Building a Poll Part 3: Catching Up With All Our Assumptions

This has been a fun series to write so far, and I'm hoping that all of you are getting as much out of reading it as I am from writing it. In my few posts so far, we've stated a few assumptions and a few things for role-playing. I'd like to collect this all together and put it all in context.

In my last post, I set up a framework for thinking:

We now get further into the role-playing aspect of this series. Let's pretend that you're trying to design a polling strategy for a Democratic Congressional candidate running for an open seat in the state of Mississippi. It is going to be in time for the 2008 elections, and not a special election.  You are the campaign manager, and it's your job to figure out what you need to do with the polls.  You have no primary opponent, and are able to begin running against the Republican from day one.  In fact, your candidate had an exploratory committee up and going by March 07, and declared his intentions for the seat in June 07.  The Republican incumbent of fourteen years is retiring, and they're facing a primary of three candidates.  Their primary is not going to be messy and fun. It's going to have the party leadership step in and make their executive decisions, so you'll be running against someone by January 08.

Now, just to put this all in context, let's assume that you've been given the job because you're a master at making the trains run on time, and not necessarily the strongest on strategy.  Because of this, you're seeking advice from all kinds of people on what to do about polling.  And this blog will be the aggregated voice of all those people. Does this make sense?

Now, in the post prior to that, I decided that when we were discussing some completely hypothetical poll, we would keep the n-size at 500.

We now have two distinct conversations happening, and I want to make sure that everyone is clear on the difference.   In the first case, we'll be talking about building and using different kinds of polls, as well as interpreting them, in an applied context.  In the second case, we'll be talking about the abstract thinking that goes into different kinds of polls.

Clear? I hope so, because I'm looking forward to it.

Dirty D