What happened in New Hampshire

I swear, this blog will soon return to the mundane comings and goings of the LeCompte family, but I wanted to pass along some fascinating self-flagellation and analysis going on in the U.S. political media about why everyone was so wrong about what was going to happen in New Hampshire.

Politico has a piece that reads much like a Politicos Anonymous meeting. In sum: reporters and pundits are addicts, and knowing what voters are going to do is their crack cocaine. (Side note - Politico has been self-critical about wrong stories in the past).

The Washington Post has some comments from a pollster who suggests that the polls stopped calling people before the momentum swung towards Hillary.

Andrew Kohut has a piece in the New York Times suggesting that the under-response from poor, white voters causes polls to overestimate support for black candidates. Which is a slight variation on something else known as the Bradley Effect - where voters tell a pollster they're voting for the black candidate when they really support the white candidate.

This column from the nation sums up what I think was some real revulsion from people as to how Hillary's "emotion" was covered in the last hours of the campaign. And Markos Moulatsis, not a fan of Hillary's by any stretch of the imagination, expands on the thought.

And Marc Ambinder has a decent summary of the remainder of theories on why everyone (including Hillary's campaign staff) had it massively wrong.

Returning to our regularly scheduled family news programming, I went and saw Charlie Wilson's War tonight. I highly recommend it.