Why Are Polls So Screwy?

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You cant ever trust polls by CNN/TIME or AP/UPI becuase they are mostly taken from certian araes and are most likely rigged to favor what liberals who take them want and if the polls are in favor of conservatives the liberal distort or lie about it all

Flu-Bird of CA 4:17PM March 18, 2009

The liberals and liberal media are using the "polls" to try to convince everyone that Obama has already won and anyone voting against him should just stay home, forget it.They want McCain to just quietly bow out.
I believe that if Obama wins, in 4 years the smug, supercilious, sneering liberals will be a lot more subdued. I predict that Obama's fall will be even more dramatic than that of liberal leaders such as the Clintons or Marion Barry. Both the Marion Barry and Bill Clinton regimes were greeted with hosannas and screaming delight from the liberazis. The Clintons were going to establish a nirvana in the U.S., and Barry was going to make D.C. heaven on earth. What say ye about them now, liberals?

Pam Ela of VA 11:26AM October 27, 2008

I was listening recently to an NPR story about this same topic. According to the piece, because an increasing number of individuals use a cell phone as their only phone, it is becoming more difficult to conduct polls. Apparently, this is the first time in many decades that fewer than 70% of Americans have a land line phone. This could explain the vast discrepancies between online (an AOL poll from last Saturday listed McCain as ahead, for example) and traditional polls. Perhaps pollsters need to join the current century.
Oh, and to Mr. James Craig of NY: interestingly, I am 34 year old and have been polled twice in the last eight years. It was a little exciting. Of course, I live in Maine, so perhaps the population skews the odds in my favor.

Jennifer Feldman of ME 7:51PM October 24, 2008

I do not believe polls put out by any of the media. I am a 76 year old conservative, and I could have written the letter signed by 'liberal losers'. I would suggest that they would get rid of the "early voting", and have ONE DAY for the primary election and one for the general election.And, I might add, keep the political rhetoric down to six months before any election. They would automatically cancel the vote of any voter whose name appeared more than once. The practice of voters coming in to a state just to vote, should be brought to a screeching halt, and those that participate in the practice should be arrested on the spot and not be permitted to go home until after the election, thereby denying them the right to vote--period! Politics bring out the criminals, and any caught trying to mess up election results should be procecuted. The polls are only meant to manipulate and to discourage the folks who haven't as yet voted. We need to put "honesty" back into our political system. One way to do that is get rid of the electronic junk. Get back to the paper ballot, and mark your choice with an 'X'. If a voter is illiterate, he/she should be accompanied by one member of each party into the voting 'booth'to help the voter understand what/who they are voting for. The only early ballots permitted should be the absentee ballots by the elderly and disabled.

Barbara Rice of OH 11:34AM October 24, 2008

Polls are reported to the people hiring the poll takers.
Smart poll takers deliver the results the people paying for the polls want to hear.
Results are skewed by the questions and the way the questions are posed.
Polls are a business.
The idea of a business is to make money.
A business makes money by pleasing its customers.

HillbillyBill of TN 8:34AM October 24, 2008

I am an immigrant and have been in this country 34 years. In these yaers, I have been impressed with the number and frequency of polls. I have always felt that the media realised that they had power following Nixon's troubles and his resignation.
Since then, the media elite have relentlessly pursued a program to "educate" the American people. Over the years, the American people have gotten wise to this and the polls have become increasingly unreliable due to the methodology having fallen victim to the desire or the need by the media to be able to "forecast" the results. The result they are looking for is to assess the success (not failure) of their own agenda. Goebbels was a lot more successful in Nazi Germany than they have been so far. Fortunately the American people have a commendable independent spirit which the Germans of the post-world war I era did not have.
The biggest debacle was in 2000 and I have a gut feeling that it is going to be so this year as well.

Clement W of TX 6:37PM October 23, 2008

Presidential polls have always been screwy. The one consistency is that over the past
sixty years or so their findings invariably favor the Democrats (poll takers with an agenda?) The polls would have had you believe Ronald Reagan didn't have a shot at winning.
I am seventy-six years old and have never been solicited by a poll taker. I took my own poll amongst my peers and could find no one else who had. This from over one hundred people (the internet is a great tool.) Additionally, none of them knew any one who had ever been so solicited.
I put poll takers right up there with the media and all those lovely folks from academia
-- Liberal losers.

james Craig of NY 4:54PM October 23, 2008