Who Knew?

After the Iowa Caucuses, I made the prediction that New Hampshire would be very close on the Democratic side. It turns out I was right — just 3 percentage points separated Clinton from Obama. But if you had asked me yesterday afternoon, I would have followed the polls and guessed that Clinton would lose by 10. Mary, of course, nailed it — she said the whole time that Clinton would win, so credit where credit is due.

The question of the day is, what happened with the polling? The GOP race was called mostly accurately, so why were the numbers for the Democrats so out of whack? There are lots of attempts at answers out there, but the most convincing explanation I've seen is this: it's not so much that the polls were wrong, it's that Clinton got an enormous bump at the very end — the vast majority of undecided voters broke for her. Obama and Edwards got roughly the percentages that the polls said they would, but Clinton surged ahead in the final 24 hours.

It will be interesting to see if anyone is able to figure out exactly why Clinton won the undecideds. Did it have something to do with that show of emotion that the cable nets couldn't stop replaying, either in favor of the "humanizing" moment or against the sexist reaction from the political pundits? Was it an instinctual no-you-don't reaction against Iowa? Was it the retooled stump speech? Her policy proposals? Something else? Maybe we'll never know. But on to Nevada!