It was stated that in New Hampshire "The Democrats were leading by 46-40% in the final polls; the Republicans won by 51-47%, a 10 point switch"
Looking at site I mentioned in my earlier post, here are the final polls listed for NH:
Polling Firm Date GOP DEM UNDECIDED SPREAD
ARG 11/2-11/3 48% 44% 8% GOP +4
Univ of NH 10/30-11/2 47% 46% 7% GOP +1
Concord Monitor 10/29-10/31 46% 47% 7% Dem +1
ARG 10/28-10/30 48% 46% 6% GOP +2
FPC/WNDS-TV 10/27-10/30 40% 45% 15%Dem +5
Univ of NH 10/23-10/28 42% 46% 12% Dem +4
So let's take the ARG poll, the last one, factor in the undecided breaking the same way the poll did (48% GOP 44% DEM = 92%; 48% is 52.17% of 92%, 44% is 47.83% of 92%) thus GOP gets 4.2% of the undecided and Dem gets 3.8% of the Undecided. Add this to the poll numbers to get the following:
NH Senate
GOP 52.2%
DEM 47.8%
which is pretty close to the actual numbers if you take out 3rd party candidates and look at the two major party results only:
Sununnu GOP 227,229 52.27%
Shaheen DEM 207,478 47.73%
So NH did not fall outside the margain of error in an analysis of several competing polls of the end of election period.
Look at the last 4 polls, the actual result was reasonable with the margain of error in all four polls. How do you explain these polls away?
The point of the analysis that started this discussion was "... to determine the odds that four out of eight hotly contested Senate races would dramatically turn from the Democrat to the Republican, based on the latest polling numbers taken just prior to the election."
If you are only using one set of polling data before the election (that which is most favorable to Democrats) and not factoring any other polling data (Neutral or favorable towards Republicans) I don't see how you can say this is an honest analysis of the polls.
If your point is to say the polls showed Democrats should have won more of these races and that there was the possibility that elections were stolen by tabulator tampering, I don't think you can without examining all the polls relating to a race. Some of these races were just close looking at the assorted polling results and as in NH did not"dramatically turn from the Democrat to the Republican"
Dems sometimes lose because of bad campaigns, national trends and momentum, local events, which a straight stastical analysis of flawed numbers may not take into account.