Lies, Damn Lies, and Poll Results
I don't know about you, but when I read statistics like these, I get downright nervous... and who the fuck are these "likely voters" the pollsters keep referring to anyway?
"Likely voter"-related skewing aside, it turns out that I need not worry as much as I have been when I hear that Bush is leading in the polls. Know why? Because pollsters don't ask cell phone users. There are some 169 million cell phones in the United States. That's a lot of people who aren't being asked who they're voting for. More specifically, that's a lot of people under 30 not being asked the Big Question... dare I say, more than enough to swing the results away from The Dark Side?
That's what I thought.
"Likely voter"-related skewing aside, it turns out that I need not worry as much as I have been when I hear that Bush is leading in the polls. Know why? Because pollsters don't ask cell phone users. There are some 169 million cell phones in the United States. That's a lot of people who aren't being asked who they're voting for. More specifically, that's a lot of people under 30 not being asked the Big Question... dare I say, more than enough to swing the results away from The Dark Side?
That's what I thought.
posted by Mary at 7:31 PM
1 Comments:
A bit closer to home, the weekend before the last election the Globe and Mail paid Gallup a great lot of money to do a very extensive national poll wihch sais that the Liberal and Conservative parties were prett much tied.
Then the election happened and the margin between the Liberals and Conservatives was 7 points. About twice the margin of error of the poll.
I have a feeling the news media wants to play the poll results to make the race as interesting as possible to attract the most viewers up to the election. Of course anyone who votes for someone based on how the majority of other people are voting should probably stop breathing right now.
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