I love polls. More than almost anything. But people get suckered in to what they "mean." Reposted from a comment i made over at myDD.com:

"And considering the average journalist reads most polls about as well as I do a schematic to build a nuclear submarine, you get garbage in, garbage out. Less effective poll + Less informed analyst = "HRC and Giuliani may as well be anointed the nominees right now"

If you want detailed analysis, read the mystery pollster blog at pollster.com or Public Opinion Quarterly. But these other guys in the media. . . .

It's not so much the purveyor's fault, either. If they offered a detailed analyis using regressions, multiple variables, and started tossing out terms like "standard deviation" and "multicolinearity" no one would ever read a press release from them ever again.

And so you get the version dumbed down enough that even Bill Schneider can tell you what the poll means. And not like it's in the nature of MSM reporters to ever marginalize their importance or ask if what they're presenting is really "the whole truth". . .

There's a story told about the inventor of the IQ Test, that when asked what specifically his test measures, he respnded "Someone's Intelligence Quotient" to which someone said "And what is Intelligence Quotient?" "It's what my test measures."

The same is true of polls, especially when further biased by flawed or overly broad interpretation.