Unlike in 2004, the 2008 election polls obtained somewhat more detail about how undecided the voters were, and the results support my argument made on pollster.com several times previously, that many voters mull over their decisions until late in the campaign period.

In the 2008 election, the exit polls show that 4 percent of voters said they made up their minds on Election Day, another 3 percent in the previous three days, and an additional 3 percent within the past week - for a total of 10 percent. That's virtually the same as the 11 percent who said they had made their decision in the past week in 2004 - with 5 percent saying the day of the election, 4 percent the previous three days, and 3 percent the past week.

More interesting, the 2008 exit polls suggest that only 60 percent of voters had decided whom to support before September, with about four in ten making up their minds after the major party conventions in August.

While it is certainly difficult for a voter to pinpoint exactly when he or she made a final decision, some pre-election polling data from this year suggests the exit poll results may be pretty good approximations. Of course, most pollsters don't measure the undecided voter directly (which they could do, by asking whom voters intend to choose on Election Day and then asking, "or haven't you made up your mind yet?"), but instead pollsters will often do so indirectly. After the hypothetical, forced choice vote question, for example, the CBS/New York Times poll sometimes asks, "Is your mind made up, or is it still too early to say for sure?" CBS reports that in mid-August 2008, about a third of all registered voters were "uncommitted" - they had either not chosen a candidate initially, or they had mentioned a candidate but then said it was still to early to say for sure if their minds were made up.

A somewhat larger undecided voter group was measured in a 1996 Gallup poll, conducted Sept. 3-5, 1996, which asked voters up front if they had made up their minds - rather than the standard "who would you vote for if the election were held today" question. In that format, 60 percent said they had made up their minds, while 39 percent said they had not, and 1 percent were unsure. Those 1996 figures are similar to what the 2008 exit poll responses suggest as well.

Below are two graphs of voter preferences. The first is based on a reconstruction from the exit poll crosstabs, which show voter preferences including the undecided vote. Of course, such a reconstruction needs to be viewed cautiously. It's difficult for people to remember exactly when they made up their minds, so at best this graph is an approximation of what voter preferences might have looked like for each month.

As you can see, this first graph shows more voters undecided than choosing either of the two major candidates before September, and it shows the decline in the undecided group over time. (Obviously, each time period on the X-axis is not proportional to the number of days in the time period, but the general pattern is obvious.)

The second graph is a reconstruction (averaging) of Gallup's daily tracking poll, using the likely voter results when available, and the registered voter results otherwise. The "last week" results are based on just four days of the week before the election, while the "last 3 days" are based on just those days from the tracking poll. I used this method to approximate the exit poll categories and provide a comparable base of analysis.

In contrast with the first graph, the second graph of the Gallup tracking poll shows no significant change in the undecided voter group from August through Election Day. In fact, Gallup's daily tracking poll, which goes back to March 2008, shows a steady 5 - 6 percent undecided group for the whole seven months - something that not even Gallup researchers can argue (with a straight face) is accurate.

If we believe that the exit polls have any validity in measuring opinion, it's hard to deny the superiority of the first graph in giving poll consumers an accurate picture of the changing electorate during the campaign. The declining size of the undecided vote over the course of the campaign is clearly an important dynamic in the campaign, regardless of whether pollsters will acknowledge it.

According to Kohut, Obama was up by just 7 points among likely voters in the latest Pew poll, 49 percent to 42 percent, down from the 15-point lead he enjoyed the previous week. The NPR anchor asked Kohut to explain the dramatic decline in Obama's lead. "There are two things going on," he said. "First of all, John McCain has made some gains among whites and he's made some gains among independent voters. The other thing - McCain is enjoying the typical boost we get when we narrow the sample from registered voters to likely voters."  

Actually, Pew has been reporting the results among likely voters since early September, and the decline in Obama's lead occurred among Pew's likely voters - which favored Obama by 53 percent to 38 percent in the Oct. 23-26 poll. The 4-point drop in Obama's support and 4-point gain in McCain's support found by the Oct. 29-Nov. 1 poll could not be attributed to narrowing the sample from registered to likely voters, given that both sets of results were based on likely voters. (See Pew's chart here.)

This misinterpretation of the data comes in the wake of Pew's previous two October polls, which were clearly outliers compared with other national polls conducted in the same time periods. Other polling organizations in mid and late October showed Obama with only half the lead that Pew did, so when Pew's last pre-election poll found only a 7-point lead, that finally brought Pew back into line with other polls.

