Now, Here's a Poll I Like More

After First Debate, Bush Still Leads Kerry(washingtonpost.com). I know it's not a good practice to select which poll I want to believe, but this poll seems to have more credibility.

In the aftermath of last week's presidential debate, Bush currently leads Kerry 51 percent to 46 percent among those most likely to vote, according to polling conducted Friday through Sunday. Independent candidate Ralph Nader claims 1 percent of the hypothetical vote.
But the president held only a 3-point advantage among all registered voters, down from 7 points in a Post-ABC News survey conducted before last week's presidential debate. Kerry is particularly popular among occasional voters -- a sign that the election may hinge for Kerry on his campaign's ability to get newly registered voters and those with only a spotty voting record to go to the polls.
...
A total of 1,470 registered voters were interviewed for the first wave of the tracking survey, including 1,169 who were determined to be likely voters based on voting intention, interest in the campaign and past voting history. Margin of sampling error for results based on either sample is about plus or minus 3 percentage points.

1470 people polled, and a 3% margin of error. Much better than the earlier poll of just over 1k, and with a 4% margin of error. At one time, these polls use to be of around 2000 people, but they slowly shrunk until covering just over 1000 in the months between the Kerry and Bush conventions.

You know, if all the news organisations would just group together to form a ABC/NBC/CBS/New York Times/USA Today/Zogby/Gallup/PEW/LA Times/Washington Post poll, they could cover around 5000 people quickly and at a fairly low cost. That would greatly improve accuracy, reliability, and end my habit of getting ticked off when a poll comes out and I don't trust it (even though the rest of the media does). But, there are probably good reasons why such a poll isn't being done.