Friday, January 16, 2015

Who do you believe?

We got two polls out this morning.  Reuters, and Gallup.  Reuters scores Obama at 37%, where as Gallup has him much higher, at 46%. Both Reuters and Gallup have good reputations going back 80 years or more.  Both base their results on small samples of the population, 1000 to 1500.  It takes great care and skill to select a representative sample.  Select an unrepresentative sample, say at a Tea Party meeting or a ACLU gathering, and you can get just about any results imaginable. 
   I like the lower Reuters number myself, but perhaps it is too good to be true. 
   So what does one believe? 

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