[SALChamps03]

Common sense also leads me to concur with the view that .000004% of the US population cannot possibly represent the whole.

[Young Scholar]

First of all, 1,200/300,000,000 = 0.000004 = 0.0004%, not 0.000004%. Second of all, clearly you can accept that there can be a sample of 1,200 people that is representative of the population as a whole on a certain issue, meaning that if 60% of the population supports this issue and 40% opposes it, 60% (720 people) of this sample will support it, and 40% will oppose it.

Since it is clearly possible that a sample can be representative of a whole on an issue, why can't you accept the laws of statistics that say that 1,200 (randomly selected) people is enough to be representative to a reasonable degree of certainty?