What Real Polls Look Like
News reporting on polls is often ridiculously shallow. Once in a while you'll find a case where they actually lay out the entire poll and how they conducted it, and the detailed results. Here's an excellent example of a solid poll.
Results are a mixed bag of course. Depending on your own viewpoint, you'll tend to zone in on the results that most match what you'd like to believe others think. Learning to look at them objectively is something of an art.
Dean, I agree.
That WP poll is as close as it can come to a mid-term test in a graduate school program in political science.
But how many people, even those of us who care and who have opinions to back up our caring, will sit still for 32 whoppingly complex questions about the entirety of the policy matrices of a sitting US president?
There's a bit of monologue I picked up from an old Hollywood film;
"I'm healthy out here on this California beach. In fact, I'm so healthy, I stink from it!"
So my comment is that this great WP poll is so complete, it too stinks. (There are times you can be overwhelmed with something set up for an ostensibly good purpose, but it kills you with loving detail.)
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Dean,
It is a good poll - mostly because it gives you the details; the problem with most polls released these days is that they don't tell you what the sample looked like, nor do they tell you precisely what questions were asked.
Its also a poll to warm the heart of any GOPer....with 48% of the respondents being Democrats and with an oversampling of black American respondents, the picture emerges of a stunningly large and broad support for President Bush...and when you finally add the fact that its a poll of "adults" (as opposed to "likely voters") what emerges is the outlines of a crushing GOP victory next year...and this poll taken after three months of relentless negativity...
Fun, fun, fun for me next year....