Leave it to statisticians to make methodology personal. Yet with so many Americans paying attention, it makes sense that the methodological minutiae of a single survey became this controversial. Errant polls can have profound effects, and not every poll is reliable. Just look at the Wisconsin primary race last February between John Kerry and John Edwards. Right before the primary, an American Research Group poll showed Kerry with a 53 to 16 percent lead over Edwards, and an MSNBC/Reuters/Zogby poll had Kerry with 47 percent to Edwards' 20 percent. Edwards got within six points of Kerry in the actual primary election.

"The polls [in Wisconsin] were way off," said Brad Coker, a pollster for Mason-Dixon Research. Would Edwards have taken the state if the polls hadn't built a bandwagon for the Kerry campaign? Probably not, Coker said, but dubious polls like those in Wisconsin "hurt a candidate or a campaign trying to raise money." Coker continued, "If you're down 20 points, it gets awful hard to get people to write big checks." Think John Kerry in January, who had to mortgage his own home to prop up his campaign before he won the Iowa caucuses.

And once a bad poll is out there, it is difficult to rein in the faulty data. Talking heads repeat poll numbers with impunity. "Take the one wrong poll, and all the pundits latch on," said Michael McDonald of the Brookings Institution. In the context of a presidential race that could hinge on a few thousand votes in a handful of swing states, poll-driven perception might yet trump reality.

Yet the methods and math behind political polls are often far from intelligible to the public or the press. Pollsters constitute a cadre of number crunchers obsessed with margins of error, sample screens and statistical weighting. In other words, they speak a language most Americans -- even most members of the fourth estate -- do not. This leaves plenty of room for the echo effects of a rogue poll to have real impact. With this in mind, Salon ranks the most frequently cited and covered polling outfits.

First, a disclaimer. Even the best polls will be wrong about one time in 20, both Blendon and McDonald say. And Blendon cautions that even the most trustworthy polls will often differ because pollsters place different weights on their results, use different screens on their samples, and poll on different days and at different times.

Polls to trust

The traditional gold standard in the polling world is the Gallup organization, which has covered presidential elections since George Gallup predicted a Roosevelt victory in 1936. Wonks can read all about Gallup's standards on the organization's Web site, which is as canonical as it is unexciting. Gallup teams up with CNN and USA Today for horserace polls.

Most pollsters and all of the experts Salon contacted say that the major papers and television networks are also reliable. Despite Dowd's objections, the Los Angeles Times polls look methodologically pristine, as do the CBS News/New York Times, Wall Street Journal/NBC News, and ABC News/Washington Post polls.

Several pollsters said that Fox News, which hired the research firm Opinion Dynamics to do its polling, tends to have a Republican bias in its survey results. But in terms of methodology, Fox News appears to be a "model survey," Kyle Smith, a statistician at the University of New Mexico, wrote in an e-mail to Salon. In particular, the questions Fox asks are actually fair and balanced. "If you want a good standard to judge other survey scripts, I'd suggest using Fox's," Smith wrote. The Fox bias that some pollsters allege might come from the way numbers are reported, not gathered, Blendon said.

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