Clinton pollster dismisses ‘outlier’ New Hampshire poll

Hillary Clinton's top pollster on Wednesday trashed a poll that showed the former secretary of state trailing in New Hampshire by 27 points, calling it an "outlier."

"Well first of all, you folks report these polls, as you know, you’ve heard me say this, as if they’re all tracking polls. This poll has been an outlier each time it came out," Joel Benenson, the Clinton campaign's chief strategist and pollster, said in an interview with MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports."


In the CNN/WMUR poll, which came out the previous day, Bernie Sanders led Clinton 60 percent to 33 percent, and a higher percentage of Democratic voters said Clinton was the "least honest" Democratic candidate (55 percent, compared with 2 percent for the Vermont senator). Benenson dismissed that point as well. "I've been asked this question all the way through. We have a candidate who has been leading throughout the country. She is leading in all the Super Tuesday states by significant margins," he said.

Benenson, who worked as Barack Obama's senior strategist in 2008 and 2012, maintained that the campaign has always said that New Hampshire would be a "very close" race and argued that "anytime there’s a New Englander on the ballot in New Hampshire, the races are highly competitive."

Voters in New Hampshire, Benenson continued, often make up their minds in the last week before the primary.

"So, these things are going to be volatile and competitive down to the end," he said, "and we just keep focusing on driving the message we have for Americans who are voting and Democrats who are voting in these primaries who want a candidate who can produce real results who’ll make a real difference in their lives."

The RealClearPolitics average of New Hampshire polls shows Sanders ahead of Clinton by 11.4 percentage points.

