Okay, One Poll You Can Dismiss

As I hope I’ve made clear, bad polls from NYT/CBS, Bloomberg/Selzer, CNN/ORC, etc. – you can’t dismiss those. Even if the internals look funny to you. Those are each premium phone polls with strong, national reputations. Emerson, which released another group of polls today, you can dismiss. They are one of the few landline only pollsters around today. And their way of adjusting for that shortcoming (“3 point decrease in Conservative opinion and a 3 point increase in Liberal opinion to offset the bias in land line only telephone polls”) just doesn’t cut it as a serious way of doing a poll, as I noted a couple weeks ago.