Daily Agitator
We are bombarded daily but this poll or that poll….the Prez popularity is falling or rising or ………More people are conserv…the country is going in the wrong direction….are a few of the polls that the media is SO addicted to these days…a minute by minute look at how Americans view Washington and its players……these figures are used to drive the political debate or drive the story of the day….but how accurate are these figures?
From the Newser website:
Yeah, it’s expensive, but pollsters need to start calling cellphones. According to the latest CDC data, 23% of US adults, or 25% of US households are cellphone-only, writes Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com. Add in “cellphone-mostly” households and that jumps to 40%—and it could be even higher by November, never mind 2012. These people are just being ignored, even though they are very different from their landline counterparts. Cellphone-only users are more likely to be young, urban, poor, and technologically savvy than their peers. “All of these characteristics are correlated with political viewpoints and voting behavior,” Silver argues. Pollsters try to compensate by “upweighting” the few young people they do reach, but that’s a lousy solution, and a recent Pew study proves it. Pew pitted a weighted landline-only poll against one that called cells and discovered that the latter swung six points in Democrats’ favor—a statistically significant result.
I have been preaching this all the way back to the 2008 election when daily polls were all the news…..during the election I asked why the people with cels were not part of the poll…..and that any poll that did not include these people was NOT accurate in any way and should be ignored completely….I said that then and it is MORE important now.