Unfortunately, that's not even close to reality. People are constantly out and about, they use caller ID mercilessly, and perhaps most important, many people are ditching land lines and becoming cellphone-only.

The cellphone issue is a particularly bedeviling one for pollsters, because the cellphone-only demographic looks quite different from people with land lines: younger, poorer, more urban, less white and more Internet-savvy, according to a Centers for Disease Control study from last year.

Response rates for 20-somethings in polling tend to be very poor, leaving pollsters to decide just how much they want to weight up their responses (in other words, how to extrapolate those few young-voter responses so they reflect their actual percentage of the voting population).

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State statute seemed to require that a special election be held this year, but West Virginia’s Secretary of State Natalie Tennant, citing case law, decidedtwo weeks ago that because the 2010 primary election had already happened, the election to fill the seat shouldn’t be until 2012 (when the seat would be up for its regularly scheduled election anyway). National Democrats heaved a sigh of relief, thinking that it would be better not to have one more seat to defend in what’s shaping up to be a difficult year.

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First and foremost for the right is the Tenth Amendment, a decidedly vague sentence about how the federal government has only the powers specifically given to it by the Constitution. However, they’ve reached deep into their tricorner hats to pull out a real doozy: the Seventeenth Amendment, which some of them would like to repeal.

If it’s been a while since you’ve taken high school civics, the Seventeenth Amendment, enacted in 1913, provides for direct election of U.S. senators. This was a break with the old method of having senators picked by state legislators, without public input. It recently became an issue in the Republican primary in Idaho’s 1st Congressional District, but it’s also been bubbling up into Republican state party platforms, such as in the one just ratified in Idaho this week.

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There’s always been a great deal of smoke and mirrors obscuring the polling industry, but the revelations here go beyond mere number-massaging, possibly to the point of data actually being made up.

Until a few weeks ago, the prolific pollster was best known for its work on behalf of the liberal website Daily Kos, although it also had a number of other mainstream newspapers and TV stations as clients. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas ended his relationship with the firm shortly after Research 2000 repeatedly showed Bill Halter narrowly winning the Democratic Arkansas Senate runoff (he ultimately lost to Blanche Lincoln), and, more important, after Research 2000 ranked near the bottom of numbers guru Nate Silver's pollster ratings.

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Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, and Poizner, who made a fortune in Silicon Valley before winning election as the state's insurance commissioner in 2006, are both seeking the GOP gubernatorial nomination in the June 8 primary. Whitman has already spent $64 million of her own money, while Poizner has thrown down $17.7 million of his own.

They’re walking in the footsteps of several high-profile self-funding failures, though. Michael Huffington, then a one-term congressman, dumped $28 million of his own money in a bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 1994. He lost by 2 points. Four years later, Al Checchi, the former chairman of Northwest Airlines, ponied up $40 million to run for governor -- only to lose in the Democratic primary to then-Lt. Gov. Gray Davis (who raised $7 million the old-fashioned way).

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Lincoln's lead in the most recent polls tends to be in the 10-point ballpark. She was ahead of Halter 46-37 percent in a Research 2000 poll this week and 44-32 in a Mason-Dixon survey two weeks ago. Her real challenge on Tuesday, though, isn't to outpoll Halter -- it's to clear the 50 percent mark, in order to avoid a runoff. (Arkansas is one of 10 states, almost all located in the South, that requires the top two finishers in a primary to go to a runoff if nobody breaks a certain percentge.)

In a two-person race, the winner would, naturally, break 50 percent. However, unbeknownst to many national observers, this is a three-person race: The other candidate is D.C. Morrison, who’s been running to Lincoln’s right and employing a variety of Tea Party-ish talking points. Morrison polled at 6 percent in the Research 2000 survey and at 7 in Mason-Dixon's.

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His collapse has been epic.  A Quinnipiac poll from last week showed Crist trailing his Republican foe, Marco Rubio, by an unsalvageable 56-33 percent. Compare that to a Quinnipiac poll from almost a year ago, when Crist led Rubio 54-8!

Two things tripped up Crist during his victory lap: 1) Florida’s once-humming economy collapsed, as its unemployment rate (currently 12.2 percent) became one of the nation’s worst; and 2) Rubio, the conservative and charismatic former state House speaker, caught on with Tea Party activists, who'd been looking for a vehicle to take on Crist (who infuriated them when he literally embraced President Obama and promoted his stimulus package last year).

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A comprehensive poll conducted for the New York Times and CBS News and released late Monday CBS News/New York Times essentially found what anyone watching a couple minutes of news footage of a rally would intuit: the 18 percent of the nation that identifies with the Tea Party movement tends to be white, male, older than 45 and Republican. And also hypocritical: despite their anti-spending rhetoric, Tea Party supporters told pollsters that two of the federal government’s most money-consuming programs, Social Security and Medicare, are worth the cost to taxpayers (maybe not a surprise, given the Tea Partiers’ average age).

Interestingly, despite the frequent framing of the Tea Partiers as a predominantly blue-collar, the NYT poll also found that they are wealthier and better-educated than the public as a whole. And half of them think the Obama administration’s policies favor the poor.

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Reid’s purported confidence stems from the prospect two other candidates on the fall ballot eating up the rest of the electorate’s votes.

