A Look Inside the Push - Pull of Polling

Really good article on polling and the difficulties it entails. After reading this i am going to be pretty skeptical of polls since it seems that getting a good cross section is getting harder and harder.



The earliest presidential election cycle on record is also becoming the most polled, with new national numbers and key state surveys coming out weekly or even more often. But getting to those numbers is more complex than it may seem from the outside, and polling often looks deeper than the simple horse-race aspects.

University of Iowa political science professor David Redlawsk researches how citizens process political information in order to make a voting decision and has conducted many polls, including a study of Iowa caucus goers conducted in late March and released in early April.
The Iowa caucuses are notoriously resistant to polling because screening for likely caucus goers is difficult. Redlawsk said in a recent interview that screening methods are a closely guarded trade secret:

"Commercial polling firms do not want to give away their techniques for trying to figure out the likely caucus goers. Usually it involves a couple of
screening questions to determine past behavior -- attendance at caucus -- and
to provide a scale on which respondents can indicate their likely future behavior -- those who place themselves at the top of that scale are generally considered the "likely" attendees. But it is a guess at best. Since some 40 percent of caucus goers may well be new to the process each time, it's pretty hard to figure out ahead of time who they are."

For the Rest of the Article:

http://www.reuters.com/article/blogBurst/politics?type=politicsNews&w1=B7ovpm21IaDoL40ZFnNfGe&w2=B7tmRCRJt2YFzDsa7MJ1CblL&src=blogBurst_politicsNews&bbPostId=B8Gf3lfkXvOVCz2VT0RdAIjL5BCQJN9EgfGuoCz16C58R8NiYS&bbParentWidgetId=B7tmRCRJt2YFzDsa7MJ1CblL

We need a solid Democratic candidate that runs on firmly rooted ideas based on progressive beliefs. I have trouble supporting a candidate that changes position with every poll.
Look at the republicans, they are attacking their own president to get an edge because they read polls that say bush is unpopular