Then there are “push” polls, which are not really polls at all. Instead, they’re a mechanism designed not to determine voters’ opinions but to disseminate negative information about a candidate in order to move voters away from that candidate.

One of the flaws in polls is how they are weighted and what makes up the sample; if a pollster oversamples a party or demographic, the result is misleading numbers. There also is the sticky situation of how a pollster determines turnout, a not-so-scientific exercise that requires being able to measure intensity among voters -- which is about as easy as capturing lightning in a bottle.

Newhouse and Strother agree that polls right now have zero value, expect perhaps for the guy on top who can send out press releases touting his lead.

This year, because Americans will have the option to vote for the first black president, race will be yet another factor in deciphering voter trends.

No one has done more research on blacks in political campaigns than Strother, who has consulted against former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in Louisiana; he understands the complexities of polling during a campaign with race as part of the equation.

“No one wants to be seen as a bigot, especially someone who is not a bigot, but neither do those that are,” he says. “Sometimes there is a fear as a pollster that you are being told what people think you want to hear.”

He says one way to avoid that reaction is to ask, “I recognize that you would vote for someone no matter what their race is, but would one of your neighbors vote for someone who is black?”

That offers a good gauge of how someone will vote, he says, because “their answer is very telling about their otherwise closely held views.”

Yet for all the science that will go into trying to analyze what will happen, the answer may lie in one simple question: How badly do we really want change?

While that question seems to favor Obama, especially given today’s economy and President Bush’s unfavorability, “change” remains one of those tricky words that mean a whole lot of different things, positive and negative, to different people.

It’s all in the delivery -- just ask any pollster who has used it in a survey.