National polls are often conducted by asking the opinions of a few thousand adults nationwide and using them to infer the opinions of all adults in the nation. explain who is in the sample and who is in the population for such polls. use a poll from a newspaper, tv, a magazine, or from the internetexample: hello! i saw a poll on tv the other day. it was a simple poll of favorability of our current president. his numbers went down from the previous poll of 54% favorable and 47% unfavorable to 48% favorable and 52% unfavorable. the population is all people in the u. s. of voting age and the sample was probably 1000 people in a major city in the united states.