Polling ‘Alchemy’

* I have just read Arianna Huffington’s Nov. 6 column, in which she trashed political polls and pollsters for a whole laundry list of reasons. The chief one was one in which she admitted to being “stunned” to learn, in response to an inquiry, that the “margin of sample error” applied to the percentage each candidate got and not, as she had always thought, to the difference between those percentages. When this tenet, which is taught in basic statistics, was explained to her by one of the pollsters, she characterized it as “numerical alchemy.”

The question that immediately came to my mind was, why did this intelligent woman, who has the prestige and power of multiple national soapboxes and whose opinions are listened to by a vast audience, admittedly take 25 years to ask the question?

GENE KALLAND

San Pedro