SOME POLLS GET NOTICE, BUT ALL POLLS AREN'T ALIKE

Much is made of a Newsweek poll issued Friday before last purporting to show Vice President Al Gore leading Texas Gov. George W. Bush 52 percent to 38 percent. You should know that this is the same poll -- the only one, by the way -- that showed Walter Mondale ahead of Ronald Reagan just after the 1984 Democratic convention. That fall the Gipper crushed Jimmy Carter's vice president, winning 49 states, conceding only Mondale's home state of Minnesota by a hair's breadth, meaning that in his two elections, Reagan won 93 states. Four years ago, the same Newsweek's last poll also showed President Clinton with a 23-point lead over Bob Dole. Clinton won a week later by an eight-point margin. Newsweek is owned by that liberal bastion of inside-the-Beltway thinking, The Washington Post.

Where can you find more reliable information than from these almost laughably irrelevant Information Age dinosaurs? Where more and more news-hungry consumers go: to the World Wide Web. Leading coverage here, free, are two superb new Web sites providing data that just three years ago would have cost money to get in a timely fashion.

One is Voter.com, which this last week was down and being re-tooled to try to meet the crushingly heavy demand it is experiencing. At Voter.com (assuming they have it back up today or tomorrow), you can read the increasingly famous Battleground Poll, a reliable, bipartisan survey famed for its accuracy. This past Friday, Battleground had the presidential race at 43-38 Bush over Gore among likely voters.

Battleground further breaks out four factors for likely voters: A voter's age, how strongly he or she feels about his or her stated preference, the voter's level of education and frequency of voting history. When this analysis is performed, Bush's lead widens further. Battleground updates its results by 11 a.m. weekdays, Eastern time.

The other great Web site for accurate polling is portraitofamerica.com, where the famously accurate Rasmussen survey work is called the Portrait of America poll. This one is updated weekdays at 12 noon Eastern time. Rasmussen doesn't poll 600, or 800, or even 1,000 likely voters. They poll 3,000 across America, and they do it on a "rolling" three-night basis, giving you not one or two nights' work, but rather a three-night "rolling" average. On Friday morning, Rasmussen had the presidential race at 42.5 percent Bush to 40.6 percent Gore.

Both these sites also have congressional, Senate, governor's races and state-by-state presidential surveys. Meanwhile, one looks at the declining circulation and relevance of the Time magazines and the Newsweeks and wonders how long they'll be able to continue fooling enough of the reading public into paying hard-earned money for their stuff.

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Gas tax blues: Last March this writer introduced a non-binding Senate resolution calling on our federal representatives to suspend all or part of the federal motor-fuel tax. My resolution went nowhere as senators and representatives listed all the reasons why government couldn't do without the cash. With gas spiking toward $2 a gallon and a home-heating oil crisis looming, how about revisiting this now?

Peter Kinder is a assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.