Thank you for your replies so far.

One thing that is of concern is the possible impact that their mental perambulations (never thought I'd ever be able to get that into a sentence) affects naive waving voters

In the ideal world, they would simply report and not analyse potential hypotheticals beyond their pay grade. To do so is to to enter the political fray themselves rather than just observe it.

For me, polls should not be carried out at all for any kind of public perusal, yet alone analysed. They obfuscate (I'm in a "big word" mood today) the argument since they attach importance to an irrelevance.