COMM 386: Basics on polling / PLS READ!

Here's an op-ed piece on polls by Steve Kircher, longtime research manager at the St. Petersburg Times, in yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It includes this evaluation of the polls so far in the presidential race:

Why conduct surveys so far in advance of the election? Cynics will say it helps fill the cable news channels and political columns of newspapers. While that's a likely factor, more important is that polls generally are accurate, and even this far out they are helping to track the dynamics of the presidential race, even if the dynamics today are quite a bit different from what they will be in November.

There's an interesting paradox here: We usually compare poll data to election results in order to evaluate a poll's acccuracy, but there's a down side to that because it tends to emphasize "horse-race" reporting. That's one of the issues we'll be looking at this semester.