Never trust candidate polling

It's important to remember that political candidate polls are far from perfect. Some are done (or not done) and released (or not released), to be willfully imperfect.

Consider the saga of Shelley Berkley's pollster Mark Mellman. Mellman is highly regarded. So, when one of Mellman's polls for Berkley showed Obama winning Nevada and Berkley handily beating Dean Heller for the U.S. Senate seat in Nevada, the campaign released the poll. It received considerable ink.

Obama eventually won Nevada. But Berkley lost to Heller by 1 percent.

In the election post-mortem, newspapers counted Mellman as one poll that had gotten the Berkley race remarkably wrong.

Then comes Mellman, post-election defense of his reputation, saying that actually he had called the race right. His polls for Berkley in the last few days before the election showed Berkley losing by 1 point, but those polls were not released by the Berkley campaign.

The point is simple: Always -- always -- take with a grain of salt polls done for candidates or political parties. Campaigns only release what is in the best interest of the campaign. Period. So, discount them all.

PS: As a sidebar to the Mellman story, it is interesting to note that one local-yokel "journalist" took personal offense at the reporting that Mellman had gotten the Berkley race wrong. It is even more interesting how that journalist's "prediction" that Berkley would lose by the skin of her teeth coincided so nicely with the undisclosed Mellman poll. Did that scribe know about the later Mellman poll but not report it? Bet me.