---snip---
Take polling, please. The vast majority of Americans?as many as 90%, pollsters have told me privately?refuse to answer questions when the wizard calls (although the number is marginally better this hot election year). People who use cell phones exclusively, mostly younger voters, are unreachable. The wizards say they can correct for these things, by "weighting" their polls?that is, giving disproportionate weight to members of underrepresented groups like young people. But surely that makes polling less scientific and more speculative. It means polls should be trusted only to verify broad shifts?Bush moved ahead in the presidential race after the Republican Convention?rather than specific point spreads. There are other problems. Volatile times make for less accurate polling. The wizards base their model electorates, inevitably, on who voted last time. Earth-shattering events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq could yield a substantially different electorate in 2004, but no one knows whether that means, for instance, that there will be a surge of military-draft-fearing 18-to-24-year-olds coming out to vote this year. The subject of Iraq, in itself, has to be hard to poll; people are torn among their loyalty to the troops, their lack of knowledge about a previously obscure part of the world and the nagging sense that something has gone quite wrong. Mixed feelings are difficult to quantify.
---snip---
Full article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/04/klein.polls/index.html
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