The New Hampshire and California primary numbers were so ridiculously off that pollsters are generally thought to be operating out of bounds these days with a gravely flawed methodology, to put it faintly. This notion seems to be reenforced by two strongly divergent polls that came out today.
A Quinnipiac poll that has Hillary Clinton at 55 to Barack Obama‘s 34 in Ohio, and Clinton ahead of Obama in Pennsylvania by 52 to 36. How the hell does that square with those good Virginians giving Obama such an overwhelming majority two days ago with Obama dramatically cutting into Hillary’s core support base? How can there be more than a 45-point difference between these Ohio/Pennsylvania numbers and the final Virginia tallies? Has Virginia been invaded by aliens from the planet Trafalmadore, or have they landed their space ships in Pennsylvania and Ohio?
There’s also a just-released Rasmussen Reports daily poll showing Obama with a national double-digit lead over Clinton with 49% of likely Democratic primary voters and only 37% standing by Hillary. The “most stunning” aspect of the Obama surge is that “he now leads 46% to 41% among women. Clinton retains a lead among the narrower subset of white women, but her lead in that vital demographic is down to just three percentage points.”
Either the pollsters are drunk or on drugs, the people they’ve spoken to are drunk or on drugs or crazy, or these polls simply weren’t conducted on the same planet. There’s no fourth explanation.