I figured i'd respond to the other two posts with that title considering that one of them was yet another attempt at voter discrimation by the far right wing operatives, and that polls deserve alot more praise than what they get from reactionary forces looking to blame something.

 There's only one poll that's a completely accurate depiction of the public's opinion when it comes to government, and that's at the end of election day(although even those aren't always completely accurate, as we saw with electronic voting vote stealing in 2004 and the hanging chads of 2000). However, human beings like to know how they're doing.

Scoreboards, report cards, speedometers, scales.... Our world is permeated with measurement of how we progress. Why would politics be any different? 

The only problem with polls is that when it comes to how we view politics, they should be a map rather than a compass. There's always more than one way to get to a destination, and more often than not we're coming from different places, but polls and surveys and other tools used to gauge public sentiment are just ways we can get a good idea of what public opinion looks like right now.

And even then, those "maps", like other maps, are just representations of something in reality, and not all representations of reality correspond exactly to reality, particularly with the rapidly changing sentiments of public opinion.