For the Democrats, why did we see major discrepancies between polling and election results in New Hampshire, especially compared to the Iowa caucuses? My colleague, John McGinnis, offered a possible reason: people might have wanted to appear to their neighbors (i.e., in an Iowa caucus) to be more open to an African-American candidate than they were in the privacy of the voting booth. A similar, though less strong effect might influence a respondent’s answer to a pollster in New Hampshire: a possible reluctance to admit favoring or voting for Clinton over Obama.
As someone who has voted for Barack Obama several times in the past, I hadn’t thought of that possibility.