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Trust Me, There's A Bounce

Just a quick thought about that new CNN/WMUR poll out tonight showing Hillary and Obama tied in New Hampshire. Clinton pollster Mark Penn holds it up as evidence that there's no Obama bounce coming out of Iowa. This strikes me as preposterous. We're talking about a poll conducted Friday night and during the day on Saturday. Why is that a problem? Two reasons:

1.) There's no way the full brunt of the Iowa result had trickled down to the average voter by Friday night. It wasn't even known until after many people went to bed (or at least turned off the television and went offline) Thursday night, and Friday is not a day most people spend soaking up news. (Many don't, for example, tune into the nightly news Friday evening, etc.)

2.) It's notoriously difficult to get a representative sample of voters Friday night, since many people go out and therefore don't answer their phones. As with Christmas vacation, this could taint the sample because, say, more affluent voters are more likely to go out, and Obama does better among affluent voters.

My hunch is that any poll conducted before Sunday (and therefore realeased Monday), when people actually read newspapers and watch news broadcasts, won't measure the full extent of the Obama bounce. Which is, you know, bad news for Hillary, since she won't know how much she's down till it's almost too late to do something about it.

--Noam Scheiber