El impacto del Union Leader

Nate Silver:

What I’ve done, therefore, is compare how the Republican candidate endorsed by The Union Leader finished in each of the past six competitive New Hampshire primaries compared with how he was polling at the time of the endorsement. By default, I use an average of all statewide polls conducted in the three weeks before the endorsement, although there were no polls within this window in the 1980 and 1996 cycles, so I use the first poll just after the endorsement instead. I do not consider races before 1980, as we have no New Hampshire polls for those years in our database.

As it happens, although only three of the six Republicans endorsed by The Union Leader during this period won their primary, all six outperformed their polling. Mr. du Pont, for instance, finished with a fairly meager 11 percent of the vote in 1988 — but this was better than his 4 percent standing in the polls at the time of the endorsement.



On average, the candidates endorsed by The Union Leader finished with 29 percent of the vote in New Hampshire — an 11-percentage-point improvement from the 18 percent they averaged in the polls when the endorsement was made.

(...) This is a pretty good sign for Mr. Gingrich. If you do take the results of the regression analysis to be tantamount to a prediction, they imply that New Hampshire could be quite close, with Mr. Romney finishing with 36 percent of the vote and Mr. Gingrich at 30 percent. What I think is fair to say is that Mr. Gingrich would at least have a shot at winning New Hampshire if he also wins Iowa, a result that could be devastating to Mr. Romney’s campaign.