[Hawthorn]

I've been computing weighted averages of the RCP-reported polls for about a week now. It's not the least bit difficult if you know how to do the most basic Excel operations.

Anyway, the current RCP unweighted average of ten polls has Romney up by 0.6%. But if we weight by sample by sample sizes, then Romney's advantage goes up to 1.2%

More interesting to me, however, is that when we drop the five polls that lack results from after the 3rd debate, then today's unweighted advantage for Romney goes up to 1.2%, and the weighted advantage goes up to 1.7%.

(I would also like to compute a pooled margin of error for the "meta-sample" -- except that my math skills don't seem up to the job!)

[FredZarguna]

There is no meaningful "meta analysis" of these numbers, because the respondents in these polls are not cohorts in any meaningful sense. This is what's wrong with RCP's "poll averaging technique," and weighting doesn't really improve it, unless you are making the assumption that the smaller sigma poll is more accurate (reasonable if truly a random sample of truly likely voters, but those are two big IFS.) But anyway, if that's true, than why even include the large sigma poll to begin with?

The only real meta analysis you could do is to take the raw responses from these polls, apply your own analysis, and then weight the results. But you aren't going to get those numbers from these pollsters -- their corrections are already cooked in.

Poll averaging is junk math. It doesn't make the answer more likely to be right, it only makes the answer less likely to be wildly wrong. It's a form of hedging. But hedging is risk mitigation, it's not prediction.