It may be, as Kohut suggests, that McCain picked up support among whites and independent voters - though it is worth further research to explain why none of the other polls report the same dramatic change. In any case, whatever the mysterious causes of Pew's outlier results, followed by the sudden bounce back into line with other polls, this unusual fluctuation cannot be easily explained away as a change from registered to likely voters.

First I should note that Nick has misstated my position somewhat, which was explained here and here. In brief, my argument is that pollsters should measure the undecided vote, by including in their vote choice question a tag line, "or haven't you made up your mind yet?" I also argue that pollsters should not insist on asking who voters would choose "if the election were held today," but who would they support on Election Day. I contend that this way of asking voters their candidate preferences produces a more realistic and accurate picture of the electorate than the way pollster currently report the results of their hypothetical, forced-choice vote question.

Nick disagrees, because he thinks that this approach would exaggerate the number of undecided voters. He makes the novel argument that any indecision measured as I suggest would be "calendar-induced" indecision but not "candidate induced" indecision. I don't know of any evidence for the validity of this distinction, but it's crucial to his argument.

To illustrate this point, he presents recent data from the ABC/Washington Post tracking polls, which suggest that currently only 9 percent of voters say they could change their mind before election day, including 3 percent who say it's a "good" chance they could do so, and 6 percent who say it's "pretty unlikely" they would do so. The latter term Nick interprets in his own mental framework as "no chance in h*ll."

Then, as though it's an obvious problem, Nick says, "Imagine if polls up until last week were showing undecideds 10 to 20 points higher - or still showing 9 points greater this week." Yes, let's imagine the 9 percentage point increase in the undecided voter group over what is reported these days.

It's important to note that most polls have been showing just a couple of percentage points of undecided voters, including ABC and the Post. These news organizations did not highlight the 9 percent undecided in their news stories, but instead focused on Obama's lead over McCain by 52 percent to 45 percent - leaving 3 percent unaccounted for (1 percent "other" and 2 percent "undecided"). If you want to know how many voters might "change their minds," you have to look hard for the data. Of course, ABC and the Post are no different from most other polling organizations that regularly suppress the undecided vote.

So, if the polls were to show "9 points greater undecided this week," as Nick feared, that would still be only 10 to 11 percent. That hardly seems excessive, given that the 2004 exit poll found 9 percent of voters saying they had made up their minds in the three days just prior to the election. And just today, the AP reported that about 14 percent of voters were "persuadable," a news story that emphasized the size of the undecided voter unlike most poll stories, which suppress that information.

Just before the New Hampshire Democratic Primary, the UNH Survey Center found 21 percent of voters who said they had not made up their minds (when asked directly, without the hypothetical, forced-choice version that is standard), and the exit poll showed that 17 percent of voters said they had made up their minds on election day.

These numbers suggest that measuring and reporting the size of the undecided voters is an important part of describing the state of the electorate. Not to do so is one of the continuing failures of most media polls.

As the discussion of Charles Franklin's column on house effects suggests, most people believe that "who's right" in their poll results these days will be resolved after Election Day. Then we can compare which polls came closest to the final results, and infer that the most accurate polls in the final pre-election predictions were probably the most accurate during the campaign as well.

But it doesn't usually work out that way. In 2004, the seven polls noted in the accompanying chart all showed Bush winning by a margin of one to three percentage points, except for Fox, showing Kerry the winner by two. All the results were well within the polls' margins of errors in comparison with the actual election results.

However, the interesting point is that during the month of September, these very same polls showed dramatically different dynamics. As shown in the next graph, there were three basic stories: ABC, Gallup, Time and ABC all showed Bush gaining momentum in the weeks following the Republican National Convention, and then falling toward the end of the month. Furthermore, although these pollsters all agreed with the general pattern, at the end of the month Gallup showed Bush with an 8-point lead, CBS and Time had him at one point, and ABC at 6 points.

The second story, reported by Fox, Zogby and TIPP, showed very little movement over the month of September, with the margin varying from a Kerry lead of one point to a Bush lead of three points.

Finally, Pew had its own dynamic, not found by any of the other polls, showing a significant surge for Bush after the convention, followed by a dramatic decline, then another significant surge.

One of the most interesting comparisons is between Gallup and Pew, which diverged by 13 points in mid-September, but closed to agreement by the end of the month.

At the end, all the pollsters could claim they were "right" on target, and NCPP dutifully noted the fine performance of the media polls. That performance, of course, was only in the final prediction. No effort was made to evaluate the polls during the campaign, though clearly they presented contradictory results. It appears as though we need a means of evaluating the polls during the election campaign.

