Ron Paul won 45 percent of the vote in a straw poll in California over the weekend, and his supporters are beside themselves with joy. What I can’t figure out is why such bright people are so fooled about something so meaningless.
There are three kinds of political polls. (Well, four, if you want to count election day voting.) Let’s talk about what they are and which ones matter, because many very bright people don’t understand which ones are potentially worth getting excited about.
The first of the three is the opinion poll with a statistically valid, randomly selected sample of the likely voting population — and this is the only one that matters. These are the polls done by the big polling organizations such as Gallup and Pew and various others done for major media outlets. These are expensive to conduct, but they tend to be very useful and reasonably accurate. The results can be skewed slightly one way or another by the wording of questions or by the selection of the random sample. Various pollsters make slightly different assumptions and calculations about who likely voters are going to be, but their results tend to be reasonably accurate — especially if you average all the polls.