believe many of the polls are cherry picking. I've been called in the past by alleged pollsters, and when my answer to the first question was "Republican", SLAM goes the receiver at the other end. They are posting the truth -- as they know it and as they manipulate it.
I doubt that is the case. This isn't how pollsters operate. They begin with a set number of Republicans, Democrats, and independents to poll, based on their estimations of the party afiliation voting trends in the upcoming election.
This is where all of the manipulation comes in.
Pollsters such as the LATs, Newsweek, NYT all use over-sized Democrat samples. By the time they get to the calling phase, the fix is already in. They already know the party affiliation of everyone they're calling. They have all the voter registration data already. Then they just call people on their Democrat, Republicam and Independent lists until they've met their predetermined number of responses from each.
The
LAT poll from today, for example, was designed for Kerry to be ahead no matter what, unless there was an anomalously large percentage of Democrats voting for Bush. Even though Bush carried the majority of independent, and a significantly larger percentage of Democrats than Kerry has of Republicans, Kerry still leads Bush in that poll by something like 7 points, with a 51% majority, no less. The truth about this poll is the Democrat sample is so over-sized that the poll has a +12 point bias towards Kerry.