Public Opinion: Do Polls of the Barack Obama-John McCain Matchup Matter This Far Out?

Rick Warren Mc Cain Obama interview

Mc Cain showed ability to make a decision and lead, while Obama

looked like your typical intellectual, confused over which side

to take, if you layed Obama and all the profs in the world end to end they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. Can you trust a man who doesn't have the moral courage to defend a person in the womb to defend you?

The bigest dilemna

The biggest dilemna by John Mcain is to be elected by the media as the most likely candidate

absolutly

The media messes up all our elections with all these stupid polls, don't they have anything better to do than help to keep our elections so close. Why can't Americans all vote at the same time. People see how its going in the east and change how they vote in the west. It should be a very private thing once the election starts and we should all be surprised how it turns out in the end. When the media does is turns Americans against each other by saying and reports how each state is voting that should be illegal.

Polls

The biggesy problem with pols is that they don't tell you what the non-resnse rate is and there isz no way of deermining how the non-resondents would hae responded.

fPolls in a National Election

First of all, any REAL pollster and statistician will tell you that with a bit more than 1,000 completed interviews, properly skewed across and reflecting the prevailing demographic characteristics of the nation...YOU CAN state that these are indeed the facts..usually within four percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

This is true, even though there are more than 300 million people in the country. It's simply a matter of statistics.

The problem is -- as Leonard Hansen says -- just how was the sample that was polled decided, sliced and diced (cross-tabulated, if you will); who paid for it behind the scenes (is there any in-built bias, goodness me!); how is it being reported,by whom?

Polls, as originally created and used by George Gallup in the first half of the last century, were mostly valid. The problem is not the people who are professional pollsters. The problem is the people who commission them; and what their REAL motives are.

The pollsters would never have predicted that Bush and his brother Jeb would have beaten Gore in South Palm Beach county, Florida in 2000. But they did. 'According to the 'hanging chads'. All the polls in the world will not eliminate tinkering where it does not belong.

Polls

Most polls are not worth the space they take online, as quick items on television or in newspapers.

First, the sample sizes are too small. How representative can 1,000 people be when the mass public comprises 300,000,000?

Second, most polls are reported without the news media ever investigating the sponsoring source and its established and identifiable political positions and/or lobbying interests.

Third, neither the Democratic nor Republican parties have officially made their nominations, a process that also nominates a vice presidential selection as the two nominees run as a team.

Four, from this career newsman's perspective, the recent and current onslaught of claimed-to-be polls are unabashed media manipulation, few or none of which can be considered viable and anywhere near balanced reportage.

And, finally, we, as citizens, deserve better actual and unbiasd news coverage even as editorial staffs in most media are being cut back.

To quuote Sergeant Joe Friday on the long-ago television program, "Dragnet," we need "just the facts, ma'am." The real poll will be the national election in November.

Leonard J. Hansen

Polls

It's kind of like determining the Super Bowl winner on paper and then actually watching the game. It is all fun forecasting and hypothesizing--and many journalists get paid to just forecast and hypothesize, but really it's a 50/50 chance that these polls are right.

The game never really goes how people think, and its just dumb luck that some people even get it right.

Polls

Polls don't really matter because so many are taken, most groups polled are a 1000 people rated in age groups, gender,annual income etc..

All that changes when the final vote is tabulated, and the new president is elected.

That's where the rubber meets the road !

Dutch Robinson