is how obvious the special pleading is.
I agree that polling is a very limited tool, vulnerable to manipulation and misconstruction. And any one poll that provides drastically different results from most of the others deserves to be taken with a grain of salt.
Furthermore, polling does not measure opinion in most cases -- it creates opinion. When you get a phone call from a pollster, unless you are a politics junky, you are going to be asked questions about things you have not even thought about. In a very real sense, the pollster provokes you to think about it, and you can only spend a few seconds at most to think about it before you reply.
It is very unlikely to reflect a deep conviction or accurately predict how you will vote several months down the road.
This is not the familiar criticism that phrasing of the question affects the results -- it does, of course. But I am saying that even if the question is phrased in totally neutral terms, in all but a few rare cases, your answer is conjured up on the spot, and not a result of your informed consideration.
Within the last two weeks before a major election, I can buy the idea that most people will have given some thought to their vote, and a telephone poll is not creating your response. But months before a party primary election, only a tiny sliver of people will have given serious thought to their vote -- or even if they intend to vote at all.
That is why all those Hillary Is Creaming Bernie threads have never bothered me in the slightest.
Polling in the first few states to vote is only now starting to have any predictive ability. And now that one of them shows Hillary losing ground, NOW the Hillarians start to question the methodology of polls. That is truly amusing.
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