BTW, the reason you get the Democrat overhang is that they do the random selection poll first.
In the course of wrapping up the poll they find out your age, race, religion, political affiliation, income ~ etc. ~ whatever the person paying for the poll thinks is relevant.
So you end up with more Democrats than Republicans ~ them's the facts ~ there ARE more Democrats than Republicans.
It's when you get a poll and it ends up having more Republicans than Democrats that you'd get excited.
There are other polls where the polling company has folks on call. So they can pre-select Republicans, or Democrats, or Greenies to call up and pass questions by them. We don't see to many of them because they are more expensive ~ imagine a job where they can call you for a stupid opinion about an obnoxious product ~ any time they want.
Then there are FOCUS GROUPS (or as i used to call them "Fork us groups'). They can be pre-selected, or just random. You will never know. These groups are used as a rough guide for a trendline idea. You wouldn't want to use them to predict the results of a forthcoming election.
Free Republic works just like a Focus Group ~ if you follow it regularly you can figure out the trendlines in Conservative thought ~ which is useful for many purposes. On the other hand we get infiltrated by people like the Obama Truth Squad who seek to drag us off topic, or simply cease discussing certain things. More recently the Mittbots have gotten into suggesting that we should discuss anything critical of Romney.
Of course that's just crazy talk ~ Freepers come down on both sides of the Bible so whose this Romney guy that we ought to be careful around his holy eminence and sweaty body.
Today I heard the purest of Freeper Talk come through a couple of the TV talking head shows ~ it was on here yesterday, and it's on there today. Usually somebody comes up with some soundbytes that will confuse and confound the MSM folks and their Democrat toadies they bring in to back up the network.
Remember, one righteous man can stop armies.
It is surprizing the JFK even got that many. That was before LBJ's War on Poverty Act, when he said, "We'll have the Negroes eating out of our hands and voting Democrat for the next 200 years."
Before FDR's Great Depression, few Blacks had any reason to vote Democrat, the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK.
Anyhow, after the conventions, all the pollsters will have to move closer to reality, or risk their sterling reputations.