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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MrLucky who wrote (5947)	12/1/2005 8:35:07 AM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 542836

But, as I have mentioned to DB of this thread, I'm not all that enamored with polls in the first place. Most of us think polls are great when our side does well but then trash them when it is doing badly. Done correctly polls are the best information we have on the various ebbs and flows of the electorate between elections. And are treated as such. The Bush folk, for instance, are widely believed to be close to distraught over their bad polling now. And, no doubt, are trying to create some better poll numbers, either artificially or actually. But polling is very sensitive to tampering. And that's the problem. Slight wording changes can alter distributions rather dramatically. And the growing practice of rebalancing samples, using stratified samples, and the like means one has to be very leary. I generally do the opposite you say you do. I consider the major media polls the more accurate and the newer, less tested ones the less so. But then I try to pay more attention to the full field of polls and changes over time. Finally, my own concern is that journalism schools don't train journalists to read polls correctly. So we get whacky interpretations.