Insta-Pollsters

Mystery Pollster, who I normally appreciate, does a slipshod job talking about ABC/WaPo's "flash poll" that seeks to gauge opinion within 24 hours on a new aspect to a secret program, the extent of which certainly is not fully known. He's rightly assailed in the comments.

The poll, conducted on the telephone to ask respondents if they don't mind electronic monitoring of their telephone calls, was done hastily, in one night, had a +/- 5% margin of error (high for these kinds of polls), and fails to understand that the kind of people who would turn down giving their opinions in a survey seem to me to be exactly the kind of people who would be uncomfortable with all of their phone calls stored in some database.

Doing a poll on a complex and controversial program like this in a day is just sloppy. We saw with the earlier release of information in this NSA program that the initial polls show a majority in favor, followed by crowing from the right, only to erode as more and more information came out. A poll this early in the game has no value.

UPDATE: see also Greg Sargent's look at the loaded question-wording.