Huh. There are still Republicans running? I thought they would all quit once it came to light that Ron Paul was beating them monetarily. Well, good luck to one of them. I hope they manage to come up with some sort of nominee before the convention.

Have these numbers been confirmed by any actual news outlets?

I can't wait till this is all over and I never have to hear about all these stupid polls.

I have never met anyone in my entire life that has actually been a part of one of these things. Has anyone here actually ever participated? Who do they call... how does it work? I assume they're not using the web for it.

Anyone? Bueller?

Hank Rearden: I can't wait till this is all over and I never have to hear about all these stupid polls.

I have never met anyone in my entire life that has actually been a part of one of these things. Has anyone here actually ever participated? Who do they call... how does it work? I assume they're not using the web for it.

Anyone? Bueller?

not me, or anyone i've ever known afaik

Hank Rearden: I can't wait till this is all over and I never have to hear about all these stupid polls.

I have never met anyone in my entire life that has actually been a part of one of these things. Has anyone here actually ever participated? Who do they call... how does it work? I assume they're not using the web for it.

Anyone? Bueller?

I got a call recently from the DNC asking who I was going to vote for. It was the first I've ever received.

Hank Rearden: I have never met anyone in my entire life that has actually been a part of one of these things. Has anyone here actually ever participated? Who do they call... how does it work? I assume they're not using the web for it.

Dude you can look this stuff easily. google or wiki?

Opinion poll (new window)

They don't sample that many people. That's why you don't know anyone. But they try to get people that represent a large group.


Do you really think they just make it up?

Just wanted to add another "not me or anyone I've ever known"

Hank Rearden: I can't wait till this is all over and I never have to hear about all these stupid polls.

I have never met anyone in my entire life that has actually been a part of one of these things. Has anyone here actually ever participated? Who do they call... how does it work? I assume they're not using the web for it.

Anyone? Bueller?

{Raises hand.} I've done a lot of these. They call your home. They ask questions. You answer. Takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. Once you start doing them, I think you end up on a list shared by various pollsters, because I get a lot of these calls. And, I don't screw around, either. I answer honestly, and if I don't feel like talking, I tell them I'm eating dinner.

Hank Rearden: I have never met anyone in my entire life that has actually been a part of one of these things. Has anyone here actually ever participated? Who do they call... how does it work? I assume they're not using the web for it.

Anyone? Bueller?

I have, once (not this election cycle)...my dad, several times (not always about politics).

Hank Rearden: Has anyone here actually ever participated? Who do they call... how does it work?


If your only phone is a mobile phone, you'll never receive a call from an opinion pollster since it is illegal to solicit to a mobile phone.

If you avoid shopping malls, county fairs, welfare offices, monster truck rallies and football games, good chance is that you'll never see an opinion pollster in the public.

If your neighborhood is in the ghetto, the Styx or in a gated community, then they'll never come to your house.

Obviously, you need a quaint house in the city with several phone lines, while being right down the street from the fairgrounds for your opinion to matter.

FYI: LA Times endorses Obama & McCain.

Oh Republicans...How can you vote for a guy on the basis that he "Knows Jack Kemp!"??? Seriously, if we ran Obama with the message "I'll be a good president and leader because I know Lloyd Bentsen" you'd all be laughing your ass off. Well, I guess we're laughing at you...

burndtdan/Hank Rearden

I've been a participant in both a phone poll and an exit poll, but both were in previous election cycles.

Exit poll was a paper questionnaire. The phone poll was not very well designed, in my opinion, but wasn't a push poll.

Although I have participated, I find the fixation on polls to be annoying. People tend to emphasize them over other parts of the campaign, to the exclusion of other important campaign news.

McCain and Rudy are the two corporately pre-approved candidates who both agreed to back whichever one of them came out on topharkabee is the populist candidate who was added as a sop to the evDEVILical crowd and he wasn't supposed to last even this long. Guess "nobody could have imagined" the Colbert bump. Mittens is basically buying his candidacy and the GOPhers are only too glad to take his money and make this look like an actual race.

