A few weeks ago, I wrote an article suggesting that Donald Trump's poll numbers had slipped. The next day, the candidate called me.

"I'm not complaining," Trump said. "But we have actually been going up. I know a lot of the online polls have been phenomenal, too, but I know that you don't cover that stuff as much."

Both parts of that are true. Some of the online polls have been phenomenal, and we don't cover them too much.

We don't cover them much because The Post relies on polls "based on the principles of inferential statistics," in the wonky words of our pollsters. The worry with online polls is that they "typically base their samples of respondents on groups of people who join a panel to take repeated surveys." If you take out the randomness of the sample, our pollsters say, "there is no theoretical bases to project results to a larger population."