My larger point seems to have got lost. The top of the hour news regularly quotes this stuff, obviously without a second thought as to what it means. It’s like a charming young Boston Globe reporter writing 15 years ago about the scary new mega container ships that carry 80,000 containers.
No, it isn’t lost. It just doesn’t matter or make any sense. Who gives a flying fig?
Most people, including news reporters, couldn’t tell you what an MOE means, what sample size is suspect, how polling companies weight results internally, or myriad other aspects of polling.
To focus on minutiae like whether RCP has weighted various polls that have already been internally weighted and arrived at through various methodologies is the very definition of a “waste of time.”
RCP is wise not to spend hours and hours of work to satisfy less than 1% of their web visitors.
The data is, just like all polling data, a snapshot of results that may or may not be accurate.
That’s why whenever a new poll comes out, you will see Freepers who know about polling say things like “I’d like to see more polls that show this trend” or “I think this might be an outlier” or “MOE of 7%? Well, that’s worthless” or “Trends are the key, not an individual poll.”