It's true, of course, that we can't know which polls are most accurate during the campaign, but we can say that collectively they often tell quite divergent stories. And that hardly qualifies them for plaudits after Election Day.

Last week (Oct. 6), Gallup and DailyKos/Research 2000 tracking polls both showed Obama up by 9 and 11 points respectively, the same figures they show as of Oct. 13. Diageo/Hotline, GWU/Battleground and Zogby tracking polls all showed quite different results - with quite different trends.

On Oct. 7, Diageo/Hotline, GWU and Zogby showed an average of a 2-point lead for Obama, while DailyKos and Gallup showed an average of a 10.5 point lead. All three of the former polls reported an increasing lead for Obama in the subsequent week, while Gallup and DailyKos told us there was essentially no change.

Obama's Lead Among Five Tracking Polls

	Gallup	Gallup2	DailyKos	Diageo	GWU	Zogby
6-Oct	9		11	2	7	3
7-Oct	11		10	1	4	2
8-Oct	11		10	6	3	4
9-Oct	10		12	7	8	5
10-Oct	9		12	10		4
11-Oct	7	6	13	8		6
12-Oct	10	10	12	6	8	4
13-Oct	9	10	11	6	13	6

After the election, will we know which tracking polls were right? If history is a guide, all will come within their polls' margins of errors compared to the final election results. And we will all forget how confusing their different prognostications were during the campaign.

Perhaps we need another standard by which to judge the polls' performances during the election campaign.

ABC's Gary Langer acknowledges these discrepant results, writing that "Some analysts might say the results are contradictory; I'd suggest instead that we learn more, not less, by comparing and contrasting them." The "instead" clause seems like a non sequitur to me - it is obviously true that the results are contradictory and, yes, we can also learn "more, not less" by examining their contradictions. Perhaps especially enlightening, besides the fact that each polling organization phrased the questions differently (giving different information to the respondents), is Langer's point that only 27 percent of respondents had "strongly" held views - 9 percent in favor, 18 percent opposed. It hardly portrays the public as fighting mad against the government's plan to address the economic crisis, when almost three-quarters of the public seems more tentative than decisive.

Two days later, a CBS/New York Times poll found what might best be described as "tepid opposition" to the federal government's bailout plan - 42 percent who approve to 46 percent who disapprove. But after asking respondents about that plan (without specifying the details), the poll then gave respondents limited information about the plan Congress is working on, principally that the government would "provide" $700 billion of government funds to financial service companies in danger of going bankrupt. The question then asked if respondents thought it was a good idea or a bad idea, or "don't you know enough to say?" With that formulation, the poll found 38 percent opposed, 16 percent in favor, and 46 percent without an opinion.

An examination of all the poll results suggests a public that is mostly taking a wait-and-see attitude toward whatever plan the president and Congress might finally adopt, a conclusion that was hardly the dominant theme of any network, nor of any news media organization conducting its own polls. That the public might be ambivalent is not surprising, given how confusing the actual events have proven to be. As Langer notes, the vast majority of people don't feel strongly one way or the other. Moreover, as the CBS/NYT poll shows, close to half of the public expresses no opinion, when explicitly given that option. I suspect the percentage would have been even higher, if the poll hadn't given respondents information about the plan and then asked their immediate reaction to it. (It is also likely the direction of the results would have been different, if the information provided to the respondents had been more objective - perhaps including mentions of oversight, control of CEO salaries, public equity in the companies, and/or the "investment" character of the funds, rather than the implication that the money would be handed out to the companies with no strings attached).

It's true as Langer notes, that we pollsters can learn a great deal by examining the results of contradictory poll results. But that doesn't address the larger problem of how the general public and political leaders view them. We may think conflicting poll results are enlightening, but I suspect to many others, they merely demonstrate how untrustworthy polls are in the first place.

In Mark Blumenthal's post on how David Plouffe is polling for Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee's communications director Dan Pfeiffer is quoted as saying that "the Gallup Daily is the worst thing that's happened to journalism in 10 years." Gallup's Frank Newport predictably rejected the comments, claiming that Pfeiffer's comments "are the same types of sentiments that have been expressed since George Gallup's first presidential polls in 1936."

I don't think Frank is correct in his boiler plate response. It is not useful to dismiss all criticisms of polls these days as the same old tired comments of seven decades ago that have long been discredited. If I understand Mark's blog correctly, Pfeiffer and Plouffe object to the Gallup Daily because it does not, contrary to Frank's assertion, provide an accurate description of where the presidential race stands today.

