Polling the Unwired

by James Gattuso on September 17, 2004 · Comments

Is the wireless revolution making political polls less accurate? Jimmy Breslin argued yesterday in Newsweek that it is– pointing out that most poll are done by telephone, and none include cell phone users. “Beautiful”, he says. “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.” And most of those missed are younger voters who are more likely to have cut the cord, and who are more likely to be Kerry voters. An interesting thought.

Comments Posted in: Media Regulation, Wireless & Spectrum Policy

  • Sam
    If Klist and Jason are ignorant of sampling methods, you are strikingly ignorant of punctuation and spelling check...
  • P
    Klist, I feel for your employer ... do they realize you are an ignoramous?

    Jason, you are a genius ... did you come up with this thought all by yourself. Sample size is not a function of the population size but of its variability.

    Are all of you ignorant of sampling methods. Antecdotes are not the basis of refuting stats just one's lazy friends.
  • Jason
    Polls not accurate? You must be kidding...


    How can anyone take seriously a newscast broadcasting the results of a question asked to, usually, less than a thousand people, and then referring to it as a statement from "the American people?"



    Yeah, I always like to base my perceptions on the opinions of 0.0003% of a population. Give up on polls: they are far more useful at creating public sentiment than they are at reflecting it.

  • klist

    No surprise here. As an employee of a large news media corporation, I handle polling data almost on a daily basis.

    The typical poll target is going to be a caucasian male or caucasian family, age range 45 and above, politically and socially conservative. The "Mayberry" type if you want.

    Because of this wide spread model, it is quite easy to obtain severely skewed results.

    So far, nothing appears to be done to fix that.

  • James Gattuso
    We'll have to put you down as "undecided" in that case.
  • Andy
    Any pollster that calls my cell phone is likely to get a string of profanity. I pay for the air time and I don't want to pay to participate in a political poll.
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