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Greetings, fellow Freepers, lurkers, Patriots, and all USA-loving folks!

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Polls rely on random sampling, which is difficult to achieve due to "confounding factors" such as what kind of people own phones, what kind of people answer a phones at what time of the day or week, what kind of bother to take a poll, how different kinds of people are distributed in different area codes. If you make a lot of calls to Berkley California Kerry wins in a landslide, Nadar comes in second, the communist party comes in third etc.

So the pollsters try to minimize these confounding factors by making a weighting adjustment for party affiliation. The problem is they have to guess what ratio of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans to use. Usually they base this on exit polling from previous elections. Some pollsters do not make such an adjustment. Still others decide whether or not they think they need the adjustment after the poll is taken.

Polls, such as Newsweek, that do not weight tend to be rather erratic in these ratios, and in the case of most of the polls that I have looked at that had a debate bounce for Kerry, they have shifted from a high Republican mix to a high Democrat mix. This suggest either they have fallen prey to confounding factors, or there has been a sudden national shift in party affiliation.

Polls, such as Fox/Opinion Dynamics that decide whether to weight after seeing their results tend to show very little change in general, and don't tend to be helpful. Essentially they end up being tweaked to show what the pollster already thinks.

Polls that weight by party affiliation are probably the best for tracking trends, but they are still of questionable use in determining the real results. I have not seen much of a Kerry debate bounce in these polls.

I think that all of these post-debate polls, taken immediately after the debate, and particularly on a weekend are less-than random. The proximity to the debate poisons the "randomness" of the sample. For instance, it may well likely change the way people decide to cooperate with the caller, or if the question "Who won the debate?" is asked just prior to "Who will you vote for?" it could act as a "push" poll because it gets the respondent thinking positively about Kerry just prior to going for the big "Who will you vote for?" question.

Normally, outside the influence of the debate results, all of the pollsters take and report their polls at varying times during the week and do not have the immediate biasing influence of their perceptions of the debate. What we have here is a confluence of all pollsters taking their polls at the same time, and producing in actuallity more of a referendum of who won the debate than who people plan to vote for in November. I think once the pollsters get back to polling during normal days and away from the debate, Kerry's temporary bounce will fade.

The other thing to remember is that the polls using likely voters, hence the most accurate, are the ones still showing a Bush lead. Newsweek's polling used registered voters only which most often skews towards Democrats. I worked in the polling industry for 8 years and Newsweek is looked on as a joke. They do not balance by party I.D. and often over-sample members of one or the other party. Media polls are quick and dirty, more about being on time than being right. Additionally, though they did not do so in their latest poll, Newsweek often polls on Friday night which most in the industry know you must avoid. More affluent voters are less likely to be at home and thus the poll skews towards Democrats when done on Friday night.

Gallup's latest may even be a bigger mess. Apparently they polled a combination of registered AND likely voters, then culled out the likely voter sample to come up with a separate result. That is faulty methodology at best since pulling out a sub-sample like that could well mean you've pulled out a sub-sample without any real geographical balance. For instance, those likely voters may very well come from regions and states that are more heavily Democratic such as the West Coast. Frankly I think in that event you're almost better off just doing an all-registed voter poll than a mix of both likely and registered voters.

Anyway, that's my two cents. I worked for Time/CNN's polling outfit, Yankelovich Partners, (it's now someone else) and I saw how these media polls get done. It's likely watching sausage getting made. There's not much in the way of demographic quotas or weighting, and don't even get me started on the type of people they put on those phones. Probably half of them are punching in Kerry when the respondent says Bush.