This seems to clarify the confusion with the polls.
electoral-vote.com
"
......But using land lines is no bed of roses either. Many people use caller ID or their answering machine to do call screening. Busy young professionals are rarely home from work before 11 p.m. whereas lonely old people are only too happy to talk to the nice young girl who seems to care about what they think. Calls made at 2 p.m. are going to oversample housewives, and so on. All these effects lead to biases. To correct for them, pollsters conduct exit polls of voters leaving the polling place on election day to get a good idea of the statistical make up of the electorate for next time. These data are used to correct the polls. For example, if the exit polls show that 10% of the voters in some state are African Americans and in a state poll of 600 people by accident only 30 are African Americans (5%), the pollster can just count each African American twice. This process is called normalization. It was proposed for use to correct undercounts in the 2000 census but was rejected by the courts on the gronds that the constitution calls for an "enumeration" of the population, not a statistical model of the population.
Exactly what to normalize for is a controversial issue. Should the pollster make sure his poll has the statistically correct number of Catholics, gun owners, retirees, veterans, immigrants, union members, millionaires, welfare mothers, fat people, lesbians, and [fill in your favorite category]? Where do you draw the line? More specifically, should the pollster normalize to make sure the effective number of Democrats and Republicans is correct? Some pollsters do and some do not. And how many is correct? Gallup is currently normalizing to 40% Republicans and 33% Democrats which some pollsters think is highly unrealistic, which explains why Gallup's polls show Bush doing so well."
Bottom line is all polls are worthless and don't really reflect anything. |
