Believe me, when you're hyper-focused on the presidential campaign like I am it's easy to get hooked on the latest polling data like a lab rat waiting for his next food pellet. The media definitely doesn't help things, either, since they use the polls like a crutch to hold up their daily chatter.

So being pretty skeptical by nature I have no idea why it took me until now, with the urging of guys like Ruy Teixeira, to start peeking behind the curtain. Better late than never, I guess.

The bottom line is that these polling organizations are stabbing in the dark and presenting subsets of their data as the whole picture a lot more than people realize. A particularly fun game to play with the kids is to figure out how your favorite pollster calculates who a "Likely Voter" is. I guarantee your 8-year-old will call bullshit.

But I guess instead of admitting they have no idea what the margin of error actually is, it makes more business sense to just let the polls become "conventional wisdom" the second they're printed. How cool is that?