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Originally Posted by alias  They said Trumen would not get elected also, but he did. I wonder what Lincoln's approval rating was at it's lowest point? | Even if a polling firm is both skillful and lucky (and, yes, luck is a factor) in producing a perfect estimate of how people are likely to vote, it can still "get the election wrong" if candidate preferences or the likelihood of voting changes after its final poll is completed as happened, most notoriously, in the Truman-Dewey election in 1948.
Critics of the polls may well ask, given all these possible sources of error, why should anyone believe the polls? The answer is "their track record." Since 1956, the average error of all the national polls on the gap between two main candidates’ share of the votes has been 3.3 percentage points, and in 2000, the average error was 2.2 percentage points. Not perfect, but pretty good. And they do better in some years than in others. So pollsters should always run scared. Harris Interactive | The Harris Poll - Why Should We Believe the Polls? "(Gay marriage) is a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish."
-- Jon Stewart
"Please don't judge others by your own standards."
-- Garysher  |