McTaint and Rudy are the War Eternal candidates.

Fear McCain's potential rise to power as it will just be an extension of the BushCo regime despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth heard from whackjob pundits like Rush, Hannity, Malkin et al.

I've never been called, nor do I know anyone who has ever been called to participate in a poll. How can 1,100 people actually relect the whole country? -/+ 3 % points of course. BS.

Guess_Who: I've never been called, nor do I know anyone who has ever been called to participate in a poll. How can 1,100 people actually relect the whole country? -/+ 3 % points of course. BS.

If you flipped 1100 pennies, and tallied "heads" and "tails", do you think you'd get a pretty good idea of what would happen if you flipped every penny?

Polling is not perfect, but it is accurate when done correctly.

I've never been called for a national election, but then again, polling a person who actually knew the issues would probably skew the thing horribly.

Corvus: They don't sample that many people. That's why you don't know anyone. But they try to get people that represent a large group.


Do you really think they just make it up?

it's not a question of whether they make up the results, that would be stupid. it's a question of whether their sample is representative of the population.

and it seems to me (admittedly not a statistics junkie) that if there is something prohibiting you from including a section of the population in your survey, then try as you might, your sample can't be truly random or truly representative. that's why i don't really pay too close attention to polling, because they do passively exclude people that don't have landlines, aren't home at certain times, etc. meaning their results are persistently skewed in some way.

burndtdan: and it seems to me (admittedly not a statistics junkie) that if there is something prohibiting you from including a section of the population in your survey, then try as you might, your sample can't be truly random or truly representative. that's why i don't really pay too close attention to polling, because they do passively exclude people that don't have landlines, aren't home at certain times, etc. meaning their results are persistently skewed in some way.

Ultimately, however, the polls have empirical performance on their side. New Hampshire was the major exception, where last-minute dynamics caused them to be off by 9%, and that was national news. Most often, they're good to within the advertised +/-3%. (And even a poll calculated to have an error of +/- 3% is merely saying that it's 95% likely to be within that margin).

No one claims they're ironclad. Just a useful tool.

Dinjiin:
If your only phone is a mobile phone, you'll never receive a call from an opinion pollster since it is illegal to solicit to a mobile phone.

Then how do the polls correct for cell phone only people, who tend to be more technologically savvy, younger, etc.?

More importantly, why do I get solicitation calls on my cell phone? And mostly from Spanish speakers?

/politics should be a popularity contest. this isn't high school.

I've never been surveyed. Neither has any of my family or friends.

burndtdan: and it seems to me (admittedly not a statistics junkie) that if there is something prohibiting you from including a section of the population in your survey, then try as you might, your sample can't be truly random or truly representative.

And that's what they try there best not to do. The whole thing is to try to get as much as a representative group as possible. They know that. Just sometimes it's hard to do.

And it's almost impossible to know who will actually vote.

Polls are what they are.

For the people who think they should be right 100% of time, well then those people really don't understand how they work. Even the polling groups know they can't be 100% right.

chimp_ninja: b
Ultimately, however, the polls have empirical performance on their side. New Hampshire was the major exception, where last-minute dynamics caused them to be off by 9%, and that was national news. Most often, they're good to within the advertised +/-3%.

And Iowa was another major exception too, where they said Hilary would win. I would trust the Vegas bookies to have a better grasp of the odds in this election cycle than most political polls.

burndtdan: it's not a question of whether they make up the results, that would be stupid. it's a question of whether their sample is representative of the population.

I think the error you and others here are making is you believe:
Larger poll = better results

This is not true.
More Representative poll = better results.

So all you people saying "I don't know anyone" are missing the point and don't really understand how sampling works.

Yoyo: And Iowa was another major exception too, where they said Hilary would win. I would trust the Vegas bookies to have a better grasp of the odds in this election cycle than most political polls.

