Interested in politics? Know all the poll results on candidates and issues right away. The best polls always updated.

The sites listed here will give you a collection of the latest public opinion polls on all the presidential candidates and issues. You'll know as much as the reporters writing for the media. Be careful, this stuff can be addictive.

I know that a lot of people are very skeptical about polls.

I think the best way to think of how a poll is conducted is to think about what you would do if you had to make an estimate of the composition of a large collection of things. Let's just say that our poll is to find out how many Republicans and Democrats there are in the country. O.k. lets replace "Republican" by "blue" and Democrat by "red." Now let's say that there is a big box with a mixture of blue balls and red balls and they have been all mixed up. You don't have the time to count them one by one (or there's a rule against it). You've seen guessing games to figure out how many candies are mixed in a jar with marbles. It's the same thing.

What would you do to make your estimate?

First you would experiment by picking up a handful of the balls and looking at how many are red and how many are blue.

Would you think one try would be enough? Two tries?

Well it depends how many balls there are in the box.

If there were ten, you might be satisfied that you have a pretty good idea of the mix after five attempts. If you're a perfectionist, you might go to ten. But remember you have to put the balls back in after you pick them up and swish them around again.

This is what a poll, telephone, door-to-door, or whatever, does.

The main thing is to make sure that there aren't any organized errors, like always taking the balls from the same corner of the box. And making sure that the balls are the same size and weight.

Pollsters make sure their dips into the population always have the same chance of picking Republicans and Democrats (or persons in favor of Clinto or Obama or Guiliani or McCain) by making sure their phone calls or house calls are random. They can do this with computers to randomize numbers and addresses.

Both mathematical theory and experience show that after between 1000 and 1500 dips into the population box the results tend to be the same with tinier and tinier differences. That's why, contrary to common sense, perhaps, for a population of more than 300 million persons, about 1500 dips gives a result with a small margin of error. There is always an error which gets smaller and smaller with the more dips of the hand, but after a while the error is so small it's not worth the effort to look any more.

Of course there are a couple of caveats that are extremely important:

1. The way the questions are worded. One wouldn't ask, "How do you feel about that hateful beast John McCain or that surly egoist Barak Obama?" It's obvious that would skew some people's answers.

2. The farther away from the event (like an election) you are trying to predict the less accurate a poll will be about the final outcome, since people change their minds, there are new events, and the candidate may be seen in a different way from his or her actions or statements. Conversely, the closer to the event, the more accurate the poll will be.

WEB EXCLUSIVE

By Marcus Mabry

Newsweek

Updated: 8:49 a.m. MT June 21, 2007

June 21, 2007 - In 19 months, George W. Bush will leave the White House for the last time. The latest NEWSWEEK Poll suggests that he faces a steep climb if he hopes to coax the country back to his side before he goes. In the new poll, conducted Monday and Tuesday nights, President Bush’s approval rating has reached a record low. Only 26 percent of Americans, just over one in four, approve of the job the 43rd president is doing; while, a record 65 percent disapprove, including nearly a third of Republicans.

The new numbers—a 2 point drop from the last NEWSWEEK Poll at the beginning of May—are statistically unchanged, given the poll’s 4 point margin of error. But the 26 percent rating puts Bush lower than Jimmy Carter, who sunk to his nadir of 28 percent in a Gallup poll in June 1979. In fact, the only president in the last 35 years to score lower than Bush is Richard Nixon. Nixon’s approval rating tumbled to 23 percent in January 1974, seven months before his resignation over the botched Watergate break-in.

The war in Iraq continues to drag Bush down. A record 73 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Bush has done handling Iraq. Despite “the surge” in U.S. forces into Baghdad and Iraq’s western Anbar province, a record-low 23 percent of Americans approve of the president’s actions in Iraq, down 5 points since the end of March.

But the White House cannot pin his rating on the war alone. Bush scores record or near record lows on every major issue: from the economy (34 percent approve, 60 percent disapprove) to health care (28 percent approve, 61 percent disapprove) to immigration (23 percent approve, 63 percent disapprove). And—in the worst news, perhaps, for the crowded field of Republicans hoping to succeed Bush in 2008—50 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of terrorism and homeland security. Only 43 percent approve, on an issue that has been the GOP’s trump card in national elections since 9/11.

If there is any good news for Bush and the Republicans in the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, it’s that the Democratic-led Congress fares even worse than the president. Only 25 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing.

In the scariest news for the Democratic candidates seeking their party’s nomination in 2008, even rank-and-file Democrats are unhappy with Congress, which is narrowly controlled by their party. Only 27 percent of Democrats approve of the job Congress is doing, a statistically insignificant difference from the 25 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of independents who approve of Congress.

Overall, 63 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, including 60 percent of Democrats, 67 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Independents. Apparently, voters aren’t happy with anyone in Washington these days.