Presidential Election Polls

Ugh! It is almost impossible to read the news these days without having to read these asinine articles about the latest poll on the US presidential election. Exhibit A: Obama leads McCain by 15 points [google.com].

I do not understand why these polls continue to get widespread media attention, when the Democratic nomination process showed time and time again how flawed these polls are. They continually predicted one candidate or another would win by a large margin, which were proven incorrect. Take this article about the New Hampshire primary [nytimes.com]:

"All the published polls, including those that surveyed through [the day before the primary], had Senator Barack Obama comfortably ahead with an average margin of more than 8 percent."

He would ultimately lose this one. The author of that article speculates on the reason:

"Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites. Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews."

Regardless of the reason for the polls being wrong, the fact is that they are so unreliable that they hardly merit any attention. You might as well just publish articles about what various people speculate which candidate is in the lead. And yet, we continue to be inundated with these articles covering the poll results.

I still hold the opinion (and I hope that I am proven wrong) that there is such a large percentage of racist people in this country that a black man has no chance to win this election. The last few presidential elections have been decided by such narrow margins that it would not take many racist voters (who don't normally vote) to tip the election in McCain's favor.