Should We Trust the Polls?

Yesterday, I posted a story in which I suggested that Kamala should put Gretchen Whitmer on her ticket but then a good friend sent me a note telling me that my brain had shut down because I said that Whitmer was Governor of Wisconsin when, in fact, she’s the Governor of Michigan.

As Grandma would say, ‘Michigan, Visconsin, vat’s de difference?’

But either way, what will now happen is that the Fake News media will be inundated with all kinds of political polls giving us the probable electoral outcome for a Kamala and this or that V.P. ticket versus Trump and the hillbilly on the GOP side.

Which brings up the following question which swirls around in my ever more demented brain every four years: Exactly how do these polls pick the people whose responses form the basis for predicting the outcome of an election which is still a couple of months away?

Notice, I’m not asking whether the polls accurately summarize the answers which are collected or whether a particular poll is asking the questions which need to be asked.

I’m just interested in how someone gets on one of those ‘nationally-representative’ lists of several thousand individuals whose answers are then used to tell us how 150 million people will vote.