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Charles Frankin, Visiting Professor of Law at Marquette University's Law School and co-founder of Pollster.com, visited our journalism class Tuesday to discuss polling and its relationship with politics.

"How do we know what the public wants otherwise?" This is the question Franklin asked us as to why polling is so important, especially in politics. However, polling is not very cheap, and many newspapers will only publish polls if they get it for free.

Franklin created Pollster.com in 2006 with Mark Rosenthal in 2006 after finding an investor. His relationship with Pollster.com ended when it was bought by the Huffington Post, but he was still around when the website received 20 million hits in November 2008, the month President Barack Obama won the presidential election.

Franklin discussed some of the duties of a pollster. For one thing, polling is journalism and it gives real information to people, but they can be misused. He gave the example of Bush approval ratings from February of one year to May of that same year. The reports in May said that his approval rating had been falling since February, but in reality, his polling had reached a low between those months and had been rebounding. So while his approval rating overall was down from February, it had actually been going up at the time it was reported his approval ratings have been going down since February.

Franklin also shared some debates in polling, such as whether or not "don't know" should be provided as a choice or if pollsters should just note when respondents says they do not know. He used this example: When asking who is prime minister of Britian or Speaker of the House, men seemed to be more knowledgeable than women. This is because so many women were choosing the "don't know" option. However, when the polls were repeated, and the don't know answer was taking away, and women were encouraged to take a guess, they proved just as knowledgeable on the topic.




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