Did Race Cost Obama NH?

Polls predicting a Barack Obama win in New Hampshire were way off, and the head of the Pew Research Center thinks race and class were part of the reason. In his years as a pollster, he has found that poorer, less-educated white people are less likely to agree to answer poll questions—and more likely to vote against black candidates.

So why were the Iowa polls spot-on? "My guess is that Mr. Obama may have posed less of a threat to white voters in Iowa because he wasn’t yet the front-runner," Andrew Kohut writes in the New York Times. Kohut says polls are better today than decades ago at predicting support for black candidates, but "the difficulties in interviewing the poor and the less well-educated persist." (More Barack Obama stories.)