State of the Race: 35 Days Left

I really don't know what to think about polls lately. They have been all over the place the past few weeks. The most troubling thing to me is that people constantly refer to polling as a science. But if it is truly a science you would think that the experiments would lead to slightly similar results instead of the crazy fluctuations we have seen recently. Two things are clear to me today.
1.) Bush is up by anywhere from 1-8 pts.
2.) Polling is not a science. It is an art, and people mix the colors the shade they want to see. This from the Electoral Vote Predictor:

"It is becoming increasingly clear that the pollsters are producing the results that the people paying the bills want to hear. Even pollsters who were once thought to be above suspicion are now suspicious. Gallup, for example, is now normalizing its samples to include 40% Republicans, even though the 2000 exit polls showed the partisan distribution to be 39% Democratic, 35% Republican. There is scant evidence that the underlying partisan distribution has changed much since then. Other pollsters also normalize their data, but most don't say how. Normalizing the sample to ensure the proper number of women, elderly voters, etc. is legitimate provided that the pollster publicly states what has been done."

Here are the results of Hot Gun Spy's unscientific community bumper sticker/political sign poll:
Kerry: 76%
Bush : 24%
I won't tell you how I got that number but I will tell you that I had a solid count, used some arithmetic, and am very comfortable with the results.

Today's Rasmussen Reports Numbers:
Kerry: 46%
Bush : 48%

Posted by Paul Hina at September 28, 2004 11:23 PM