Slashdot Mirror
Are Today's Polls Clueless?
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?"
Based on my experience as a college graduate of this year, I can say pollsters are definitely missing a huge segment of the 18-25 population. NONE of my friends (yeah, I have friends, thank you very much) have a landline to their apartment, and instead rely on cell phones, as do I. Of course, this is in NYC--which raises the question, do rural and suburban areas (read: swing states) also have large populations ditching their landlines for mobiles? If not, it wouldn't seem to affect polls in those areas as much.
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.
Biased anyone?
The key thing to remember is that people who carry cell phones tend to be younger and more liberal than people with land lines. As such, polls that ignore cell phones tend to have fairly skewed results.
Going door-to-door is probably the best alternative at this point, though there are flaws with that as well.
Now, while I agree that Bush has told some whoppers in the White House, pointing out this non-sequitur in an article that's supposed to be about bad polling methods really undermines his message. If he hopes to get better youth representation in future polls, the writer has best not look like a partisan shill while he's trying to influence the pollsters into changing their methods. He may as well have just wrote down a Dean-esque "YEARGH!" in print... his advice is going to be ignored as if he did so.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
The 18-25 demographic doesn't vote.
See http://www.fec.gov/pages/agedemog.htm
Year after year, Americans under age 25 fail to do their civic duty. Why do you think the drinking age is 21?
Young adults might support Kerry over Bush... if they bothered to *vote*.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
While I understand your comment is tongue-in-cheek, there's actually a number of states that make it quite difficult for homeless to vote.
There's been attempts to get them voting, but it's quite a challenge. In Oregon, for example, ballots are all sent in the mail. Now, you can use the election clerk's office as a mailing address, but that means physically picking it up. I suspect most homeless people are more interested in little things like shelter and food than going through the hassle it takes to vote.
they only get to ask those people who dont hangup on them.
it would be interesting to see a poll that showed the response rate. A lot of people hang up on pollster calls, thinking they're telemarketers or something, often before the questions even get asked. Therefore, if Gallup or USAToday or Quinnipeac (sp?) phoned 20000 numbers, show how many or what percentage of them took time to actually answer the pollster's questions.
the other thing I would like to see on these public opinion polls are how the questions are presented to the pollee. E.g, phrasing of the questions, multiple choice or open ended, etc.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
While that is funny, there are some more critical problems with polls in my opinion. Another problem with the polls we saw during the Republican convention is that the poll was conducted while a disproportionate number of republicans were at home. Two of the major polls did nothing to adjust for this and the difference in their results verses the other polls was several points. The other problem I'm aware of is the fact that these polls typically only count "likely voters", usually defined as a person who voted in the last presidential election. There is a massive increase in many states in voter registration, so these people are not counted either. My impression is that they are predominantly non-republican.
Seriously, the amount of FUD that's comming from the (so called) right is amazing.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
If you're willing to substitute 'ignorant and possibly apathetic' for stupid, and 'Bush administration' for republicans, then pretty much yeah.
There are republican leaders I respect. There are democratic leaders I despise. But I haven't heard a single good reason (and even a reason I disagree with can be good) to vote for the Bush administration.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
I think I'm old enough to qualify as one of them "older people", even if I don't tend to agree with my peers, so I'll try to relate things from the "Boomer" point -of-view. It might help others (you don't seem to need it) understand just what a mess we're in.
The baby boom generation represents a demographic abnormality which may not be apparent to you, but is clearly apparent to them.
First, they are by far the largest single demographic of American society today. Which means, in terms of raw numbers, they have the votes.
Second, every generation tends to become more active as voters as they reach their senior years, and that's what the Boomers are becomming right now.
And finally, the Boomers (generally, people born between the end of WWII (1945) and the middle of the 60's (1965)) were raised during the Industrialization Bubble on the mid 20th century, where the Corporation was King, standardization and mass production were the buzzwords. They have been raised in a society which rewards Group-Think, and rewards it well.
Because educating our children was deemed a priority then, most Boomers attended schools in buildings less than 10 years old. Because educating our children now is just a lip-service issue, most of the Boomer's children (and a lot of their grandchildren) attend school in those very same buildings.
The Boomers have generally reached senior points in their careers, and are past child-breaing years. That means they aren't generally nearly as interested in questions like "How can I afford the mortgage payment" and "how can I pay for my children's education" as their younger counterparts because, for many of them, the paychecks are bigger, the mortgage is paid-off, and the Kids are already through college. Instead, the issues of interest to Boomers, generally, revolve around staying healthy as long as possible, and preparing for the day they're no longer around. This also explains, to some extent, the surge of religious dedication often attributed to the Religious Right.
