Admin Note: This post was submitted in time, but accidentally left in draft form. I have recently discovered the error and moved it to the front page.

We now get further into the role-playing aspect of this series. Let's pretend that you're trying to design a polling strategy for a Democratic Congressional candidate running for an open seat in the state of Mississippi. It is going to be in time for the 2008 elections, and not a special election.  You are the campaign manager, and it's your job to figure out what you need to do with the polls.  You have no primary opponent, and are able to begin running against the Republican from day one.  In fact, your candidate had an exploratory committee up and going by March 07, and declared his intentions for the seat in June 07.  The Republican incumbent of fourteen years is retiring, and they're facing a primary of three candidates.  Their primary is not going to be messy and fun. It's going to have the party leadership step in and make their executive decisions, so you'll be running against someone by January 08.

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There is one thing about polling that makes it incredibly frustrating for a pollster and great for journalists and other pollsters who seek to discredit your findings: there is no such thing as a perfect methodology.  There is absolutely nothing that you can do to ensure that your poll is perfect. Not too long ago, The American Prospect had an informative review of a recent book on the war on science. I'd advise that you take a look at it and think about it before we proceed.  Your poll will never be perfect - come to terms with this. Someone will always be able to complain that you should have asked X or should not have asked X, that the ordering of your questions introduced bias into the poll by creating incentives for certain responses, etc.   Some of these complaints are nothing more than standard trolling and attempts to discredit the findings of a poll as described in the article I linked to, but some of them are legitimate. So long as your poll falls into the range of best practices (which we're going to be describing in this blog), you're fine.

 How do we know what to ask about? 

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Admin Note: We apologize for the tardiness of this post. Dirty D got swamped in his day job and forgot to send me his contribution for editing and posting.  We'll try to be on time in the future.

In my last post, we began a conversation about using your list strategically.  This was the beginning of the intersection with Blue Leader's awesome series, Building a Voter File. I'd like to continue that conversation today.  When we left off, we were talking about using variables on a list in lieu of questions in a poll, and how you could trust what's on there.  I'd like to continue that conversation a bit today.

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It's been a while since we've had an update in the Building a Poll series, and I'm excited to pick it up again. When we last left off, we were talking about using a list strategically. I'd like to continue on the subject of using lists, but we're going talk about something more mechanical aspect of using the list: building a random sample.

Granted, if you're a pollster, you're likely to have purchased a random sample from your data vendor, but it never hurts you to understand the mechanics of how this works.  Heck, maybe one of your clients stuck you with a membership list or some other targeted list and asked you to call a random sample of that list.  You can't very well send that list off to your data vendor and ask them to sample it for you!

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