New Hampshire to media: WE, not YOU, will decide

Well.

So yesterday the question wasn't who would win New Hampshire, but how big Barack Obama's victory would be. And when the dust settled, it wasn't Barack Obama who prevailed in New Hampshire, but the Big Crybaby herself.

So what happened?

Josh Marshall says:

It's hard for me to remember an election where the trend of polling and the final poll results so failed to predict the actual vote. Certainly, there's no example I can remember of it happening in such a high profile contest. In the next couple days we'll probably get a better sense of what happened. My hunch is that the polls were not 'wrong', that they were right in showing a big bounce for Obama, but that there was a late swing in Hillary's direction.

That, however, is just a hunch. And it's undermined, at least to a degree, by the fact that, as far as I can remember, none of the polls showed any slackening of Obama's lead, even though I believe the pollsters were still surveying as late as Monday evening.

Perhaps we'll know more once the numbers are more closely examined. But it will probably remain undetermined to a significant degree.

According to CNN, women broke for Clinton by a whopping thirteen percent.

So given that Obama had been polling just fine among women, what happened?

If the media coverage of the Infamous Diner Incident is any indication, with a negative tone that spilled over into even Keith Olbermann's coverage, I would guess that Democratic women in the Live Free or Die state saw a bunch of white men deciding what was sincere and what was "appropriate behavior" and decided to put them in their place. Yesterday on Morning Joe, Scarborough was asking the candidates appearing on his show if they've ever cried on the campaign trail, a question to which Rudy Giuliani, so predictably it's becoming a running joke, responded:

"This is not something I would judge anybody on one way or the other. And the reality is, if you look at me -- Sept. 11, the funerals, the memorial services, there were times in which it was just impossible not to feel ... the emotion."

The media pileon was everywhere. Was she sincere? Was she being petulant that her coronation wasn't going to be a coronation after all? Was she tired? Was it a sign of weakness? I'm putting question marks in to be charitable, but the pileon was clear. It's as if they were jackals waiting for the soft underbelly so they could pounce.

On Monday night, Rachel Maddow talked about this with Dan Abrams, the ubiquitous Pat Buchanan, and some asshat from the obviously Obama-leaning Huffington Post:

Digby is all over this, citing a comment from Pam Spaulding at Pandagon (emphases mine):

Oh, I just heard NBC’s Brian Williams bring up “The Bradley effect,” (aka the Wilder effect).

a phenomenon which has led to inaccurate voter opinion polls in some American political campaigns between a white candidate and a non-white candidate.[1][2][3] Specifically, there have been instances in which statistically significant numbers of white voters tell pollsters in advance of an election that they are either genuinely undecided, or likely to vote for the non-white candidate, but those voters exhibit a different behavior when actually casting their ballots. White voters who said that they were undecided break in statistically large numbers toward the white candidate, and many of the white voters who said that they were likely to vote for the black candidate ultimately cast their ballot for the white candidate. This reluctance to give accurate polling answers has sometimes extended to post-election exit polls as well.

Researchers who have studied the issue theorize that some white voters give inaccurate responses to polling questions because of a fear that they might appear to others to be racially prejudiced. Some research has suggested that the race of the pollster conducting the interview may factor into that concern. At least one prominent researcher has suggested that with regard to pre-election polls, the discrepancy can be traced in part by the polls’ failure to account for general conservative political leanings among late-deciding voters.

I’m not sure that it applies here, given the complicating factor of gender bias, and what we can now call “The Tweety Effect,” where the misogyny of a talking head in the MSM so enrages a demographic that they go out and vote in a manner that will put egg on the face of the talking head.

I would be more inclined to agree with Pam here were it not for the fact that Iowa is every bit as white as New Hampshire, and the result there was very different.

I watched the "diner breakdown" footage. I was inclined to see it as Hillary pulling aside the mask she wears all the time to show us the person that people who know her say they see; someone who's warm and empathetic and human -- until she effortlessly segued into the obvious slam on Obama. But whether it was real or calculated, the media frenzy surrounding one moment in a campaign was preposterous.

