fbaezer wrote:I vow to the Des Moines Register pollsters. Good job!
In fairness, the last polls out by InsiderAdvantage, ARG and Zogby also all had Huckabee ahead. By 6%, 5% and 6% respectively (the DMR poll also had him ahead by 6%).
Earlier on I said I just didnt have a clue who'd win. I should have heeded a last-minute reminder I read somewhere about how Pat Robertson fared, back when. Almost all the polls had him in single digits until the very end; just one last-week poll had him at 14%. But he got 20%.
I wonder just how much support Huckabee got! Based on the polls he had a 50/50 chance of winning anyway, but if MSNBC is calling the Republican race already when they deem the Democrats race too close to call, he must have won by a comfortable margin?
Possible backgrounds from the top of my head:
- The pollsters undersample hardcore born-again Christian conservatives (but why would that be? Are they harder to reach?).
- The true Christian conservatives (say, born-again weekly church-goers) come out with more discipline than others - and particularly so in this once-in-15 years case when one of their very own is standing, and a likely voter model can't capture that.
The Robertson reference came with a related reminder I think, namely that born-again Christian conservatives are less likely than mainstream voters to be swayed by high-profile media stories (like, for example, those about the Huck's various recent gaffes). They rely largely on their own networks for information, through the church etc, and thus remain relatively sheltered from mainstream media narratives, even Fox's.
