Reply #30: Maintaining your sanity

[DemFromMem]

I think polls are mainly useful in terms of monitoring trends and not in getting an exact picture of where things. Though Rasmussen is a Republican, his polling seems to be closest to what we intuitively know is probably happening. I've been monitoring the poll each day since March (as I'm sure many of you have). He has never showed the wild swings other polls are reporting and he's polling a large sample every single day. The race has never been outside of a five point margin and is now showing the race separated by less than 1%.

His state numbers are also extremely close. This race is going to be all about turnout. Forget the polls. The race is close enough and will remain close enough so that either guy has a chance if he can get his base out in big number.

There is one thing about all the polls I've wondered about. There are 30 million Hispanics in the country and a large number of them are citizens (more than 2 million naturalized just since the last election). And about 1 in 10 Americans was born in another country. I work with immigrants every day in my work and my sense is that the polls would not be picking up these voters. First, there are language barriers. Are the polls designed for people who don't speak English well (i.e. are the questions available in Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, etc.)? Second, many people from other countries are suspicious when strangers ask questions about their politics. I think this might explain why Gore did a little better on election day than the polls were saying since immigrant voters tend to favor the Democrats. Do the pollsters actually try and factor these issues in when they're doing their analyses?