Nowhere do you experience the agony and ecstasy of following political polling results more than in the scientific tea-leaf readings now coming out of North Carolina. Each makes sense when you read them.
Here are two of the latest.
1. WTVD in North Carolina sees a nail-biter:
On the eve of the North Carolina Democratic Primary, with 25% of votes already cast, Barack Obama has no breathing room in his hope to defeat Hillary Clinton in popular votes.
According to SurveyUSA’s 8th and final tracking poll, conducted exclusively for ABC11 Eyewitness News, on the final day of the fiercely fought campaign, Senator Barack Obama holds on with 50% of the vote to Senator Hillary Clinton’s 45% of those polled.
There is no foreseeable outcome in North Carolina, regardless of which candidate wins the popular vote, where one candidate collects significantly more convention delegates than the other.
AND
2. FiveThirdyEight.com predicts it’ll be Obama by double-digits.
In Pennsylvania and Indiana, the previous times that we conducted this exercise, the results from our regression model were closely in line with the composite polling averages in those states. In North Carolina, however, while most polls show a tightening, single-digit race, our model steadfastly forecasts a solid, double-digit victory for Barack Obama.
If you’ll recall, the way that I produce these projections is to rely purely on demographic data from previous primaries. So the unstated assumption is this: if voters in North Carolina behave like demographically-aligned voters in other states, this is about what we should expect. On the other hand, if something has changed in the way that some groups of voters view the candidates — our model may be inaccurate.
There does appear to me to be some evidence that Hillary Clinton is overperforming the position she has generally held throughout most of the recent primaries. But there is also some strong evidence that the current polling in North Carolina may be understating Barack Obama’s support in that state.
Read it in its entirety since it’s a detailed analysis.
Choose the poll that fits your political bias and believe it, and pooh-pooh the other one.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.