Jimmy Breslin: No cell phones = worthless polls!

[Soopercali]

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres163973220sep16,0,5025667.column?coll=ny-news-columnists

He interviews John Zogby:

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."

[yardwork]

1. Who is home during the day? Retirees and home-schoolers

Of course that is a gross generalization, but there is no question that omitting cell phone numbers from the polling sample skews the results. The sample underrepresents young people, people who work away from home, and stay-at-home moms and dads who are on the run all day carrying their cell phones.

[MoonRiver]

2. And even when they're home, who with caller ID answers the phone,

when the caller is unknown? Nobody in my family.

[LTR]

3. I was just going to post this excellent column

It's what I've been saying all along. Many young people are using cell phones as their home phone, rather than pay two bills. Guess what? Cell phones don't get polled.

And I'm sure the majority of younger people lean Dem, especially with the ongoing war.

On thing Breslin missed is that cell phones are very common among minorities as well, espeicially African-Americans. Guess how they lean politically?

Breslin nailed it, and this is a highly-recommended column to read.

[guitar man]

4. nailed it

I no longer have a "land line" in the house. I fired SWB a couple years ago and went straight cellular. I wasn't using the line for anything except internet anyway and the money I saved by getting rid of it pays for cable internet.