Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has pulled 16 percentage points ahead of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, according to a Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University poll released Monday.
The telephone poll showed support for Sanders at 55 percent, while support for Clinton stood at 39 percent. This indicates a substantial break out for Sanders, who led the December iteration of the same poll by only two points, at 48 percent to Clinton’s 46 percent. It is consistent with a majority of polling in suggesting a surge in support for Sanders in New Hampshire, although the details of this surge have varied widely from a few points within the margin of error to double-digit leads.
The Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University poll surveyed 408 likely Democratic primary voters from January 20-24, with a margin of error of 4.9 percent.
Sanders is like a shot of adrenaline to the dying heart of America. Will the truth save us? Or will we sleep walk into corporate fascism?
We’re already there.
I looked at the internals of this poll. The internals said that only 50% of the Democratic respondents would vote again for Barak Obama, if he could constitutionally run again. This, in spite of the fact that every other poll has shown Obama enormously popular among Democrats countrywide. I think those numbers are regularly in the high 80s. Could it possibly be that in New Hampshire, that Barak Obama carried twice, only 50% of Democrats would vote for Obama again. Pardon me if I think that is unlikely in the extreme. Much more likely is that this poll got a pretty strange voter pool-- deliberately, I suspect not, but through unprofessionalism, most likely. Most surprisingly, the the “internals essay” showed no recognition of this incongruity. How about quizzing these pollsters about their techniques.
Pollsters don’t change their techniques until forced to. This is why FiveThirtyEight is such a godsend for determining what polls are good or not. Their weighted polling average has Sanders 52.8%, Clinton 39.4%, Better than a 13 point spread.
Always makes sense to be skeptical of any one poll. But in this case every major poll this month except one (PPP) has showed Bernie ahead to one degree or another in New Hampshire. Whether his margin is as high as 16% (or even higher as several polls suggest) I am somewhat skeptical. That being said, it’s New Hampshire, and right next to Vermont where Bernie’s wildly popular, so it’s not out of the question.
But in any event, it’s not nearly as important as yesterday’s poll that appeared to show Bernie significantly narrowing Hillary’s lead in South Carolina. But that one is in fact just one poll, and with a very large margin of error (9.4 points!). So, we’ll have to see what develops when we get at least a few more polls to support or contradict that apparent trend.