Quote:
Originally Posted by timmynausea
The one I've heard that makes the most sense is that a lot of Independents that planned on voting for Obama decided to vote in the Republican primary (likely for McCain) because all the polls showed Obama up by so much.
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I buy that in general (that he will have trouble in states where McCain has a strong presence) but I would expect that to have shown up in polling. I would presume that most of these polls ask people in what primary they intend to vote -- so you'd expect that independents who knew they were going to vote for McCain would indicate so in advance, and we would have seen that in pre-primary polling.
It's a whole different game trying to decide which candidates will do well in a state based on demographics, local issues, D/R splits, and so forth... as compared just to basing it on polling data, especially that done very near the actual vote. The latter, finding major differences between multiple polls and the actual vote, is often pretty mysterious.