voting and polls

I spend so much time looking at the negative aspects of this presidential campaign. This New York Times article on the increase in newly registered voters in swing states may offer some hope.

It seems to be an accepted fact that as the number of who people vote increases, the better it is for the Democrats. Perhaps this race won't be as close as the pollsters claim since the polls often count "likely voters" based on previous voting. This seriously under represents new voters and young voters. According to some, the Gallup poll (which gives consistently positive results for the bush campaign) is a good example of poor sampling as discussed at The Daily Kos:

A stratified random sample is one in which the pollster determines in advance the proportion of various subsets (strata) in the population and then randomly selects participants within each subset. This basically is what Gallup is doing.

Now that in and of itself is not a problem. What is problematic for Gallup is how they are defining their strata, their subsets. As Steve Soto notes, the proportions of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents specified by Gallup do not accurately reflect those proportions found in the population. In Gallup's case, the samples end up consisting of a disproportionately greater number of Republicans relative to what is likely to be the case in the population and a disproportionately smaller number of Democrats. Not too surprisingly, the effect is to inflate the numbers for Republican candidates and to deflate the numbers for Democrat candidates.

All of this says to me, to take any poll with a large grain of salt. The only poll that counts will be the one taken on election day.