The title of this post is courtesy of Alex Gage , one of our former partners and now a successful political consultant. I was reminded of it when I saw a piece by Howard Finemen on the Newsweek site in which he takes a shot at parsing the current polls of the presidential race. OK, so he’s not exactly Bob Groves in his grasp of the methodological issues, but he does shed some light on the variety of ways in which a handful of experienced and respected polling organization practice the science of survey research. AAPOR does similar work in its attempt to unravel the disappointing performance of the polls in the 2008 New Hampshire primary.
One key issue that Fineman does not touch on is weighting. At an AAPOR Conference several years ago at which a number of well-known pollsters were invited in to talk about how they do what they do. I am a little fuzzy on the year, but the conference was in Norfolk, VA and the topic may have been the 1996 election. Many AAPORites have yet to recover from that evening and its revelation of the scandalous weighting procedures used in political polling. It was after this session that the name Zogby became toxic on the AAPOR listserv, and by the end of evening it was clear to all concerned that political polling is not science, but art.