It may be worth noting that Obama got 36-37%, which is pretty close to his polling average. It was Clinton who exceeded her polling average substantially. I haven't seen any discussion of absentee voting. I wonder how much of Clinton's support voted before Iowa (when her polling average was considerably higher) and whether that support escaped the attention of polls.

I have your handy and ultra-cool looking delegate counter on my blog.  Will it update automatically or will I have to get the new code when it updates?

Can't stand watching a woman cry, especially after being kicked and pummeled to the ground in a debate.

It takes skill to become the underdog after leading the crowd, and doing so in only five days. It was a masterful ploy.

Clinton pulled it out barely. Lets not forget she held a commanding lead in every poll month after month. What has hurt Obama is the expectations game mostly created by the media Independent of what the voters actually want. Obama was riding a groundswell but he peaked and broke a bit too early is all. Hillary survived it but lets face it she's battered pretty badly. At this juncture her backers expected her to runaway from the field and thats not what is happening. Obama is still emboldened and has cash and Edwards has to make up his mind if he's really for Change or its just a bunch of empty lawyer talk? Its Edwards call now he can make or break either of them by dropping out after N.C.'s primary. My guess is where in for a long fight here. Just because Obama didn't win doesn't mean he can't. Bill Clinton didn't win N.H. in 1992 as I re-call but it didn't stop him either. This time its Bill and his wife who are the establishment and its they who are the minority in the party. The simple facts are if you add Obama's 37% to Edwards 17% u have the majority for change and not the Hillary variety.

thought they were killing her, but they actually helped.

If they would have been honest. Reported polls honestly.  Obama would have had a closer race and maybe even won.  People would have been urging to vote like in Iowa.  (btw. Iowa was a fluke because working people don't get to take out 3 hours to stand in corners at 7 - 10 pm. and we see Hill owns that group under $50,000-if they don't work, they don't get paid)

Does anyone think, if McCain  was behind big, and had closed on 1/7 that the pollsters would have buried it?

I give them credit for releasing accurate numbers.
I caught the Rass right away.  I ignored Zogby, though I looked at it today.

I see a number of factors contributing to the late surge.

1) Obama got a big bounce out of Iowa.  A law of political gravity is that a significant part of big bounces disappear over time (I'll call it the counter-bounce).  Obama's counter-bounce was due to start happening around this time anyway, and the factors I'll outline below sped it up.

2) Clinton's NH support has consistently polled firmer than Obama's, i.e., more people give answers like "strong supporter" or "certain of my vote".  Combined that with the bounce, and it's evident that the large lead Obama had over the weekend was super-soft.

3) Unlike Dean in '04 who had no real bottom to how far he could fall, Clinton is a known commodity.  People--especially real Democrats, her core supporters--might fall into the latest fad for a few hours but then they wake up and go "Wait.  This is Hillary Clinton we're talking about, not some charicature.  I know Hillary Clinton."

All those factors set up the possibility for a Clinton comeback.  Here's what made it actually happen:

1) A couple of things at the debate helped her. After she had her nice little line about hurt feelings, Obama kind of chips in "you're likable enough" which is really a left-handed compliment for a gent to offer a lady in public. The media didn't play that much, but a fair number of New Hampshire Democrats were watching, and it was a foot-in-mouth moment for Obama that a fair number of people took into the polling booth with them.

2) Probably a little less important was Hillary's shot about Obama's lobbyist NH chair, which he denied, but which was true. That didn't get much play, either, and probably most of the watchers never heard any fact-checking, but it got some blogosphere time and never entirely died as a story. To the extent it lived on it raised some rather difficult questions for Obama, both about how his lobbyist connections relate to his "new way" of doing things and about whether he tells the truth when attacked. I doubt we've heard the last of it, because Obama's SC chair is a registered federal lobbyist.

Generally on the debate, New Hampsherites seem to have believed their lying eyes and not what the pundits told them.  Hillary looked good and showed passion, and Obama was somewhat removed.  (It's also possible that the tag-teaming bit didn't go over so well.)

3) There was not much really to counter-balance against those things, because Obama played the last few days as a victory lap. Clinton showed more desire and kept the headlines.

4) Not everybody can profit by (semi-)crying, but it was what the doctor ordered for a candidate who is decried as the super-scripted ice queen. Even better was the timing. It got so much air time on Monday that Hillary got pretty much the full amount of bounce from it, but without time for the counter-bounce to set in, as it inevitably does.

So yeah, the signs were there.  Big time.

In the Iowa Caucuses the polls were pretty accurate, the DMR poll dead on.  People came to rooms, stood up and were counted.  In NH the poll numbers for Richardson, Edwards were exact despite some anecdotal evidence of Edwards losing support to Clinton.  Obama's internal poll had him up by 14%, Clinton's internal had him up by 11%.  

80% of NH precincts use the diabolical and terribly inaccurate Diebold machines, and here we are with our first results and people scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened.  

Todd, with all due respect, please, no apologies for the MSM/pundits/pollsters.  They all got it wrong--whether by eight points or eighteen, NONE OF THEM were remotely correct.

I submit to you they all LIED.  Yes, LIED.

They were desperate to make true their dream of stopping a "Clinton Restoration."  Indeed, William Kristol in the TIMES commented "Thank you, Obama, for stopping the Clinton Restoration."

It was the Matthews/Williams/Russert narrative from the outset.  

