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I been watching CNN For the past two weeks. They have polls. Everytime they state the results they say "80% America hates Bush" But then at the end or at the very bottom of the t.v. they have something that says "500 people interviewed margin of error 2%".
I gotta argue, how the hell does 500 people equal 300million people in the U.S O_o It's less than .001% of the U.S Population. I hate it when they say "America thinks that 65% of blah blah is doing a bad job" and they have 100 people surveyed in this poll. WTF. Drives me nuts man.
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Like mentioned before, polling is a scientific and statistical process. They plug the numbers into an equation, figure out the confidence level and all that, and they calculate that they will need X number of people to get within a specific error of margin. They can get pretty accurate. I'd probably have more to contribute had I been in class a few weeks ago. In my "managing political campaigns" class we had Mark Blumenthal come in, the creator of Pollster.com and the unofficial king of political polling. I would have known a lot more about the topic had I been there.