Reply #14: Also...Older Folks Still Answer The Phone

[KharmaTrain]

Many of us live with caller-ID and voice mail...not picking up a call unless we know who it is. A pollster admitted that weekend polls tend to skew toward older voters since younger people are out and harder to reach on weekends and that's why Gramps gets bumps on weekend polls and then settles back down in the mid-week polls.

Polling is and always will be an inexact science...no matter what you're told. It's not just a snapshot in time, but also weighted...meaning if the pollster gets too many Democratic responses, they'll "weight" it against the perceived percentage of repugnicans their methodology calls for. The concept is to get a "balanced" percentage of several million people by using a sample size as small as a couple hundred.

Lastly, national polls mean little except fodder for the cables to play with. Many of these same networks conduct their own polls...and as tends to be the case with a lot of research, they look for what they want to see. If they can make it seem like Hillary Clinton is hurting Obama to fit their current narrative, damned if they didn't find a poll (or commission one) that says just that.

Bottom line, the polls that matters are on November 4th.