In general, I don't trust polls, especially this far out from the actual election. I always enjoy looking at the different ones, though, and their different results, and wondering how their methodologies differ, to give those different results.

Case in point: two polls taken right after the Republican National Convention put Bush ahead by 11 points, while Zogby later said it was more like 2 points.

I usually enjoy reading Dick Morris, and this column, in which he considers the polling differences, is no exception.

Morris concludes that the actual difference is closer to 11 than to 2. Here's the important part:

"Some polling firms treat party affiliation as a demographic constant and, when they find that their sample has too many Republicans, they weight down each Republican interview and assign an extra weight to each Democratic response.

But other polling firms - and I - disagree. We feel that political party is not a demographic, like gender or race or age. If the survey finds more Republicans than usual, we think it's because the country has become more Republican, so we treat the result as a indicator of national mood, not of statistical error. "