Don't Take New Hampshire For Granite

Hillary Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary was a surprise to everyone, including, apparently, Hillary Clinton. Tim Russert said last night on MSNBC that the Clinton people had told him that morning that they had internal polling showing her between 9 and 11 points down. Their hope for the day was that they could keep their loss to Obama within single digits.

Instead, she won a tight race, garnering 39% over Obama's 37% and Edwards's 17%. It truly is a startling turnaround for the Clinton campaign, which was in a tailspin after their unexpected loss to Obama in Iowa last week. By yesterday morning, there was open talk about bringing in new (or, better put, old) blood like James Carville and Paul Begala -- although both Carville and Begala have denied it. (Begala quoted something he says to his four boys: "NHD -- not happening, dude.")

I am not naive enough to think they're not going back to the campaign just because they said so, but certainly the urgency of a shakeup is diminished this morning. Mark Penn, the campaign manager who was widely criticized (including by Bill Clinton) for his "Obama: Where's The Bounce?" memo just last weekend, is probably smiling today.

The question on everyone's mind is, how did the polls and the pundits get it so wrong? What happened between the time the pollsters hung up their phones and the voters pulled their levers? Remember, even the Clintons' internal polls showed her losing.

The most colorful theory I've heard yet comes from Pam Spaulding over at Pandagon, who has postulated the Tweety Effect -- "where the misogyny of a talking head in the MSM so enrages a demographic that they go out and vote in a manner that will put egg on the face of the talking head." The Tweety Effect is named for MSNBC "Hardball" anchor Chris Matthews.

It'll be interesting to see the post-mortems over the next week or so on why the media got it so wrong. By the way, there was an interesting exchange last night between Matthews and NBS eminence grise Tom Brokaw where Brokaw implicitly scolded Matthews for this "Tweety-ness." Or maybe explicitly. Read for yourself (and thanks to Digby at Hullabaloo for the transcript):

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to do?

MATTHEWS: Yes, sir?

BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: Well what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess.

BROKAW: No, no, we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. You can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this.

But we don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed. And trying to stampede in effect the process.

Look, I’m not just picking on us, it’s part of the culture in which we live these days. I think that the people out there are going to begin to make judgments about us if we don’t begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding, in many cases, as we learned in New Hampshire when they went into the polling booth today or in the last three days. They were making decisions very late.

Here's their colloquy:

In any case, we apparently still have an actual contest for the Democratic nomination, which is good for the party and for the nation. Lots of entertainment value, too!