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?"

Comments

Re:Biased.

[JohnTheFisherman]

The other funny thing is that the last several elections have offered polls which tended CONSISTENTLY several points to the left of reality. I'm talking off by 5-10 points just before the election - and always to the left.

Clearly, there is an issue with the polling methodology, but it isn't ignoring all the 'younger, hipper, quicker, and smarter' cell phone devotees.

I wonder what makes them automatically overlook Kerry's lies?

Re:Biased.

[JohnTheFisherman]

The latest Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby tracking poll has the contest at 45 percent for Gore and 43 percent for Bush.
I guess those got far more play in the news that I saw, because Gore was up well more than that. I'm also talking about the overall message, rather than each and every individual source, if that wasn't clear.

You could be a tad bit less of a jackass about it (it works on so many levels!), but YMMV. You haven't 'proven' anything other than the fact that there is a large amount of variability from one poll to the next.

Re:Notes on polling

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be noted that people under 25 are disproportionately conservative

Wrong.

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.

Wrong. Polls taken over weekends favor older republican females.

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.

Wrong again. The Gallup and CBS/NYT polls both used incorrect party ID samples. After resampling, both of them show an exactly tied race, which is more or less what Pew, Harris, Quinnepac, Zogby, and others have shown. Which means that since the Republican Convention (where both Bush's and Kerry's internal polling showed a Bush Bounce of 4% -- LA Times' nutcase 15% jump notwithstanding), Bush has been losing ground.

And this doesn't even consider the fact that using the 2000 party IDs for resampling is almost certainly too conservative! Democrats will be out in force this year, certainly much more than in 2000 when they were in full retreat after the Clinton scandal. They hate Bush with a passion and will vote vote vote.

I would not be surprised if Bush gets 55-57%, unless the course of the election changes dramatically in the next 6 weeks.

Holy crap! You know that You've shown ineptness in understanding polling trends three times now, so it's time to dismiss you.

Re:Biased.

[JimFromJersey]

Look for example at world protests, the vast majority of protestors against political entities are who?

Students, that's who,

because going to a protest is so much cooler then going to class and who cares about class as long as mommy and daddy/the state still pick up the tab. Or one could argue they protest becasue they are clueless, their mushy little minds are foulded by neo-marxist, chomsky-ite (un)thinking. They've taken poli-sci 101 or some such other crap and now they think they understand how the world works; they think that going to cancun on spring break means that they can speak for the "oppressed masses" of the world. What crap.