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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (30794)	6/14/2004 3:11:00 PM
From: Orcastraiter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

I am certainly not an expert on polling. But the problem with random sampling is this- anger (or in more general terms, any extreme emotion) has a tendency to skew the sample. By definition, random sampling means sampled without bias. In otherwords the sampling of opinion is blind to any emotion of the sampled opinion. So assuming that we have a random sample, then any extreme emotion would be represented within that sample. And if this anger is well distributed amongst the population, than any random sampling (of proper size of course) will reflect that anger, and those opinions. What you're saying is that somehow magically the anger amongst the public is not being sampled properly. I respectively disagree. The anger, and more importantly, the rise in anger over time, has been accurately recorded in the polls (within the limits of accuracy of course). If you do not agree that the anger is already reflected in the polls, then you do not believe in polls. Like i said in the previous poll, the CA Gov election would have been a difficult one to sample opinion on, because of the number of choices, the short time frame of the election and the flux of opinion. In otherwords using the CA Gov. election polls to discount the accuracy of polls in general is like blaming the tape measure for not being able to measure the length of a rapidly expanding and contracting spring accurately. LOL Orca