Umm Iowa was a caucus for one. And for two:

Iowa Zogby Jan. 2 Clinton:24% Obama:31%
Iowa Insider Advantage Jan. 2 Clinton:32% Obama:34%

Only a few more to go for Romney:

quatchi: McCain and Rudy are the two corporately pre-approved candidates who both agreed to back whichever one of them came out on topharkabee is the populist candidate who was added as a sop to the evDEVILical crowd and he wasn't supposed to last even this long. Guess "nobody could have imagined" the Colbert bump. Mittens is basically buying his candidacy and the GOPhers are only too glad to take his money and make this look like an actual race.

McTaint and Rudy are the War Eternal candidates.

Fear McCain's potential rise to power as it will just be an extension of the BushCo regime despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth heard from whackjob pundits like Rush, Hannity, Malkin et al.

Quatchi is a liberal, but he's doing it wrong. Quatchi is Canadian but likes to show up in every US political thread. Quatchi thinks there's no reason at all to be in combat with the Middle East. Quatchi is borderline socialist. Quatchi is smart, but tends to have multiple personalities and occasionally refers to himself in the third person. Quatchi has lost all of his credibility by being an illogical nutcase. Quatchi never really says anything of value. A lot of us wish Quatchi would STFU.

I am an Atheist liberal. I would vote for Romney and you wanna know why? Because it's the economy stupid. I think a successful business man would know how to run America better than a war-mongering panderer. Sure, Romney isn't the best choice, but he is sure a hell lot better than McCain.


And Hickabee? Yeah, WWJD doesn't work when the country is in a recession. We will be owned by a bunch of foreign investors you can be rest assured that there won't be married gays.

mistahtom: I am an Atheist liberal. I would vote for Romney and you wanna know why? Because it's the economy stupid. I think a successful business man would know how to run America better than a war-mongering panderer.

W. Bush was a CEO and business executive at many companies.

Government is more about compromise and listening to people than how most business are run.

mistahtom --
A president has far more impact on such things as foreign policy (where Romney attempts to position himself as a hawk), on law enforcement (where Romney tends towards the authoritarian -- he wants to double the size of the Guantanamo Bay prison, for instance; even the current president has said that it should be shut down), and on government spending (he's stated that the country should spend at least 4% GDP on national defense; present level is ~3.7% according to Wikipedia)... than he does over the overall broader economy. A president can't really stop the Indian and Chinese economies from growing rapidly and thus increasing their demand for raw materials and consumer goods, for instance.

Hank Rearden: I have never met anyone in my entire life that has actually been a part of one of these things. Has anyone here actually ever participated? Who do they call... how does it work? I assume they're not using the web for it.

Yep, I was polled in the race for the 2004 general election. On my landline phone, at home.

quatchi: Fear McCain's potential rise to power as it will just be an extension of the BushCo regime despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth heard from whackjob pundits like Rush, Hannity, Malkin et al.

There is a difference, however slight. I think McCain would actually fight wars with the aim of winning them, rather than with the goal of making his buddies rich.

Still not voting for him, even a well-managed war with a definite goal isn't something to be done just for the hell of it. But I do think he'd be better than Bush in this respect.

This is good news for the democrats, can you imagine this geezer campaigning all day and having a debate in the evening? Obama will eat him up with is 100 year war comment alone.

Corvus: burndtdan: it's not a question of whether they make up the results, that would be stupid. it's a question of whether their sample is representative of the population.

I think the error you and others here are making is you believe:
Larger poll = better results

This is not true.
More Representative poll = better results.

So all you people saying "I don't know anyone" are missing the point and don't really understand how sampling works.

i understand how it works, i was just saying i haven't ever participated. i can't, i don't have a landline. my views will never be accurately represented in any poll.

i don't think they're useless, i just realize that they should be taken with a grain of salt.

So, you mean the same jackass news channel that said Giuliani was a sure thing? Man, their polls sure are accurate.

And then there were 4.

I predict Yuckabee will pull out after Super Tuesday when he realizes his campaign is on a one way ticket to hell.

quatchi after that analysis you lose the right to call anyone else, even Rush and Malkin whackjobs.next to you Anne Coulter looks well reasoned and objective.