More Thoughts on Polling

UPDATE: The folks at Zogby just sent me a statement clarifying some points regarding the Breslin story, which you can download here. Go ahead and read it. Make up your own mind and tell me what you think.

Regular readers know that I keep harping on the fact that cell phone users aren't getting polled, that they tend to be young people and make up a certain demographic/ psychographic for Kerry. Yesterday, Jimmy Breslin joined the chorus:

Anybody who believes these national political polls are giving you facts is a gullible fool.

Any editors of newspapers or television news shows who use poll results as a story are beyond gullible. On behalf of the public they profess to serve, they are indolent salesmen of falsehoods.

This is because these political polls are done by telephone. Land-line telephones, as your house phone is called.

The telephone polls do not include cellular phones. There are almost 169 million cell phones being used in America today - 168,900,019 as of Sept. 15, according to the cell phone institute in Washington.

There is no way to poll cell phone users, so it isn't done.

Not one cell phone user has received a call on their cell phone asking them how they plan to vote as of today.

Yes, I know. Zogby doesn't do phone polling for that reason. Breslin knows it, too:

And the great page-one presidential polls don't come close to reflecting how these younger voters say they might vote. The majority of them use cell phones and nobody ever asks them anything.

Common sense would say that the majority of the 18 to 25 who do vote would vote for the Democrat. The people who say they want to vote for Bush are generally in the older age brackets, and they don't have as much trouble with the lies told by Bush and his people. The older people also use cell phones much less because they can't hear on the things and when trying to dial a number on these midget instruments they stand there for an hour and get nothing done. The young people on cell phones appear not to be listening and they hear every syllable. They punch out a number without looking.

They are quicker, and probably smarter at this time, and almost doubtlessly more in favor of Kerry than Bush.

Comments

[Eli]

Beware ... big brother Zogby is watching.

[grumpygenius]

What's remarkable to me is that there's something that Breslin informally calls the "cell phone institute" in Washington, although it shouldn't be surprising that it exists.

What is that, a division of the Smithsonian?

[Karen]

There's a lengthy discussion of this topic over at the Electoral Vote Predictor (http://www.electoral-vote.com/) -- that URL shows the current day's poll results, so if you go online tom'w, hit "previous" for the 9/18 post.