Barack Obama and Mitt Romney weren't the only ones nursing losses in New Hampshire Tuesday night. The political polling industry, after projecting a big Obama victory for days, found itself conflicted, confused and embarrassed by the vast gulf separating the predictions from Election Day reality.

Just hours after Hillary Clinton's stunning comeback, with voting data still rolling in, pollsters and political scientists grappled with one question: How did the pre-election surveys get it so wrong? Explanations for the failure included faulty methodology, the emotional effect of a teary-eyed Clinton on the eve of the vote, unpredictable turnout among independent voters, and the possibility that race was a concern for some voters in the privacy of the voting booth.

"It's shocking," said Del Ali, director of Research 2000, which conducts surveys for the Monitor. "I think everyone's looking for answers."

The last Monitor poll, released Saturday night, showed Obama and Clinton locked in a dead heat in New Hampshire. By Sunday, nearly every other poll showed Obama opening a wide lead.

A University of New Hampshire/WMUR tracking poll on Sunday put Obama at a 10 point lead. A Gallup survey released Monday had Obama trouncing Clinton, 41 percent to 28 percent. According to a compilation on the website realclearpolitics.com, Obama enjoyed an average lead of eight points in polls taken last weekend - outside the typical margin of error.

The flawed projections are even more striking in light of the accuracy with which the same polls described the outcome of the state's Republican primary, with most giving John McCain a five- to six-point win over Romney.

Clinton's three-point victory set off rounds of soul-searching within the polling industry yesterday. Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News, said he and his colleagues need to take "a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been wrong. We need to know why."

Langer said pollsters should break down their results by the respondents' age, gender, income and other factors, to see whether they accurately predicted the proportions in which those groups actually voted.

Others argued that the problem might not be the way the polls were conducted, but how they were interpreted. David Moore, senior fellow at Carsey Institute at UNH and former editor of the Gallup Poll, said most polls implied that the electorate was firmly set in its decisions. But a thorough examination of the responses shows that many voters were still unsure who they would support just a few days before the primary.

The final UNH poll, for instance, said that only 53 percent of likely Democratic voters had definitely decided who they would vote for. Twenty-six percent said they were leaning toward a candidate, while 21 percent said they had not yet decided who to support. According to exit polls on Tuesday, nearly 40 percent of voters made up their minds within the last three days of the campaign.

"There was a very large number of people who could potentially be influenced by last-minute media events," Moore said. "That's tens of thousands, still listening to the news and looking for pieces of information to help them make up their mind."

And those last-minute events made their mark. In a Portsmouth café on Monday, Clinton choked up when asked by a voter how she managed the stress of the campaign trail. The scene, broadcast relentlessly over the final 24 hours of the campaign, may have reinforced support for Clinton among the middle-aged women who ended up backing her in large numbers Tuesday.

Moore also cited Clinton's performance in a televised debate Saturday night, in which she discussed her gender and launched a series of stinging critiques of Obama's record and rhetoric.

Most pollsters had stopped calling voters by Sunday or Monday, leaving little time for the impact of those events to register, said Dick Bennett, director of American Research Group.

"For me, it was a timing problem," Bennett said. "If the campaign had gone on a couple more days, we would have seen the effect of those events."

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