True - take the 2000 presidential election, for example.

Elections and Polls are not the same, sorry to burst your bubble on that one. :handball:

I have experience in both social and physical science research and am familiar with poll development. I understand what you are saying. While I don't think that polls get it right all the time, the major ones (Gallup, Zogby, etc.) seem to have taken great pains to be more transparent in their polling. For example...from this Gallup poll:

Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,007 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted March 23-25, 2007. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

If you see more into it than I do, and would prefer raw data, that's all well and good. From what I'm seeing, this is a pretty solid poll...99% confidence would be nice, but 95% is usually a fair standard for statistical significance. And I don't have a reason to suspect that Gallup is trying to manipulate numbers for some sort of advantage or benefit.

Good stuff. The only thing that I wonder, and I don't know this, are not poll organizations hired by groups to study data? Is there no potential for bias? The greatest weakness is not only in the regularly small sample size, for example I would hardly say that 1000 people with telephones represent and extrapolation to "most people think...", but the weakness in buried in the questions and how they are constructed.

:rolleyes: Such as "4 out of 5 dentists recommend Crispy Toothpaste." They don't tell you they asked 10 dentists, none of whom had teeth.

See my teeth?:D

I don't know either...I would suspect so. The 5% should cover most bias, though they have the disclaimers. As far as extrapolation, I guess it would depend on how they figure out who they're going to call...I don't know how they're doing that.

Agreed. And then the press picks up a result and runs with it. And then it is exploited by one group or another.:worried:

I think that's just the nature of people though..."God is on our side." Who likes being wrong? If you can find the smallest shred of evidence to prop yourself up on, whoohoo!

I have never been asked my opinion for a poll :(
(apart from on here, where I consider myself a minority anyway)

Are telephone pollsters exempt from the Do-Not-Call lists? I think they are.

My wife will always stay on the line and do a poll, even if it takes like 20 minutes. I'll sometimes do one, if it's around an election and I want to skew poll results towards liberal, but normally I won't do them.

I've answered a few poll questions that seemed to veer into product promotion...

And there you have another source of a polls significant weakness. I say this because I have done the same thing.

I think I was called when I lived in Philly...I enjoyed doing it, and answered all the questions as truthfully as I could. The poll questions seemed sound...no leading that I could tell.

We were called 2 or 3 times for Gallup polls around the last election, and I get a call for a product survey every three months or so.

Political organizations and charities don't have to abide by the DoNotCall list (which we're on), and I'm pretty sure marketing surveys don't either since they're not directly trying to sell you their product.