For those exit poll conspiracy theorists

FOr all those who are starting to think that there was some mass conspiracy to pad the vote for Clinton and that the true results should have been what the exit polls said, Robert Novak clears up what went wrong. If the exit polls indicated that Obama was going to win, surely that means he should have won and who cares what the actual vote count said, right? However, exit polls are just based on mathematical models. The pollsters have a hypothesis of what the electorate will be and then extrapolate from the sampling they're getting. And the problem simply was that their models weren't formulated for the women's turnout that there was on the Democratic side in New Hampshire.

The exit polls were so wrong because they grossly understated the female vote in New Hampshire. Had the turnout of women there, which constituted an unprecedented 57 percent of the actual Democratic vote, been plugged in to exit interviews, a 2-percentage point Clinton victory would have been forecast. The unexpected female support in turn can be attributed to the Clinton style, which may not be pretty but is effective. Hillary Clinton's tears evoked sympathy for her, and Bill Clinton's sneers generated contempt for Obama.

Novak goes on to say that this is why Republicans shouldn't relax and think that Hillary would be easier to defeat than running against the dreams that Obama promises us. He makes the further jump to then say that McCain is the candidate best prepared to withstand the Clinton onslaught. That's debatable, but it will be the question that many Republican voters will be pondering in the next weeks.