On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> To answer Charles B's earlier question, as far as I know, pollsters
> didn't change their techniques after 2000. The errors were in line
> with earlier years, and a 2-point miss is really pretty small.
>
> Doug
Yes, I've noticed that people tend to have way too much faith in the precision of these polls. It's important to keep in mind that the pollsters are trying to estimate the voting patterns of tens of millions of voters with a sample of 1000-1200; sampling error is unavoidable here. If the poll estimate is within a few percentage points of the actual vote, that's actually quite impressive.
Miles