People talk about polls as much as the weather.
But we don't do much more about polls than we do about the weather, when polls could do so much. The Republicans and Democrats in Congress are exchanging punts right now over the issue of conducting some part of the 2000 Census as, well, a poll. They hope that we'll assume the tabulation of a phone call made to every person in Texas would be identical to the subset pollsters polled, save for standard deviation. After the 1990 census, the U.S. Census Bureau concluded it had missed 1.8 percent of the U.S. population after its hard count was over. The bureau's 1.8 percent figure comes from the fish methodology.