New Hypothesis

I have been puzzling out a new hypothesis for Hillary's New Hampshire win. The focus has been on how she did better than the polls expected even though Obama did fairly close to what was expected. This fact forgets that there were other people on the ballot. In particular, John Edwards, based on my memory, didn't generate the votes projected for him either. This fits the view that Hillary's unexpected results came from women making less than $50,000, with no college degree and other demographic factors most associated with America's working class. Did these voters finally decide between Edwards and Clinton? The publicly available exit poll data doesn't reveal such a connection, but I believe it to be a hypothesis worthy of exploring, especially by the candidates' number crunchers. Hillary's victory speech sounded much more like Edwards' then she had to that point. Maybe she was already singing to this part of the Democratic choir.

By the way, I can't remember where I read it now, but I understand that pollsters are avoiding the Nevada caucuses out of fear of even greater failure. Unlike Iowa, there is no track record in Nevada for who will caucus and who will not so the pollster would be guessing at who the "likely voters" will be. The last data pollster.com has for its charts is from Dec. 6, 2007. Look for leaked data from the candidates' internal polling, but take all that info with the ton of salt it deserves.