They intended to make far much more out of silly, wholly unrepresentative Iowa caucuses, wherein the Oprah Winfrey megamillions bused in thousands of out-of-state non-Iowans to cast caucus votes for the neophyte Obama, to whom Ms. Winfrey has stupidly made herself an absolute obsequious fool.

If signs are what you truly want to read, then consider this, which anti-forces can neither stomach, nor accept.  Senator Obama did not win the majority of core Democrats in Iowa (they split between Edwards and Clinton).  

And he has not won the majority of core Democrats in New Hampshire.  

And with the possible exception of his home state of Illinois and South Carolina, he will never win the majority of core Democrats again.

And despite those thousands of bused-in (with those megamillions) outsiders in caucuses, or "indies" and "leaners" in the very few states that permit that amorphous crossover voting, the true Democrats in traditional voting Democratic primaries are NEVER GOING TO ABANDON THE CLINTONS.

NEVER, EVER.

And those Democrats are, indeed, the core of the party.

This was known in all of the polling data throughout 2007, and remains true to this day.

In order to give what was clearly then a flagging Obama candidacy a much-needed boost, the Des Monies Register poll followed the Obama campaign playbook so that the 200,000, but largely independent and outsider vote could become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

What was missing from any serious analysis of both that poll and its self-fulfilled results was the fact that Obama wasn't winning over the majority of core Democrats.

And that, by itself, after his full year of campaigning, made his candidacy a non-starter.

I, and millions like myself, are more than infuriated by both the MSM and their anti-Clinton friends in the blogosphere, that NON DEMOCRATS are attempting to hijack the Democratic Party.

We have no objection to "expanding the base."  That is how general elections are won.

But this is a PRIMARY process, and DEMOCRATS themselves, and not the outsiders, must be the final arbiters of which person becomes their standard-bearer.

I know it is difficult for many in the blogosphere to understand, and difficult for many a young person with short memories, who have unfairly lumped the Clintons with the Bushes in the "status quo," but for most of us Democrats who well remember the Clinton years, it was indeed a golden era.

The Clintons survived because their bedrock core of Democrats never deserted them.  Not even in the worst days of Impeachment and Inquisitions.  That is why Bill Clinton maintained high approval ratings for the full last six years of his reign.  

Yes, the economy propelled him--but the bedrock Democrats would not give up on him, even when much of the MSM had him resigning.

Why any in that same MSM and blogosphere would believe that today the majority of bedrock Democrats are going to cast their ballots for anyone other than the distaff side of that Clinton tandem is the truly astonishing fact.

Yes, Senator Obama is highly intelligent, and has soaring rhetoric.  He commands large crowds.

But the unfortunate fact is that Senator Obama may believe he is campaigning for an Obama Party that embraces independents, Republicans and Democrats, with any number of nontraditional outsiders, but in fact he is still running to win the DEMOCRATIC PARTY nomination.  And that, when all is said and done, means winning a clear--indeed a commanding--number of actual DEMOCRATS.

And a majority of those he has NEVER had, not in 2007, not in Iowa, not in New Hampshire, and aside from possibly his home state of Illinois and South Carolina, likely he will acquire no where else.

That is what the anti-Clinton pollsters, pundits, talking-heads and their friends in the blogosphere have chosen to ignore.  This is because it does not fit with their anti-Clinton narrative.

After ignoring that basic fact in Iowa, the anti-Clinton forces magnified the Obama win in Iowa--wholly unrepresentative of the Democratic Party itself--into the stratosphere.

Accordingly, they cooked the polls.  They wanted desperately to depress the Clinton base, freeze up the Clinton coffers.

The reason for this was clear--once Senator Clinton began winning in traditional non-crossover primaries, that core Democratic base would sweep her to victory.

So with New Hampshire, the MSM made its last stand.  Either depress the Clinton forces now, with everything they had, with all the resources of mixed broadcast and print media at their disposal, or live with the fact that ultimately Senator Clinton would be a likely future president.

In the end, Todd, when the numbers, particularly the national numbers, and most importantly the core Democratic base numbers, were simply not moving to the anointed Senator Obama's advantage, it was then that the entire MSM pollster/punditocracy decided to LIE.

Yes, I submit to you they all LIED.  Misters Zogby and Rasmussen, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, CNN--all of them, that coterie devoted to stopping to the Clinton Restoration, LIED.

And they will go on lying to the bitter end--such as vaulting the signficance of a Nevada Union endorsement today, for example, as if that too is somehow supposed to move core Democrats away from the Clintons.

I maintain that the truth of the matter is that the dynamics of the race never much changed all year, and the truth, when the ugly conspiracy of the anti-Clinton MSM gang is exposed, will reveal that even now Senator Clinton maintains her double-digit national lead.

Oprah's megallions are not enough.  The core Democrats are not abandoning the Clintons.

And that was the real reality of both Iowa and New Hampshire.

The polling methodology wasn't flawed at all.  The anti-Clinton forces simply dismissed the real results and created their own findings, to buttress their continuing stop-the-Clintons narrative.

That is the whole truth, and nothing but.

Sorry, it is not going to happen.

Bad news for Obama.

The Chairwoman of the Democratic party of South Carolina just pointed out that the majority of South Carolina voters are women and 65% of African American voters are women.

Of course Obama could win women like he did in Iowa, though that was largely because of young voters, but its worth noting that Clinton might have an ace up her sleeve that people are overlooking.

Pollsters will have to be careful not to undersample African Americans OR Women voters.

Yep, I called this race 'over' a couple of days ago.   Go, me!