A Little Secret About Polls

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A Little Secret About Polls
First Read expands on our point about the declining number of potentially reliable state polls.

"Good polls are expensive to do, and if you're seeing a particular organization doing a slew of polls, you've to ask: 1) how reliable are those numbers, or 2) where is the money coming from to conduct those polls? Nowadays, on the state level, we trust the polling we're getting from campaigns and state parties (although not necessarily those polls that are made public) more than the numbers we see from some non political polling organizations."

They also institute a new policy: "When we report a public poll on the state level, it will be because we think those numbers are reflecting what we know is going on in the race. We'll let you know if a pollster has a good reputation in that state, has a good track record (because a good pollster in one state doesn't mean they know the nuances of another)."

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2010/ ... polls.html