Making call on sham of political polling (Newsday)

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Making call on sham of political polling


Jimmy Breslin


September 16, 2004

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.

Out of 168 million, anything can happen. Midway through election night, these stern-faced network announcers suddenly will be frozen white and they have to give a result:
"It appears that the winner of the election tonight is ... Milford J. Schmitt of New Albany, Ind. He presently has 56 percent of the vote, placing him well ahead of John Kerry, George Bush and another newcomer, Gibson D. Mills of Corvallis, Ore. It appears the nation's voting habits have been changed unbeknownst to us. Mr. Schmitt was asked what party he is in. He answered, 'The winning party.'"
Those who have both cell phones and land lines still might have been polled the old way - on their land lines by people making phone calls with scientifically weighted questions and to targeted areas for some big pollster. These results are announced by the pollsters: "CBS-New York Times poll shows George Bush and John Kerry in a statistical dead heat in the presidential race."

Beautiful. There are 169 million phones that they didn't even try. This makes the poll nothing more than a fake and a fraud, a shill and a sham. The big pollster doesn't know what he has. The television and newspaper brilliants put it out like it is a baseball score. Except not one person involved can say that they truly know what they are talking about.

"I don't use telephones anymore because there is no easy way to use them," John Zogby was saying yesterday. It was the 20th anniversary of the start of his polling company. He began with what he calls "blue highway polls," sheriffs' races in Onandaga and Jefferson counties in upstate New York.
"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."...cont'd

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