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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (172270)	8/17/2001 12:20:14 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Set aside the validity issue for a second. Are any polls valuable? Why? I am speaking of polls for public consumption, not private polls for internal purposes.

To: Neocon who wrote (172270)	8/17/2001 12:43:48 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Well I don't know why anyone would consider any poll is a truly random sampling and will pretty well correlate with the national distribution of various demographic factors (age, region, ethnicity, sex, income, etc.), What you call random polls represent an opinion of those who can listen and care enough to give an opinion. But is it an honest opinion as it is not anonymous. Did the bias in the methods of the person asking the question have an influence on the vote. Is the person asking the question honestly recording the vote? Are the people being contacted actually random? I assume that the folks who do the mindless job of polling are graded on getting the number needed and who checks on what was really said. Has anyone every been contacted to give an opinion. I think only folks ignorant of the dangers of giving this kind of information to a stranger on the phone do not represent all Americans. I'd guess it is possible a list is developed of those who will even give opinions on the phone is developed and used repeatedly. A vote.com poll is described as follows. One can read the question being asked and there is a discussion associated with each issue. Anyone can participate and vote or not. I don't see any reason to call this poll any more or less scientific than any other poll. The votes represent an informed opinion of those who can read and care enough to vote. As with all polls some may vote in error. But I'd suggest that as the poll reaches several thousand vote error is far less than 1%. tom watson tosiwmee