I was reading this article in the Washington Post on polling (via Jenna):

Both in Maryland and across the country, candidates trailing in one poll could point to another poll in which the race was "too close to call" or even had the opposite estimate. One can hardly blame a trailing candidate for using implausible polls as a pick-me-up, but the effect is universally confusing.

And that's too bad. Polling is central both to reporting and to understanding who we are, why we vote and what we expect out of our political system.

Before last week's election, President Bush derided election "prognosticators," but no one would be so blithe as to dismiss public attitudes, as communicated via ballots or reliable polls.

For the media, public opinion data help flesh out and add context to reporting and expert analyses. Survey data help stories rise above anecdote and provide a broader perspective.

That's why it's tempting to use numbers in stories and arguments and why it's so essential to recognize that all numbers are not created equal. So, what to do?

Suddenly I had a novel idea.  How about cutting the number of polls that you do?  Maybe I've been in the corporate world too much, but polls have come to remind me of status meetings at work when you have a project manager who loves meetings way too much.

Some project managers have so many meetings, that you spend your entire week either going to meetings, or preparing for meetings.  Usually you end up creating a lists of tasks that need to be completed, and then reporting on the status of those tasks.  The problem is that if you have too many status meetings, you have no time in between the meetings in order to actually change your status.

That's what polls have become.  News services have become so enamoured with polls, and spend so much time talking about the "horse race" aspect of elections, that they hardly report anything else.  I find it miraculous that the poll numbers change at all in between each polling session, because the news services haven't accurately communicated any new ideas from the candidates to change voters minds and thus change the results of the polls.

This of course proves on of two things.  Either polls are far less accurate than anyone thinks, and thus more susceptible to random influences, or voters are far more random than we think.  Either one seem just as plausible to me.

Maybe, just maybe what the news services need to do is stop having status meetings, and actually report on what the candidates are saying, and perform some critical analysis on their views, making sure they're accurate.  Sure, you'll have less time for polling... but when you do poll, it might actually mean something.