BOB GARFIELD: It was just a brief exchange last week on All Things Considered between host Robert Siegel and White House political advisor Karl Rove. But it was an ear-opener.

ROBERT SIEGEL: We're in the home stretch, and many would consider you on the optimistic end of realism about - [OVERTALK]

KARL ROVE: Not that you would be exhibiting a bias or - [OVERTALK] I like that, you're just making a comment.

ROBERT SIEGEL: I'm looking, I'm looking at all the same polls that you're looking at every day.

KARL ROVE: No you're not. No you're not. [OVERTALK]

ROBERT SIEGEL: No, I'm not [ ? ] [BOTH AT ONCE]

KARL ROVE: You're not. You're not. I'm looking at 68 polls a week. You may be looking at 4 or 5 public polls a week. I'm looking at all these, Robert, and adding them up, and I add up to a Republican Senate and a Republican House.

ROBERT SIEGEL: Okay.

KARL ROVE: You may end up with a different math, but you're entitled to your math and I'm entitled to the math.

BOB GARFIELD: Wow! The media do their math, but Karl Rove has the math. Kind of makes you wonder if the media polls we’re so inundated with reflect electoral reality. On Thursday, we posed that question to Mark Blumenthal, a Democratic pollster and the editor of Pollster.com. Mark, with a margin of error plus or minus three percentage points, welcome to OTM.

MARK BLUMENTHAL: [LAUGHS] Thank you. Good to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: So we just heard Karl Rove assert basically that the media polling data don't amount to a bucket of spit compared to his super-double-accurate GOP data. Is that just bluster, or is it true?

MARK BLUMENTHAL: Well, the one thing that he is not bluffing about is the number of surveys he is likely looking at. Party committees on both sides are likely tracking a good 40 or so races on a weekly basis, and there may be another 30 to 50 that they are looking at once or twice a month. The other question is the math he uses to add that up. And one thing I've learned as a pollster is that there are a lot of ways to do math.

BOB GARFIELD: Now see, here I thought that math was immutable.

MARK BLUMENTHAL: [LAUGHS] I'm being a little facetious. Two plus two is always four. One way to judge what they're really seeing is to look at the surveys that get released into the general public. Now, it's not a big secret that campaigns and party committees are only going to release surveys when they show good news for their clients or for their candidates. We've tracked the polls in the public domain at Pollster.com, and since Labor Day, the Democrats had released 54, the Republicans, 13. Just in the last two weeks, since October 15, Democrats have released 21 internal polls in races for the U.S. House, the Republicans, just 2.

BOB GARFIELD: So I guess what you've told me is that Karl Rove doesn't necessarily have better polling data, just more of it, and he can see trends in closer-to-real time.

MARK BLUMENTHAL: I think so. I think both Karl Rove and Rahm Emanuel, on the Democratic side, have more data more regularly, done the same way. One of the problems that all the rest of us have at looking at some of these congressional districts is that there may be five or six polls done in the last month, but they were done by two or three different pollsters. And it's hard to tell what is real trend and what is what pollsters would call a "house effect," where one pollster has a candidate doing a little better or a little worse.

BOB GARFIELD: Methodologically speaking, though, there's no significant difference between how media polls are conducted vis-a-vis the tracking polls done by the parties?

MARK BLUMENTHAL: It's hard to know, because the vast majority of internal polls are not released, so they tend not to be studied by academics. The internal campaign polls typically are making more use of voter lists to do their samples rather than what we call "random-digit dialing." It would be true to say that political pollsters do more adjusting of the results by demographics or by other attitudes based on their experience or knowledge of a given state. That's something that media pollsters are usually a little less comfortable doing.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, putting aside, for a moment, John "Shecky Greene" Kerry's attempt at joke-telling, which has created an uproar at the very late stages of the election, it seems that the Republicans had so given up hope in a couple of major senatorial races, and congressional ones, that they essentially pulled out and stopped spending money there. And yet, Karl Rove goes on All Things Considered and says, no, no, what I got right here tells me we are fine. How am I supposed to square that circle?

MARK BLUMENTHAL: When you're a leader of the troops, you've got to keep morale up, so I don't begrudge Karl Rove putting the most optimistic spin that he can on the situation that he faces. And he may well believe that they're in a reasonably good position. But if the Republicans really believe that the media polls, either nationally or in states, were so wrong, they certainly have their own internal surveys that they could be releasing to disprove them or raise doubts about them. And while they've done that in a few places, by and large we're not seeing the Republican internal surveys in the public domain.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Mark. Thank you very much.

MARK BLUMENTHAL: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Mark Blumenthal is a Democratic Party pollster and editor of pollster.com.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from NPR. END SEGMENT A STATION BREAK ONE (MUSIC)