esrosedotblog

FONEY II

Zogby has something to say on cell phones (re Breslin's point that they are not used in political polling) and on phones in general. I am a Zogby respondent. I get polled via email and an internet connection every two weeks or so. None of the questionnaires are the same from time to time. I suspect them of trying to 'catch me' being inconsistent. There is no incentive for doing the poll other than to read rather boring Zogby newsletters. I enjoy doing them. They sort of surprise you with quick turns and fast endings. I have now done both extended phone polls as well as various email instruments (I think they like our zip and/or area code). I have to say that the quality of the interviewer is a major impediment in some phone polls. There are good ones who sound engaged and interested and others who are clearly 'phoning it in'. (heh heh). Anyway here from the Zogger by way of Kos:

"I don't use telephones anymore because there is no easy way to use them," John Zogby was saying yesterday. It was the 20th anniversary of the start of his polling company. He began with what he calls "blue highway polls," sheriffs' races in Onandaga and Jefferson counties in upstate New York.

"The people who are using telephone surveys are in denial," Zogby was saying. "It is similar to the '30s, when they first started polling by telephones and there were people who laughed at that and said you couldn't trust them because not everybody had a home phone. Now they try not to mention cell phones. They don't look or listen. They go ahead with a method that is old and wrong."

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.

And the great page-one presidential polls don't come close to reflecting how these younger voters say they might vote. The majority of them use cell phones and nobody ever asks them anything.