Well, anyway, I will take off on election day and go in and vote for some, against others, and certainly against any tax increases, bond sales or changes to the state constitution.
If a pollster were to ask if I preferred Rombama over Oromney, and I failed to respond, I'd be marked as a non-respondent. You'd actually have to ask me who I was voting for ~ not who I preferred ~ 'cause, as everyone on FR knows, I prefer NEITHER. Doesn't mean I won't be voting.
This happens to a lot of folks BTW, but they go ahead and vote just down ticket, or even at the top of the list, but the responses to the pollster's questions may or may not reflect what someone is going to do. Most pollsters discard these non-response responses since nobody cares ~
I saw an earlier post where some Freeper thinks that folks who don't say they are Republicans or Democrats must be Moderates. What utter nonsense. That's where you get your wild men and women who drop off the charts! Then, there are others who think those folks are Independents, and that's equally preposterous. They just don't want to be on the mailing lists.
Again, pay attention to the trends ~ not the absolute numbers. The trends even give you an idea of what the nonresponsive nonrespondents are thinking ~ 'cause they're still human even if they don't answer polls.
(Note ~ for a long time I used monthly postal mail volume statistics to tell me whether to invest in more stock or go cash. Worked great. Actually, that curve duplicated the old Lynch Curve. It was good for a couple of months in advance of the market too.)
Second, there has been pretty good evidence that people do not, on average, lie to pollsters.
Third, it greatly depends on the screening procedures for the pollster. For example, in the M-D poll I took, they asked the same question about four different ways, but placed throughout the interview so that at the end, they had a pretty good placement of my views. (One was on Iraq, and whether I "favored" US continued involvement or not. Well, I did IF we were in it to win. So I can't recall how I responded back then.
The trends are pretty sharp for Romney, if anyone cares to look: all the "Obama up" polls have massive oversamples of Dems---anywhere from 9-13 points---and often (not always) they are registered voters, not likely. All the recent polls of Romney being up are of likely voters with a small, if any, Dem oversample.
So when you combine the TRENDS: northern VA poll showed Zero up 4 when he won this region by 23; FL seniors AARP poll showing seniors favor Romney (oops. So much for Medicare cuts working); WI polling, twice in a row has Romney up by one; MI poll has him up five after being up one; two different "swing state" polls have him up everywhere but CO, where he is 1 down on RCP; poll out today of FL has him up huge (over 10), but with no internals; Cook Co. poll has Obama winning Cook Co., but by a much narrower margin than in 08 and not enough to carry even IL.
These TRENDS add up to a pretty big Romney win. Don't know if you'd call it a "landslide," but over 320 EVs.