Juan Cole further counters Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty:
60% of the 27% who said they were undecided favored political reform…supporters of the challenger's principles may not quite have committed to him at that point but were likely leaning to him on the basis of his platform. They were 16% of the sample. This finding suggests that in mid-May, Mousavi may have actually had 30% support.
If Ahmadinejad got all of the other 11% among undecideds, the race would have stood at 45% to 30%…based on his polling, Ballen did not expect Ahmadinejad to get to 51%. In fact, the regime has announced that Ahmadinejad received almost 63% of the vote. So while Ballen's polling does suggest that it was plausible that Ahmadinejad could have won a run-off election against Mousavi, it indicated that Ahmadinejad was unlikely to win a first round.
Nate Silver has more. There's something very fishy here. And the decision to run the op-ed under the headlines "The Iranian People Speak" and "What The People Wanted" is mystifying.
