IT'S LAUGHABLE up here in New Hampshire that the pollsters are shaking their heads and wondering how they got it so wrong ("Stunned by N.H., pollsters regroup to seek answers," Page A17, Jan. 10).
Ask any resident of New Hampshire. Ask any of us who have been haunted day and night by phone calls from locations such as "Iowa" and "Nevada." Of course, we've been wondering about the polls, too. We've been wondering, "Who the heck is picking up the phone and talking to these people?"
KIM FUSARIS
Londonderry, N.H.
POLLSTERS HAVE been increasingly telling the media what US citizens think about elections, President Bush, the war in Iraq, gas prices, etc. The New Hampshire primary results prove how wrong they can be. Without the actual results of a vote, how would we ever know?
I don't know who these people are who answer their phones and reply to polls, but I know it's not me.
Hopefully we've all learned a lesson that reality trumps a poll every time.
Maybe we should quit operating our country based on polls.
JOHN MYERS
Cincinnati
SCIENTISTS UNDERSTAND that observation can change the thing being studied. Perhaps this effect partially explains pollsters' poor predictions this week.
Maybe the very act of publishing the polls changed the vote: If voters were undecided, they would keep the race going by voting for the underdog, who, according to the polls, was Barack Obama in Iowa and Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.
On the other hand, cognitive scientists also believe that humans have a natural bias to see patterns where none exist.
In the case of pollsters, pundits, and journalists, this may lead to the need to find a story to "explain" statistical matters such as likely primary outcomes.
We're also biased toward dramatic, human stories: It's a lot more interesting to attribute Clinton's victory to her "choked up" episode than to a complex mix of more prosaic factors such as operational effectiveness.
GENE KOO
Cambridge
AFTER THE New Hampshire primary, a national reporter stated the obvious: Reporters look at polls and choose to cover only the candidates who are high in the polls. This narrows the range of views expressed and issues reported on.
The other side of the effect of polls is also obvious: Candidates are high in the polls because they receive a lot of media coverage. The resulting bandwagon effect, in which voters support who they think can win based on polls instead of who most closely represents their views on the issues, often gets us the candidate we can live with instead of the one we really want.
In any case, support for the candidate we really want may not be accurately reflected by polls.
Clearly, polls poison the process.
In addition, too many media reports are about the polls, campaign strategy, or fund-raising, and not about major issues.
The process is broken, and the remedies are apparent.
RONALD GOLDMAN
Jamaica Plain