According to Mark's post, Plouffe claims that the topline polling data aren't especially useful (they "don't tell you anything"). Instead, the campaign focuses on who are the "true undecideds," and what messages will persuade them to vote for Obama. Knowing how many undecided voters there are is an integral part of understanding the presidential race. That's true for the campaigns, and it is no less true for political observers and the public.  

But Gallup refuses to measure the undecided vote, and instead gives a hypothetical description of a presidential race, "if the election were held today" - showing us that 95 percent of voters have already made up their minds. But the election is not being held today, and the Gallup Daily does not tell us the truth about how many voters are - at this point in the campaign - committed to a candidate, and how many voters have yet to make up their minds. From Plouffe's and Pfeiffer's point of view, the Gallup Daily is useless - even in understanding the national sentiment.

Frank claims that the public needs "independent polling" so that it doesn't have to rely on "campaign operatives' self-promoting insights on where the race stands." I  couldn't agree with him more. But the public needs accurate independent polling, which gives the public a full picture of where the presidential race stands. Gallup Daily does not do that. But it could.

According to Pew's Andrew Kohut, the American electorate is suffering from "Obama fatigue." A close examination of the polling data suggests this conclusion is more of a personal opinion than one supported by the polling data.

Kohut came to his conclusion after first noting that the latest Pew Research Center poll in early August found Barack Obama's lead over John McCain "withering." He then noted that the same poll found more people saying they had been hearing "too much" about Obama's campaign than said that about McCain's campaign. Linking the two findings, Kohut concluded that Obama's greater news exposure over the summer "has proved a problem, not a blessing, for the Democratic candidate."

There are a couple of problems of data interpretation. First is the assertion of what Kohut calls a "tightening race." Pew conducted three polls - one each in June, July and August - and in those polls found Obama's lead going from eight points in June (48 percent to 40 percent), to five points in July (47 percent to 42 percent) and to just three points in early August (46 percent to 43 percent). Thus, overall, Obama's support dropped two percentage points over the summer, while McCain's increased by three. That such minor differences in the polls should be treated as a definitive trend is stunning. Even with larger-than-average sample sizes, those differences in the polls are within the polls' margins of error. In other words, even according to these polls, it's quite possible that there was no decline in Obama's lead, and perhaps even an increase. We just can't know for sure (using the 95 percent confidence level).

There are many other polls besides Pew that are measuring the candidates' support, but only one major media organization has conducted polls on a daily basis over this same time period. Gallup has been interviewing about 1,000 respondents each day, reporting the results on a three-day rolling average. If anyone wants to know how the campaign has changed over time, Gallup provides the best set of results. And these results do not show a linear change over the time period described by Kohut, but rather many fluctuations that defy any clear trend.

On June 10, Gallup reported a 6-point Obama lead, which disappeared by June 25. The lead went back to as high as six points in early July, down to one point in mid-July, up to nine points in late July, then down to zero only five days later. The lead was back up to six points on August 12, but down to one point on August 21. One can "discover" a linear three-month trend only by cherry-picking Gallup's results - but the cherry-picked trend could just as easily show an increase as a decline. In any case, the notion that "Obama fatigue" could explain all of these variations is simply not credible.

A second problem with data interpretation is the almost indecipherable meaning that is elicited by the question that was used to suggest Obama fatigue. The poll question Kohut cited asked whether people felt they had been hearing "too much, too little, or the right amount" about each of the campaigns. Forty-eight percent said too much about Obama's campaign, 26 percent about McCain. To be sure, that's a major gap, but what does it mean? If it means people are unhappy with hearing about Obama, and that is related to their "declining" support for him, how could Pew have found Obama's support dropping by only two percentage points, given the 22-point gap in the "fatigue" question? If that sentiment truly affected voters' support of Obama, one would expect a much greater drop.

More important, we know that the crucial question to explain change in support is whether the explanatory variable also shows change over the same time period. Did people become more dissatisfied from June to August with media coverage of Obama's campaign and, if so, did that increased dissatisfaction in turn cause their support to "wither"? As it turns out, Pew didn't ask that question back in June, so we don't know. Thus, statistically, we can't link dissatisfaction in the August poll with the change in support from June to August. The assertion of "Obama fatigue" is not a statistical conclusion, but an intuitive one.

