While there are legitimate questions over Gallup's polling methodology among pollsters, almost nobody believes that Gallup has a political ax to grind. Mark Blumenthal, the Democratic campaign pollster who runs the fine poll-explaining blog Mystery Pollster, says that he has questions about Gallup's methodology. But when he saw MoveOn's anti-Gallup ad, he was "taken aback by its ferocity," he writes. In an interview, he added, "The nastiness of the ad was uncalled-for. I don't think these people are intentionally slanting the results. I've met some of the people who run Gallup and they're professionals. You may not agree with what they do, and it's perfectly appropriate to question their methodologies, but I think taking out a full-page ad to claim they're slanted is too far."

There are, to be sure, bad polls available these days -- polls with slanted questions, polls that try to save money by calling only people who are listed, polls that seem always to deliver the kind of result that the person paying for it seems to want. Gallup, pollsters say, is not one of those. "That's just garbage," says Michael Dimock of Pew. "It's the gold standard of polls in many ways. They have an incredible record behind them, they have very smart people there, and they're social scientists, not partisans."

Frank Newport, of Gallup, says that from its earliest days, people who run the Gallup Poll have tried to remain scrupulously nonpartisan. George Gallup, the company's founder, refused even to vote. Newport himself says that he does not vote in primary elections. It's true that George Gallup Jr., the founder's son, whom MoveOn criticized in its ad, is a devout Christian; but when he told an audience in Massachusetts in June that he thought "the most profound purpose of polls is to see how people are responding to God," he was referring specifically to polling on religion, not to political polling, as MoveOn's ad suggested. And, Blumenthal asks, what's wrong with being a devout pollster? "Does that mean that pollsters aren't allowed to go to church? We can't go to a synagogue?"

Of all there is in this world for a liberal advocacy group to complain about in a full-page ad in a national newspaper, why did MoveOn choose to go after Gallup? Because polls can also affect the public mood; a poll showing Kerry way behind, for instance, may demoralize his supporters and fire up Bush's base. The poll also clearly affects media coverage, determining whether journalists write about your campaign as if it has no chance or, instead, as if you're within fighting distance. Polls, especially Gallup's polls, are important. They're the only measure we have of how a race is going, and election season is mainly the act of constructing storylines to fit the newest numbers.

But in a razor-thin race, this is dangerous business. Pollsters this year really don't know how good their numbers are. On Sept. 16, a day before the much disputed Gallup poll was released, the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote a blistering attack on the entire enterprise of polling. The whole thing is a "sham," he wrote, because pollsters call land-line telephones, skipping the hundreds of millions of cellphones in America. "Any editors of newspapers or television news shows who use poll results as a story are beyond gullible," he wrote. "On behalf of the public they profess to serve, they are indolent salesmen of falsehoods."

That column blazed around the Internet, and it's possible to find, now, people who refuse to believe that polls are accurate because of the cellphone problem. Pollsters, for their part, don't believe this is a big concern just yet, because the overwhelming majority of people who have cellphones also have land lines, and so are still reachable by traditional telephone polls. But Blumenthal says that recent survey industry conferences have been dominated by this question of what pollsters will do when cellphones become the only way people communicate. Can pollsters get around the hurdle of calling phones that charge by air time? Can they figure out a way to tie a phone to a particular geographic location in an age in which cellphone numbers are portable?

These are hard, hard problems the polling industry needs to solve. And they come at a time when national races seem especially close -- the era of the 50-50 nation. Polling has perhaps never been as crucial to the everyday pace of a race as it is in this presidential election. But consequently, polling has never been quite as disputed, as fought-over, before, either.

"Pollsters have been sucked into the battlefield of politics," Newport laments. But considering how important they are, it's perhaps naive to have expected them to remain pure.

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