Keller @ Large: Too Soon To Start Talking About 2016

BOSTON (CBS) - I love C-Span and the public service they provide, but they lost me yesterday when they excitedly unveiled on Twitter their new logo for "Road to the White House, 2016" presidential election coverage.

No. Sorry, way too soon.

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And by coincidence, their tweet was followed by another from an acquaintance of mine who made an interesting suggestion – that at least until we get into the actual election year, we should ignore all polls.

I admit, I like polls. They represent the actual opinions, however transitory, of actual voters, which is much closer to a snapshot of reality that the long-winded opinions of pundits who may or may not have spoken with an actual voter in some time.

But some polls are well worth ignoring.

For starters, hold onto your wallet any time you see an "internal" poll conducted for a campaign and released to the public by that campaign or its allies. Unsurprisingly, these polls always seem to offer good news for the campaign in question, and they are almost never released in their entirety, so we can gauge just how reality-based they are.

Even independent pollsters sometimes play sketchy games with their methodology. And there is certainly no reason to pay much attention to polls taken more than a year out from the election.

If they were anything close to accurate, there never would have been a President Clinton, and Scott Brown would still be senator.

So let's give the 2016 presidential polls a wide berth for now, shall we?

Not to mention taking a wide detour around the road to the White House.

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