An alternative intuitive explanation of what this question measured is that many voters may well be tired of a presidential campaign that goes on for 18 months or more - in other words, not "Obama fatigue" as much as "campaign fatigue." Dissatisfaction may have appeared to be more focused on Obama in this particular poll, because the question was asked during a time when there was more media coverage of Obama for his overseas trip. Had the question been asked at a different time, or had the pollsters tried to probe beneath the surface of this superficial question, we might have obtained a better insight into what the public was thinking.

Instead, we are treated to the fiction of "Obama fatigue" as a cause of a "tightening race"  - a spurious explanation of a non-event.

(A slightly different version of this critique was posted at HuffingtonPost.)

This time, it's Zogby's turn to confuse the masses. His latest Reuters/Zogby poll, based on a sample of 1,089 "likely voters" drawn from listed telephone numbers, conducted Aug. 14-16, 2008, shows McCain over Obama by 46% to 41%.

Two days earlier, Zogby reported substantially different results. His online poll (of self-selected people who want to be part of his Internet polling sample) of 3,339 "likely voters," conducted Aug. 12-14, showed Obama with a three-point lead, 43% to 40%.

By Zogby's own calculation of the margins of error of each poll, the difference between the two polls in McCain's support (46% in the later telephone poll vs. 40% in the earlier online poll) is statistically significant. The difference in Obama's support (41% vs. 43% respectively) would not be statistically significant. Still, the 8-point difference in the margin of McCain's lead would be significant - a McCain 5-point lead vs. an Obama 3-point lead in the earlier poll.

If we believe both polls, the period of Aug. 13-14 must have been a real bummer for Obama and an electoral high for McCain. Whatever it was that caused millions of voters to "change" their minds and gravitate toward the Republican candidate in the two-day period, however, escaped my notice. Perhaps others have been more observant.

Of course, there are reasons to discount both polls. Zogby has long been known for refusing to use sound methods in designing his samples. The use of only listed telephone numbers, and the self-selected samples of voters in his online surveys, are the two most salient problems. Still, his last pre-election polls often come close to the actual election results, and many news media outlets regularly publish his results.

Regardless of how loopy are Zogby's results, or his sampling methods, his polls contribute to what Kathy Frankovic, in her AAPOR presidential address in 1993,[i] referred to as the "noise and clamor" of the polls. Thus, they're worth noting, if only in disbelief.

Let's look, for example, at Brian Schaffner's recent post, where he compared the RV vs. LV results for several pollsters in the 2004 election. He found that "On average, the RV samples for these eight polls predicted a .875 Bush advantage while the LV samples predicted a 2.25 advantage for Bush, remarkably close to the actual result." He concludes that "it does appear as though likely voters did a better job of predicting the result in 2004 than registered voters."

This quick look at the data is hardly conclusive, of course, which Brian acknowledges. He had only eight polling organizations in his analysis, and despite the average results, four of the eight polls showed no advantage to using the LV model, while the other four did. As he suggests, it would be important to look at other years, but also other types of elections and other polling organizations.

Even then, however, an overall conclusion would not be especially helpful. Each polling organization's LV model is so different from another's that each organization has to look at its own success rate over the years to determine whether the LV model is helpful. In 1996, Gallup's senior editor, Lydia Saad, showed that in some presidential elections, Gallup's LV and RV results showed little differences, but when they did differ significantly, the LV results were more accurate in predicting the election results. That was at the national level. In the New Hampshire primary Gallup poll results over time, however, it's the RV results that typically were marginally closer to the final election results.

Still, at the national level, I would always bet on Gallup's LV results being a better estimate than the RV results, an example that Brian found for 2004. Gallup's final RV results showed Kerry up by two percentage points, while the LV results showed Bush winning by two points. Pew, which uses the Gallup LV model, also showed a four-point swing, from a one-point Kerry victory to a 3-point Bush victory.

Other polling organizations, of course, could find different results. And trying to average the results across polling organizations, to determine whether "in principle" LV models should be used, I would argue, is not helpful. That question has to be addressed by each polling organization based on its experience with its own LV model.

But what is the "truth" of the matter? Are we not interested in accurately portraying what the electorate is thinking "today"? If so, how can we say, as CNN does, that 100 percent of voters have made up their minds with more than three months before the election? Or as Gallup has been telling us for the past two months, that an average of 95 percent of voters have already made up their minds? Or even, as most other pollsters say, that over 90 percent have made a choice?

