Why internal polls can tell us more than we think about the 2012 elections

Does recent polling hint that John Boehner will be weeping come Nov. 7th?
(image created by Jed Lewison) After 10 years of teaching Advanced Placement American Government, I feel like I might owe about 600-700 students an apology.

You see, for years, when I get to the lesson about public opinion polling, internal polling'polls sponsored by a campaign or an interested outside group'gets seriously pooh-poohed. "Don't read too much into them," I have repeatedly cautioned.

It is then that the standard caveats are eagerly offered. A campaign may conduct a dozen polls, and only release the single one that is amenable to them. Plus, you can never be sure that things like question wording and the order of questions in the survey haven't mucked up the trial heat numbers. Plus, in the worst cases, the organizations or campaigns may be less than honest about how they arrived at those lofty trial heat numbers (think: the always sketchy "push poll").

Not that any of these caveats aren't legitimate'indeed, all of them are. What's more: It is accepted practice in the political press to examine any internal poll results and offer the immediate caution that these polls should be taken "with a grain of salt."

However, the time has come for me to atone for my sins, and offer some counterpoint. A little time, plus a not-so-little database of polls (over 6,000 in all, culled from the last three election cycles), offer legitimate evidence that internal polls can tell us a heck of a lot more than we might think about the state of play in an election. Indeed, by looking at larger lessons, and not necessarily individual horse-race results, there is a fair amount of predicting value hidden amidst all those data points encrusted in grains of salt.

Three lessons in particular warrant keeping an eye on, as what has already been a pretty laudable load of data (over 1,000 polls thus far, according to my own unofficial tally) will only grow exponentially by November.

And those three lessons await you just past the jump ...