Are Today's Polls Clueless? 206
Frisky070802 writes "As noted on electoral-vote, Jimmy Breslin has an interesting article in Newsday on why polls are broken. This is because they poll only landline phones, and a substantial fraction of younger people have only cell phones -- so they hit a biased demographic. If a majority of younger voters tend Democratic, the polls could be giving Kerry a raw deal. Hmm, could this be why two polls released this week vary so widely?"
Re:More cellphones in large cities (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, but do they vote? It doesn't matter if they miss people who don't vote. I started voting at 18, but in the last few years, 95% of the undergraduates I've asked say they don't vote and didn't care if I thought they should.
Re:Cell phone people are different (Score:2, Interesting)
Source: My own survey of friends.
Basis: Those of my friends that only have a cell phone have made the decision to cancel their land-line and spend the additional money on additional minutes. They are successful business types and tend to be more conservative than the general population. Other friends have both a land-line and cell, but only use the cell on nights/weekends for free long-distance. On average, these users tend to be more liberal.
Now of course, none of this has much bearing on polling because liberal/conservative is not an absolute indicator of a Bush/Kerry vote. My most liberal friends are voting for Bush because Kerry's group is keeping Nader off the ballot in so many places. They said they would've vote for Kerry, but they don't like the strong-arm tactics.
effect of Caller ID? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if Caller ID has a neutral or skewing effect on the accuracy of polling today?
News Polls (Score:2, Interesting)
Just irritating. Anyone else seen stuff like this and wish to add to it?
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
18-20 (3 years worth of people representing 10.7 million)
21-24 (4 years representing 13.8 million)
25-44 (20 years representing 83.3 million!)
45-64 (20 years representing 53.7 million)
65+ (avg age of ~80 = ~16 years representing 31.8 milion)
Graphing it would have been better. Yes, young people vote less, but is 24 really much worse than 25 or is there a spike at 30 or 35 that brings everyne in the age bracket up?
Re:I Was Agreeing With Him, Up Till... (Score:3, Interesting)
(Of course, this is using the latest re-definition of "lie" to mean "anything opposed to the truth" (and we'll just leave "truth" up in the air), as opposed to the rather more reasonable definition of "knowingly telling a falsehood". Under that definition, I don't think either candidate is lying much, although both have lied about their past to one degree or another and both have lied about their positions depending on what people want to hear (though I have to give credit to Kerry here for lying this way much more often; his problem here is that he has to in order to both be nominated and win the election and it is still up in the air whether he can manage it). The problem is that they are wrong, each in their own various ways. It is beyond me to give a full listing, as I am not perfect either.)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, I think the youth vote will be far more of a factor in this election than it has been in the past. An example: Among my circle of friends, I'm known as someone who is very politically active, and thus has been the go-to guy to get registered to vote. I have helped register many friends (and friends of friends, and so on), including several who have never shown any political inclination before. As might be expected, these people are planning to vote Kerry in droves. Quite simply, they think Bush is a reckless cowboy, and feel that he is selling out their futures with reckless defecit spending. While the 18-25 turnout may be lower than the national average, I think that it will turn out to be one of the decisive groups in this election.
Polls today are not accurate. (Score:3, Interesting)
Even within rural areas like this it is almost impossible to get a handle on who is for or against whom. In this divisive political environment people are not speaking their minds because they are afraid of being singled out and of hostility. This alone pretty much guarantees that polls will not be accurate.
Concern over Iraq (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:good thing the youngsters don't vote (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it's better when a candidate is able to change their stance based on new information.
It's too bad this election has been showing this as a bad thing.
And overseas voters (Score:3, Interesting)
There's another group too, *totally* unaccounted for by the polls: Americans living overseas. Here's a couple of factoids:
I got the first point from this site [electoral-vote.com] a few days ago. The front page keeps changing, so here's the text:The death of democracy? (Score:5, Interesting)
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again into bondage."
Alexander Frasier Tytler
"The decline and fall of the Athenian republic"
It looks like we're at "apathy" now. Time to break the cycle.
Re:More cellphones in large cities (Score:3, Interesting)
And many of my friends only have cell phones, and they also all vote.
The real flaw with Gallup's polls and the Time and Newsweek polls is that they normalize heavily in favor of republicans.
That is, gallup assumes that 40% of the turnout in November will be republicans, and 33% will be democrats, and weights the responses of the republicans commensurately.
The problem is, that bears no resemblance to reality.
Says John Zogby:
"If we look at the three last Presidential elections, the spread was 34% Democrats, 34% Republicans and 33% Independents (in 1992 with Ross Perot in the race); 39% Democrats, 34% Republicans, and 27% Independents in 1996; and 39% Democrats, 35% Republicans and 26% Independents in 2000."
In other words, gallup thinks there's a 10% difference in who will turn out in 2004 vs 2000, and I haven't heard a convincing reason why they think this.
My suspicion is that they normalize it this way based on their 8 questions, which they use to determine a likely voter, rather than just saying "How likely, on a scale of 1 to 5, are you to vote in November?" like many other pollsters.
If you re-normalize the gallup results based on 2000 voter turnout, you get either a tie or a statistically insignificant lead for either party.
Gallup also failed miserably in 2000: In late october they had bush leading by more than 10 points among likely voters nationwide. On election day, bush lost the popular vote by about
It's also absurd to look at national polls. They tell you nothing about how the electoral college will break. It's possible for a candidate to get a vast majority of the popular votes by winning by massive margins in California, New York, Illinois, etc, but still lose the electoral vote because they didn't pick up enough states around the country.
So pfft to nationwide polls, and pfft to Gallup for normalizing so heavily in favor of republicans, without saying why.
-ed
Re:What a horrible article (Score:5, Interesting)
Kerry isn't perfect, but he really hasn't "flip flopped" much. Different versions of the same bill come up in congress, and most congresscritters (including Kerry) vote for some and against others. For example, Kerry voted for a bill giving the US military $87 billion for Iraq, but against a version of the same bill that also included a provision that enlarged the deficit to give millionaires an even bigger tax cut.
There are some areas where Kerry has actually changed his mind, like fighting in 'Nam and then protesting the war. But changing your beliefs when new evidence emerges is not something to be ashamed of. It's just rational.