset. So why did the surveys get it so right in one contest and so wrong in the other? NEWSWEEK's Jessica Ramirez asked Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Before Tuesday, polls gave Obama an eight-point lead, on average, over Clinton. Your own polls, conducted through Sunday, put that lead in the double digits. What was your reaction when you saw the eventual result?
Frank Newport: Generally speaking, our polls and other well-done polls have been accurate predictors of what people do on Election Day, both in primaries and nationally. Given our poll, which we had confidence in showing Obama with a sizable lead, and every other poll that showed Obama with a lead, my expectation as a professional was that in New Hampshire Obama had the highest probability of winning. So I was surprised by the results, no question about that.

So how did it happen?
We're looking into that carefully. We don't think that there was a flaw with the polling per se. By that I mean a sampling or methodological problem. The poll was well done. That's underscored by the fact that on the Republican side the estimates were remarkably close to what actually happened. We had McCain up by four, and he won by five. That leads us to believe there was something going on with Democratic voters in New Hampshire, and that it wasn't actually a problem with the polls themselves.

There are a few theories on why Hillary surged. The main one seems to be her emotional moment. What do you think?
It is a reasonable hypothesis that it helped her. I think it's quite reasonable that Democratic voters were continuing to evaluate Monday and even into Tuesday. We're actually going to be doing some reinterviewing in New Hampshire; we're going to call back people that we interviewed and get more details on the process of their decision making. We're continuing to follow what happened and what perhaps changed voters' minds.

What do you hope to learn from going back and interviewing again?
We're doing it for two reasons. One is to find out more about what happened in New Hampshire. We also want to know what's going on with these people who have gotten to know these candidates intimately, so to speak. We want to know a little more in depth what they think about them, which will help us understand why voters-even elsewhere-may decide to support either Hillary or Barack.

Let's say Hillary's "moment" is why the numbers were off. That event happened on Monday. Most polls were complete by Monday. Is there anything that can be done to account for last-minute shifts in the future?
We sometimes, in the national polling in November, do poll all the way through Monday night. One of the reasons that we don't, typically, in New Hampshire-and other pollsters may not poll through Monday nights-is because the data has less value to consumers. One of the reasons we have polls with our partner USA Today and for our own readers at Gallup.com is that people are interested and want to know what's ahead. When we can provide them that data late Sunday night and Monday it gives us a full day to kind of explain and go over the data. If we poll all the way through Monday night, it might be satisfying to us, but by Tuesday there's less interest. Voters are turning to the actual voting going on by then. That's one of the reasons we have not. On the Republican side it didn't make a difference. We stopped on Sunday and what Republicans told us they were going to do on Sunday is absolutely what they did on Election Day. More often than not there's not a lot of huge last-minute vote changing, but it can happen.