(politics) Pollsters Can't Agree

www.nytimes.com


ASHINGTON, Oct. 18-What is going to happen on Election Day? It depends on which pollster you ask.

President Bush leads Senator John Kerry by a margin of eight points among likely voters, according to the most recent poll from Gallup, USA Today and CNN. The margin of sampling error was four points.

But wait: Mr. Bush is up by only three points in the latest tracking poll from ABC News and The Washington Post, although with a margin of error of three percentage points.

Not so fast: The race is actually roughly even, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. And Time magazine's new poll says much the same thing.

But while the headlines they produce may diverge, the actual findings of these polls may not be so different. The differing conclusions reflect how different pollsters use complex formulas to interpret very similar findings among self-described registered voters and try to come up with a result they think best accounts for who will actually show up at the polls.

The different interpretations have drawn a litany of complaints from partisans on both sides. Some are questioning everything about the surveys, including pollsters' political motives, their methodologies and whether accurate polling can be done in the age of cellular phones that cannot be called and caller ID systems that make screening out unfamiliar numbers easy.




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