The giant maw of the 24 x 7 news cycle has been looking for a "Dean Scream" moment. Barack Obama isn't going to give it to them. God knows the highly disciplined John Edwards isn't going to give it to them. They aren't looking for it from a Republican, relentlessly fellating the bunch of them as they are. That leaves Hillary. Her "meltdown" at the last debate didn't do it for them, so they latched onto this one and held on like a pit bull.

As Dday notes at Digby's place, Tom Brokaw, who is what passes for an elder statesman of television news these days tried his best to smack down Tweety as gently as possible:

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to do?

MATTHEWS: Yes sir?

BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: Well what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess.

BROKAW: No, no we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. You can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this.

But we don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed. And trying to stampede in effect the process.

Look, I’m not just picking on us, it’s part of the culture in which we live these days. I think that the people out there are going to begin to make judgments about us if we don’t begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding, in many cases, as we learned in New Hampshire when they went into the polling booth today or in the last three days. They were making decisions very late.

Be sure to watch this and the other videos at the link above for more "up is down" analysis, including how Rudy Giuliani's fourth-place finish in a northeastern state is a victory (as opposed to Barack Obama's second-place finish, which is a loss).

There is another possibility, one which our resident troll, who knows who he is and often behaves like the fourth grader who socks all the girls in the arm before class and gets away with it because boys will be boys, made sure to joke about in an e-mail when it hadn't even entered my mind. That possibility is something that Brad Friedman, who is THE go-to guy for election shenanigans, wonders about: When all the numbers for Republicans and Democrats came in right on the money, or close to, the late polling numbers, what happened in the #1 and #2 spots on the Democratic side?

You'll need to read this post first, then this one. In Dixville Notch, where the ballots are paper and are counted by hand, in public, an early report of one extra vote turned out to be false. But it's worth taking note of what Brad points out, that 40% of New Hampshire uses Diebold optical scan machines that have been shown to be easily hacked; machines that are run by a subcontractor famous for lax security.

Brad may be completely off base here, though it is certainly getting interesting that it's really mostly since electronic voting has been instituted that we've seen final vote tallies be so far off from late polling that it has voters and pundits scratching their heads, wondering what happened. A coincidence? Possibly. In New Hampshire, it's hard to tell. Perhaps women voters really did protest-vote for Hillary to send a message to the media. Perhaps New Hampshire voters decided that the nation needed to take a closer look at Obama before anointing him; that not enough of a vetting process had occurred. I don't think it's a bad thing that the "Super Duper Tuesday" states are actually going to have a role in picking the nominee this year. But whether you smell a ballot-counting rat in this particular situation or not (and even Brad isn't claiming there's anything bogus here, just that you have a situation once again where an unexpected result in ONLY ONE MATCHUP is coming out of Diebold machines), there shouldn't even be any grounds for anyone to even consider the possibility that memory cards in the voting machines were swapped out at the last minute to change a likely result.

If we want to put on our tinfoil chapeaux for a minute and speculate that someone played around with the voting machines for the precincts that use them, it doesn't necessarily mean "The Clintons stole the election." Given Hillary Clinton's corporatist leanings and the continuing racism in this country, there are plenty of third parties who might have had reason to not have an Obama coronation this quickly. OK, now, let's take our tinfoil off and put it away for a while. Because as Brad points out, he has no direct evidence of chicanery, and there's certainly an argument to be made that women were turned off by the media piling on, particularly with exit polls showing that women went for Clinton by 13%. Jeff Fecke certainly thinks so, and so do I.

There's also a troubling aspect to the exit polls, and that is that the "restoration" aspect. When asked if they would vote for their candidate or Bill Clinton if the latter was running, 57% of Hillary Clinton's voters said they would vote for Bill Clinton, vs. only 14% of Edwards voters and 24% of Obama voters. The idea of voting for one person because you want, or think that, someone else in the family will be the "real" president, is part of what brought us George W. Bush. Obviously Clinton isn't the blithering fool that Captain Codpiece is, but it does point to an alarming tendency in the population to think that you can go back in time by electing a relative of the actual candidate, and an acceptance of dynasties that's appalling in a country that was founded by declaring its independence from a king.

But the point remains: if there's any reason at all to not trust the voting system, then there's no reason to even pretending we have a democracy. The New Hampshire results simply mean that it's incumbent on all of us to pay very close attention to the polling numbers in the races to come and see if a pattern emerges.