In a strange twist, the oldest Boomers who saved hard for retirement are finding an unusual and unexpected expense: instead of treating their grandchildren to a toy train at Christmas and a winter vacation in Florida are instead breaking the budget for such things as braces and winter coats for grandchildren who's parents are unable to get the health care or proper winter clothing for them. Instead of a retirement spent growing roses, it's unofficial daycare duty for their own childern, who can't afford to take a day off work.
It makes perfect sense, therefore, for the Boomer generation to favor policies which emphasize health care for seniors to be paid for by a huge budget deficits. The cost will be paid after they're dead and buried. They are only acting rationally, in their own interest. The don't just want tax breaks skewed toward their higher incomes, they need them in order to reach their retirement goals.
And the politicians they support, who also must act in their own best interest, are also acting rationally when they pander to (as they must) this voting block. It's no secret that many Kerry supporters are only luke-warm in their support, voting for Kerry primarily because doing so is a vote against Bush. The Bush campaign has picked up on this, too, citing Kerry's seeming tendency to flip-flop on issues, which (my opinion here) is a manifestation of Kerry's realization that he has no way to run this country any better than Bush without reversing a slew of Bush's policies, but if he were to admit before the election that he has plans to reverse Bush's policies, he wouldn't stand a snowballs' chance in hell of getting the Boomer votes he needs t
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Given that Bush has been caught in a stream of lies; outright lies and lies of omission (as well as blatent attempts to mislead the American voters and vast distortions), it's not "partisan" to say he's a liar. It's a statement of fact.
Flip flops aren't a bad thing.
Usually yes, being flexible is a good thing, if you "flip flop" for the right reasons. The list presented above were all "flip flops" Bush did based on what was most politically expedient.
Voters hate it when politicians seem to change their minds to get votes. It makes the candidate seem like they're whoring or lying and aren't to be trusted. Why Kerry, who has a decades long political career, gets slammed for a few minor revision to his overall political philosophy and Bush, who has managed all these 180 degree turns in 10 years (and most in the last 4) gets a free ride is beyond me.
-dameron
----
DailyHaiku.com, saying more in 17 syllables than Big Media says all day.
First, I think that today's poll likely overstates Bush's gain, but I think that there is a definite gain. And I think that it can be explained thus: the two polls from last week that show a virtual tie ended on Monday and Tuesday respectively. Today's poll ended after the forged memos broke open.
It should be noted that people under 25 are disproportionately conservative, though not disproportionately Republican - there have been several surveys exploring this.
It should be noted that Republicans disproportionately refuse to answer polls in general for a variety of reasons, and that polls taken over the weekends in particular favor Democrats. Not sure why this is; the speculation seems to be that Republicans tend to be out more on weekends.
It should most emphatically be kept in mind that all polls are wrong. Each method for correcting (likely voters/registered voters, bias weighting and so forth) has some problem and/or some amount of guesswork. Polls are also point-in-time snapshots of opinion. This makes them useful primarily in a trend-mapping mode rather than taking any given poll on its face.
The worst characteristic of polls related to forecasting public opinion is that they are a lagging measure. They cannot predict changes based on events. For example, if John Kerry were to make a convincing speech that unites his various past opinions into a logical whole, and presenting a reasonable plan for how to win the war and manage the future, that could swing the polls quite dramatically. On the other hand, so could a terrorist attack in the US (could push things in either direction). Leadership and events matter, and neither of them are predicted by polls, only reflected after the fact. (This is also why dirty campaigning works very close to the election, such as the DWI attack on Bush in 2000, which cost Bush about 4% support within a few days of the election.)
My guess from looking at the trends and comparisons to past voting patterns and their relationship with polls at that time is that Bush has an overall 4-6% lead, and it's growing. If it moves towards an actual 10-12% lead, this could be the most lopsided electoral vote talley since 1984. I would be stunned if either candidate could get even 60% of the vote in today's political climate. I would not be surprised if Bush gets 55-57%, unless the course of the election changes dramatically in the next 6 weeks.
Most sadly of all, the inept Kerry campaign has made it virtually certain that the Democrats will not be able to change the situation in the House or Senate, either one of which would act as a curb on any tendency to overexuberant behavior by the Republicans.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Agreed, because America will be rulled by a mullah within a few years of Kerry taking office and we won't have elections any more.
You mispelled "Diebold".
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
That's what Rush Limbaugh argued - that they were skewing results so that they could show Kerry momentum in the future. I am saying that you need to find out what assumptions the pollster made about the population they are sampling to see if there is a systemic bias in the polling results. Right now you have a body of polls with the race as a dead heat and two polls consistently showing a Bush landslide. These two sets of polls are outside each other's margins of error - which means that there must be fundamental differences in statistical techniques between the two.
The real kicker about polls isn't so much who's asked, but what they're asked. Small variations in wording on the surveys result in very different answers by those being polled.
Polls are pretty accurate, but what's reported isn't always an accurate representation of what was queried.