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But so far, polling and fundraising numbers offer a mixed outlook for the party. On the plus side, one of the three surveys released in the last week, from Quinnipiac University, gave each of the prospective Democratic candidates -- Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner -- slight leads over Republican Rob Portman, a former congressman and Bush administration official. The other two, from Public Policy Polling and Rasmussen Reports, showed Portman only narrowly ahead. In Ohio, where the economic decline centers on the collapse of the manufacturing sector, the ardent free-trader Portman comes with ready-made weaknesses for the Democratic nominee to exploit.

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But several polls released this week suggest that the only thing new about the tea party movement might be its name – and that the tea partiers themselves are simply the loudest, most revved-up subset of Republicans.

Quinnipiac’s March 24 survey found that, contrary to the notion that they’re a newly mobilized force of previously apolitical independents, tea party supporters represent the right-most flank of the Republican core. Tea partiers, who made up 13 percent of Quinnipiac’s nationwide sample, approved of the Republican Party by a 60 to 20 percent margin; among independents, by contrast, the GOP’s approval was 28-42 percent.

74 percent of tea partiers identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent said they were Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. Only 15 percent voted for Barack Obama, while 77 percent went for John McCain (suggesting little of the allegedly rampant “buyer’s remorse”). And while Sarah Palin has an upside-down favorable rating (33-51 percent) among all voters, tea partiers view her favorably by a 72-14 percent spread.

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But not all of the Democrats who voted against reform come from Republican-friendly districts or face tough opposition in November. Several of them actually come from solidly Democratic urban districts. And not every Democrat who voted yes hails from a safe seat.

The chart below seeks to identify the 10 most courageous and the 10 most cowardly healthcare votes from House Democrats. The formula is simple: The courageous list is composed of pro-reform Democrats from districts with the least Democratic-friendly PVI ratings (which measure a district's partisan tendencies). The cowardly list is of anti-reform Democrats from the most Democratic-friendly districts. (An explanation of PVI ratings can be found here.)

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But recent history suggests they shouldn’t get too excited.

Believe it or not, it’s been almost nine years since the GOP picked up a previously Democratic-held House seat through a special election. Democrats, by contrast, have won six GOP-held seats in special elections in that time. And it’s not as if the Democrats were picking off low-hanging fruit: All but one of those victories came in districts that vote reliably for Republicans at the presidential level.

There are several reasons for the Democrats’ special election success. The most obvious is that many of the pickups came when George W. Bush’s popularity was at its lowest and voters were eager to take out their frustrations on Republican candidates.

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Arlen Specter is stuck in a deep hole as he seeks a sixth term in the U.S. Senate. No, wait -- he’s actually in decent shape, running ahead of his potential Republican opponent. Both of these statements are actually supported by the numbers. It just depends which pollster you believe.

Specter, should he prevail against Rep. Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania’s May 18 Democratic primary, will face former GOP Rep. Pat Toomey this fall. Specter barely beat Toomey in the 2004 GOP primary, and the prospect of a rematch against an even-stronger Toomey this year helped prompt Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party a year ago.

At first, Specter’s plan seemed to backfire. Polls started showing him losing the general election to Toomey -- although many of these surveys came from  Rasmussen Reports, an outfit that, some have noted, has a knack for portraying the GOP’s poll standing in rather favorable light.

Rasmussen’s most recent poll of the race, conducted on Feb. 8, showed Specter losing to Toomey, 47 to 38 percent.  But then, a twist: A March 2 survey from the more reputable (if less prolific) Quinnipiac Polling Institute gave Specter the lead, 49-42 percent.

So, which poll is right? Actually, they both might be (at least for now). The reason has to do with the one major difference in their methodologies: likely voters vs. registered voters.

Many pollsters are reluctant to sample "likely voters" this far from an election, as it’s hard to predict who’s planning to show up. Quinnipiac falls into this category; it sampled "registered voters," without asking who’s likely to vote. Rasmussen, however, has been using "likely voters" for all of its (many) polls this campaign cycle.

Notably, a third polling organization, from Franklin & Marshall College, was in the field around the same time as Rasmussen and Quinnipiac.

F&M offered both likely voter and registered voter models, and found Specter leading Toomey 44-40 percent among the broad pool of registered voters, and Toomey ahead of Specter 44-34 percent among the narrower likely voter pool.

This suggests a serious problem for Democrats this fall. The “unlikely voters” who are weeded out from registered voter polls are the young, the poor and people of color. When these constituencies show up, the results are usually good for Democrats (as in Barack Obama’s 2008 victory). But when they stay home, it gives the GOP an opportunity to achieve a 1994-like result.

To survive 2010, then, the challenge for Democrats is clear: They must turn unlikely voters into likely voters. And the clock is ticking.

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This may be the most consistent quirk of National Journal's scoring system: The members of Congress who are typically portrayed in the media as the most extreme and polarizing ideologues often fall somewhere in the middle of the list.

Consider Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is generally regarded as one of the most liberal politicians in the nation, let alone Congress. And yet he finished in 160th place in the "most liberal" rankings. Or there’s netroots heroes Alan Grayson (170th place in the House) and Russ Feingold (55th most liberal in the Senate).

The same holds on the other end of the spectrum. Rep. Ron Paul, who finished first in the Conservative Political Action Conference’s 2012 presidential straw poll just a few weeks ago, is rated as the 140th most conservative member of the House. And bomb-thrower Michele Bachmann is stuck in 28th place.

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