Pollsters get away with producing such dubious numbers, I think, because most pundits take a schizophrenic approach to the polls. At one level, they treat the results as though they are the Holy Grail. At the next moment, they dismiss the numbers as being irrelevant at this time of the campaign season, saying that we need to wait until after the conventions before people begin paying attention to the election. Dan Rather's recent column encapsulates this sentiment, headlined as "Summer polls in the presidential campaign are pure folly."

If we are concerned about devaluing polls, we might want to think about giving an accurate portrayal of what the public is actually thinking (or not thinking) weeks and months before an election. The current vote choice question clearly does not reveal the extent of public indecision, and thus, I think, undermines the credibility of polls more generally.

I am not arguing that shortly before election day, in their last pre-election polls, pollsters should not press voters for their choices. I agree that in most elections, even the "undecided" voters have an inkling of whom they will support. Barring last minute media coverage that favors one candidate or the other, the faint-hearted leanings of these undecided voters usually turn out to be decent predictors of how they will act when they get in the voting booth. (Notable exceptions at the national level occurred in the 1948 and 1980 presidential elections, of course, not to mention the 2008 New Hampshire, South Carolina, and California primaries, among others).

Still, during the campaign leading up to the election, why should pollsters "cringe" at reporting that a large segment of the population remains undecided? In fact, that's just what CBS News has done, commendably in my view, when it headlined its latest poll results as "Poll: Obama Leads, But Race Fluid." Nick, it seems, would not favor such a headline, nor apparently would most other media pollsters - at least as indicated by their own reports.  

There may be better ways to get at voter indecision, other than asking first, if people have made up their minds. Andy Smith of the UNH Survey Center said he will be experimenting this election season with other approaches, which could include the names of the candidates, as well as asking voters who they expect to vote for in November (not "today"), with the tag line, or haven't they made up their minds yet? A follow-up question could probe their leanings, but at least up front, the question would explicitly allow for the undecided voter to indicate such a sentiment.

In the recent release of the Granite State Poll, Andy Smith (director of the UNH Survey Center) noted that Barack Obama led John McCain by three percentage points, 46 percent to 43 percent, with 3 percent favoring another candidate, and 8 percent undecided. In the next paragraph, however, he noted that "only 51 percent of likely voters say they have definitely decided who they will vote for, 21 percent are leaning toward a candidate, and 28 percent say they are still trying to decide."

The second sentence may seem incompatible with the first - 8 percent of voters undecided, at the same time there are 21 percent leaning and another 28 percent still trying to decide - but it's a compromise that allows Smith to use the standard vote choice question, while still measuring the extent of voter indecision.

The standard forced-choice (who would you vote for if the election were held "today") approach produces results showing that more than nine in ten voters have already made up their minds about whom to support for president. Such a finding defies credulity, as I argued in a previous post, because of many other indicators that suggest a substantial proportion of voters have not even begun to think about the election. This was a particularly problematic result during the early primary season, when anyone who had even a dollop of experience with elections knew that primary voters had not made up their minds weeks and months ahead of their respective elections, despite what the polls said.

During the New Hampshire primary season, CNN's Keating Holland and Smith experimented with a different approach for measuring voter preferences. I had suggested a dichotomous question up front, asking if voters had made up their minds (or not) who to vote for on primary election day, but Holland and Smith came up with an alternative three-part response - to ask up front if voters had definitely decided whom to support on primary election day, if they were leaning, or if they were still trying to decide. Following this question, regardless of the answer, all respondents were asked the standard vote choice question, whom they would vote for if he election were held today.

With this format, the pollsters were able to determine how committed voters were to a choice in January (primary election day), and also to measure their top-of-mind preference if the election were held "today." Asking the undecided question first did not appear to influence respondents' willingness to give a preference to the second question, thus allowing CNN and the UNH Survey Center to report numbers that were comparable to what other polling organizations were doing - but still being able to indicate the size of voter indecision.

In the final pre-election poll, the CNN/UNH Survey Center results were as close to the actual outcome on the Republican primary as any of the other polling organizations. On the Democratic side, the polling results were similar to the average of the other polling organizations, showing Obama over Clinton, when in fact Clinton won. But CNN and the Survey Center were able to announce up front that with three days to go, 21 percent of the Democratic voters said they were still trying to make up their minds - suggesting the potential for movement.

Because the experiment appeared to provide additional insight into the state of voters' minds, Smith has continued to ask the undecided question up front in the general election polling. That's what gave him the results noted at the beginning of this post.

There are several ways to report the results. In accordance with standard practice, Smith focuses on the "today" results. Alternatively, he could focus on the results that treat the "still trying to decide" as though, in fact, they are undecided. Both results are shown in the table below: