Polls do Quite Well with Small Samples
e.g. they might say that 50% of the people polled thought Donald Duck would win the election with a margin of an error of 3 percent points.
They predict that somewhere between 47% and 53% of the public would vote for Donald Duck.
If all 100 million or so of the US voting population vote, you get the real result. However you can get to within 3% of the answer by just talking to 1000 people – a tiny fraction .00001 of the total.
This could save a lot of money on Election Day and says you can stay home and learn more Java unless it is a close election. Actually this is not a very democratic way to think, and everybody should vote – otherwise those that love Java would always stay at home and we would never elect Politicians who program…