When we started this site, we never meant to let our partisan identification get have anything to do with what we wrote about. After all, when writing about data, voter files, polling, journalism, microtargeting, Linux and other such things, you'd think that there would be plenty of material to write about.  And, well, there is, but to my eyes, the perpetrators of stupidity in polling are mostly on the otherside.

Today's lesson comes from that bastion of truth-seeking and truth-speaking integrity, the Editorial Pages of the Wall. St. Journal.  Known parrhesiast Stephen Moore decides to show us how not to read a poll.

There's more.

I wish this were humor, I really do.

On the very day I describe how questions can be a source of methodological error in my regular series post, I find out about the new Zogby poll commissioned by John Ziegler.  Nate Silver at 538 has been all over this one, and good on Nate.  But I want to do my own bit of analysis here, just to illustrate my point about questions and methodological error.

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Last week, I discussed some of the sampling problems that can crop up in pollsters' work.  My first article showed how the problem of bias is intrinsic to stratified sampling.  My second article expanded the discussion to demographic weighting and cluster sampling.

Today, I'm going to resume the discussion of polling problems by looking at the media's new tactic of using polls-of-polls to resolve the sometimes conflicting information from polls that get reported on an hourly basis.

There's more... 

I've heard a lot of sturm und drang over the persistence of undecided voters in the closing weeks of this campaign.  "Why can't Obama close the deal," is a frequent media meme, even on MSNBC.  Every time I hear this question, I'm more than a little surprised.  Why?

Because Obama closed the deal weeks ago.

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I think everyone in politics wants, just once, to be Josh Lyman in that scene from the first West Wing episode where two college girls fangirl on him at a restaurant.  Luckily, the Internet is here to make this a reality for a lucky few.  I can sort of understand--if not participate in--the impulse behind Viva Chuck Todd!. 

But...seriously...David Gergen?!?@?!?!?!@!11111!

I can't deal with this, not today.

Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com sat in on a session that David Plouffe and other Obama staff had with some Atlantic/Natl. Journal reporters.  It's got some fascinating tidbits about how the Obama campaign uses polling, their definition of undecided voters, and Plouffe's opinion on the worst aspect of campaign coverage.  Check it out.

New poll identifies the 430 key demographics that will win the election.

Pay special attention to the sub-headers that pop up on the screen; they're hilarious.

Patrick Ruffini annotates an article in Salon about Barack Obama's microtargeting efforts.

Sayeth the Polls:

Sayeth Dick Morris:

"After almost six weeks of a constant Obama lead, generally in the five- to seven-point range, Scott Rasmussen's daily tracking poll records two consecutive days of a tie race (July 12-13) and a one-point Obama lead on July 14. What happened to the Democrat's lead?"

I realize that we're talking about one of the sleaziest and most dishonest people in professional politics as it, but really, for a former pollster to be as ridiculous as Dick Morris was in this column is a new low, even for him.

When a poll comes out and is completely opposite to what every single other poll says, sometimes it's the truth, but more often than not, it's not.  This is especially true when you're talking about public polls. For Morris to pretend that one Rasmussen poll is strong enough to defy all the other aggregated data is the height of intellectual dishonesty, but nothing less than what you'd expect from Dick Morris.

Dirty D