Truemors
The Rasmussen daily poll has Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama tied, with both pulling 48 percent of likely voters.
Although recent polls have become more confusing each day as Americans struggle to choose a candidate. One must ask, How much do polls tell us? I can search the internet and find many political polls that will give candidates a 3 or 4 point lead and a margin of error set at 3 or 4 points. Polls can tell a story but how much of the whole story are we getting.
A huge flaw with polls in this election is the ability to reach out to a percentage of the population that use cell phones. I asked a few of my interns this summer to give me their contact information and I noticed almost all of them that where living on their own did not have home phones. I have never been polled on my cell phone but I have been polled many times on my house phone. A large population of Americans are getting rid of house phones and using the cheaper alternative a personal cell phone.
So how do we make sure a fair percentage of the population will be polled. We can't, we seem to trust the polls and only few will admit that it is a real part of how they vote.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 05:20 on September 24th, 2008
You have to inject some common sense into the debate about who gets polled. Of course cell phone users are less likely to be polled, and so are a lot of other groups. How many of us who do still have land lines actually answer a call from an 800 or 900 number, or even one we don't recognize on caller id? Since this service has become so ubiquitous, we have to assume that a good many of those actually answering polling calls in the first place are using old technology, or are just kind of desperate to talk to someone, anyone. Seems to skew quite a bit older, to me.