They really, really don’t like those poll results

I had a lengthy phone conversation with a lady this morning who did like the newspaper "making" news instead of reporting it. Which meant she did not like the banner headline that said: "Poll: Reid loses full ballot test."

She accused us of being biased against Nevada's Democratic Sen. Harry Reid. I admitted our editorial stance generally does not match up too well with the votes and stances of the senator from Searchlight, but that on the news side we do our utmost to give our readers unvarnished and fair coverage. I explained we hire a professional polling company to conduct our polls and we do nothing to affect the outcome. I said we even quoted Reid's spokesman calling the polling methodology flawed.

That contention is not widely accepted. Rachel Slajda at Talking Points Memo even found an expert who called that statement "absurd."

She wrote: "Indeed, polling expert Charles Franklin tells TPMDC that Reid's argument is 'absurd.'

"'It's a complete inversion of the truth,' said Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 'Random digit dialing is the standard method of doing polls -- hardly an exception, let alone a disadvantage.'

"'There are good campaign polls done on listed samples of registered voters. But by far the more more common and the more scientifically sound method of sample is random digit dialing,' he said, 'because that gives every phone number in the state a known probability of being represented in the sample, which is what you need for a representative sample.'

"'I'm not vouching for this particular poll being right either way,' he added. 'But I'm saying that the track record of Mason-Dixon is a perfectly decent track record.'"