Polling Data
By Via Kos, John Zogby makes a compelling argument that telephone polling, as we know it, is obsolete:
Zogby points out that you don’t know in which area code the cell phone user lives. Nor do you know what they do. Beyond that, you miss younger people who live on cell phones. If you do a political poll on land-line phones, you miss those from 18 to 25, and there are figures all over the place that show there are 40 million between the ages of 18 and 29, one in five eligible voters.
This is pretty interesting, and does not admit an obvious solution. Zogby had moved to internet polling, which may or may not give a more accurate account. We’ll have to wait for November to clear some of this up. In any case, the huge spread of current polls is probably due to something more than the difference in likely voter methodology.
I’m not current with the legalities of polling via cell phone, although I have noted that I tend to receive very few unsolicited calls on my cell (very few solicited ones, either; I’m one hell of a loser). Myself and my roommate have gone the cellular/cable modem route, and no longer have a landline at all, meaning that we are apparently politically invisible. How will the invisibile people sort themselves out in November? Well, we’re young, which may help the Dems, and we’re probably a touch more affluent than normal (correcting for the fact that we’re young) which favors the Republicans.