Five rules on how to be smart about polls

[struggle4progress]

By David Lauter
May 24, 2012, 3:45 a.m.

... Don’t forget the limits of national polls. Presidential elections get fought out state-by-state in the electoral college, but most public polls are conducted nationwide because polling all the battleground states individually is too expensive ...

Be skeptical of apparent big swings. During the primary campaigns, voters got used to huge ups and downs. Candidates could soar or collapse over the span of a week. That almost never happens in a general election for president. Why? Unlike in the primaries, the vast majority of voters already know which candidate they will support in the general election ...

Don’t mix apples and oranges. Every polling organization does things a little differently. So if a poll shows Romney with a five-point lead in a state, then another organization comes along a few days later with a poll showing Romney with a one-point edge, don’t conclude that the race has tightened. It’s quite possible the “shift” may just reflect different polling methods ...

Pay attention to what the candidates actually do. For weeks, many Republicans have been saying that North Carolina is out of reach for Obama. The volume on that assertion got cranked up even higher after Obama announced his support for gay marriage the day after North Carolina voters approved a ballot initiative banning same-sex unions in the state. Yet Romney’s campaign has been airing advertisements this week in just four states, and North Carolina is one of them (Virginia, Ohio and Iowa are the other three) ...

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-five-rules-on-how-to-be-smart-about-polls-20120523,0,5740423.story

[Scuba]

1. Most polls are designed to shape opinion, not measure it.

[struggle4progress]

2. I think many are simply intended to convince certain people to hire the polling agency

[Joe Shlabotnik]

3. I often question how landlines vs. cell phones factor into the equation.

Are increasingly larger demographic segments not being polled? Moreover, the old style mainstream media (print and television) report the results back to the landline-centric crowd.