Right now CNN and other news media outlets are struggling frantically to explain the extremely surprising result of the New Hampshire primary. Up until the votes started coming in tonight, they were pretty sure that Obama would take it (not so strange perhaps since four late polls all gave him the victory). The race was practically over for Hillary Clinton. News pundits were describing her campaign as desperate. And then she wins!
I am sure there will be plenty of speculation about what caused this upset. How could media be so wrong? I think we are already seeing three types of explanations: successful campaigning by Hillary Clinton, mistakes by the Obama-campaign, and problems with polls. As usual, there are probably several factors.
David Kuo focuses on problems with polls. He suggests that it is one thing to express support for a black candidate in a survey but a very different issue to vote for the same candidate. Once at the election booth, white candidates tend to get more support.
Yet race is not always important. Using data from the 1990s, Donald Kinder and Corrine McConnaughy (2006) find that Colin Powell is considered “a national hero, drawing support and admiration from Americans of all walks of life—blacks and whites, men and women, rich and poor, northerners and southerners”, the perfect candidate in short. Still, they also find that race often matters as other prominent black politicians are not treated evenhandedly. In sum, there is a possibility that Obama can transcend race, but it is sadly enough far from certain.
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