Which Polling Organization Do You Trust The Most?

[THUNDER HANDS]

Poll question: Which Polling Organization Do You Trust The Most?

If you trust any at all.

[Leilani]

1. It's silly to look at polls & get overly excited about differences.

Better to look at the polls for trends.

Closer to the election, there will be tracking polls to see who's up, & who's down.

During the primaries, ARG was pretty accurate in predicting momemtum, who was moving up or down.

I think this election will be EXTREMELY close, & state polls in swing states, will tell us more than national polls. Remember, the election will be won, state by state, not nationally.

[Feanorcurufinwe]

2. You have to read the methodology for each poll

if you want to judge it.

[LSdemocrat]

3. I generally like Zogby, with Survey USA a distant second

[mbee]

4. The Harris Presidential Poll in 2000 was very good and gave almost

the exact percentage by which Gore won the election. They polled all toll I believe around 100,000 people. I think they do a great job.

[AlinPA]

5. Yes. I pretty much believe Harris nearer the election (few days)

[mobuto]

6. None

They all have their ideosyncracies and their quirks, and I don't think its fair to say that one's perfect and the others are all flawed. And you can't just pick a polling organization because it shows your candidate doing well - that's insanity. What I do is try to look at all the polls, and I think taken together they tend to give a pretty good approximation of what the direction the country is moving in. The absolute numbers are not so meaningful. But momentum is.

[Gloria]

7. Pew is a good general poll....It's head is Andy Kohut, who left Gallup

years ago when it was still the REAL Gallup. He still appears on PBS and other news shows doing reports on the his outfit's polls. When I worked with him (he was one of two rotating President's of Gallup...this was the late 70's) I found him to be a straight-shooter. Unless something has drastically changed, I would still give him a lot of credibility.

[rucky]

8. Other: DU

scientific. accurate.

Robb is a dingbat.

[59millionmorons]

9. Zogby is the best and here is why

Zogby polls only likely voters.

Zogby International conducted telephone interviews of a random sampling of 1065 likely voters chose at random nationwide. All calls were made from Zogby International headquarters in Utica, N.Y., from Wednesday, March 17th through Friday, March19. The margin of error is +/- 3.1 percentage points. Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion, gender, presidential voter to more accurately reflect the voting population. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.

[mobuto]

10. The problem is what you consider a likely voter

The voting subset changes after each election and Zogby has to make a guess of who's likely to vote in the next. Sometimes he gets it and sometimes he doesn't - just like the other pollsters who do the same thing, its really a crapshoot if this year's statistical sampling accurately portrays the voting public.

I don't think any one public poll (as opposed to narrowly-tailored private internals) can tell you all that much about the election. I think Pew asks the most interesting questions, but all polls are limited by their sampling methods and all are capable of producing outlier results. You've got to look at the overall picture to see the direction the public is moving in.

[DMX]

11. Pew Research

I trust the Pew Research Poll better, you should include them.

[newyawker99]

12. Hi DMX!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast: