Obama Leads South Carolina Polls
Palmetto State - Another Election Day Mistake for Poll Predictors?
Inaccurate polls in New Hampshire led to the media refraining from using polls in Nevada. Now the media is trying again to call the South Carolina Democratic Primary.
Even though the major networks shied away from predicting primary results in Nevada: pollsters are now predicting that Barack Obama is the leader in the South Carolina Democratic primary - with caveats. After the disaster in New Hampshire it appeared the news media would take a long sabbatical from conducting, repeating or using polling predictions. But just as the moth is attracted to the light, so too is the media drawn to the pollsters’ data! Thomas E. Mann’s book Media Polls in American Politics says: “…opinion polls have become staples of …reporting….[they] are a…permanent fixture of the modern newsroom….”
Now media journalists or pollsters are qualifying their data and predictions. Reuter’s political correspondent, John Whitesides, said in his January 23rd article: “Democrat Barack Obama holds a double-digit lead on rival Hillary Clinton three days before South Carolina's presidential primary…according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.” Whitesides continues: “About 14 percent of voters in the state are undecided, and about 20 percent of voters backing a candidate say they could still change their mind.”
According to pollsters, many of these qualifiers were determined to be the reasons the media got it wrong in New Hampshire.
Polls
- SurveyUSA Election Poll #13215 - conducted 01/17/08 by WSPA-TV Greenville and WCSC-TV Charleston, South Carolina says; “Barack Obama defeats Hillary Clinton 46% to 36%....” It qualifies these results by saying; “22% of likely Democratic primary voters say they ‘may’ change their mind.” Furthermore, the results may be different because “from the poll…they [some voters] had not yet decided.”
- Rasmussen Reports Telephone Survey - conducted January 17th by independent pollster Scott Rasmussen, states: “Obama [has] 44% of the vote, Clinton attracting 31%, and John Edwards 15% [of the vote.]” He qualifies this poll by stating: “It is unclear whether Clinton gained ground as the result of a bounce from her New Hampshire victory.”
- MSMBC/McClatchy Poll - conducted by Mason-Dixon Inc, reports the vote spread is “Barack Obama 40%, Hillary Clinton 31% [and] John Edwards 13%.” They report that “22% of Clinton, 21% of Obama and 19% of Edwards’s supporters might change [their] mind.” They further deduce that “33% of all voters might change [their] mind” and “15%...are undecided.”
- Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby Poll - Zogby says: “Obama leads Clinton 43 percent to 25 percent in the rolling tracking poll” that ended on January 17th. Reuter’s John Whitesides qualified the poll by saying: “The majority of the polling in the three-day survey was done before Monday night's angry debate in Myrtle Beach.”
- USA Today/Gallup Poll - In this Poll taken Thursday through Sunday it shows; “Obama 41%...Clinton 30%” but “Obama holds 68% of the African American vote….[while] Clinton maintains 54% of the women’s vote.” The poll results, which are stated in USA Today by reporter Susan Page, Poll: Blacks, young shifting support are subdued when Page suggests they needed “…twice as many respondents as usual, to make [the] analysis....”
- Washington Post/ABC News Poll - Krissah Williams of the Washington Post wrote on Monday, January 21, 2008; “according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll…Obama is now winning 60 percent of the black vote.” With his “42-29 percentage” lead the black voters are mathematically the difference.
The ultimate answer will be known on Saturday the 26th of January 2008. But an interesting question that will be answered is; did the media and pollsters get it right this time? Did Obama win or did they miscalculate the woman's vote again, the race vote or the southern strength of John Edwards?
