...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Friday, September 17, 2004
      ( 2:03 PM )
 
There's a Cramp in Your Sample...

Gallup evidently seems to have more phone numbers for republicans than it has for dems. Not surprising and not that national polls are ever that accurate. The Left Coaster explains Gallup (via Atrios):

Because the Gallup Poll, despite its reputation, assumes that this November 40% of those turning out to vote will be Republicans, and only 33% will be Democrat. You read that correctly.


Check out the entire post for the Gallup samples. Meanwhile, Kos notes that Zogby is tired of using telephones altogether:

"The people who are using telephone surveys are in denial," Zogby was saying. "It is similar to the '30s, when they first started polling by telephones and there were people who laughed at that and said you couldn't trust them because not everybody had a home phone. Now they try not to mention cell phones. They don't look or listen. They go ahead with a method that is old and wrong."

Zogby points out that you don't know in which area code the cell phone user lives. Nor do you know what they do. Beyond that, you miss younger people who live on cell phones. If you do a political poll on land-line phones, you miss those from 18 to 25, and there are figures all over the place that show there are 40 million between the ages of 18 and 29, one in five eligible voters.

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.

Kos goes into some more detail about polling... which is only relevant if you're a hopeless political wonky geek like this Mama.

At any rate, don't pay mind to any polls...it's not over till we get every voter out there on Nov. 2.

| -- permanent link