Sunday, October 31, 2004
Zogby Cell Phone Poll
So over at dKos, there's a bit of excitement about the results of a Zogby Text Message Poll. Somehow, the results of this poll validate suppositions that there exists a large demographic of voters - cell phone only users - who would tend to vote Democratic and for John Kerry and who are not taken into account in traditional land-line based telephone polls.
Sounds great, I suppose, but here's the messy news: these results pretty much prove the opposite. Zogby himself, in his press release, says:
“The results of this text-message poll mirror what we’re seeing in our more conventional polls. Among 18-29 year-olds, Kerry leads the President by 14 points—55% to 41% in our current daily tracking poll—virtually identical to these results. Our text-message poll seems to have been validated by this experiment. All in all, I think we’ve broken some new ground in polling.”
So what has Zogby discovered? That 18-29 year-olds would vote the same way whether they are surveyed by traditional methods or whether they are surveyed by the newfangled text message experiment. Good for him. And since traditional polls are nomally already weighted for demographic factors such as age distribution, as long as the traditional polls have an accurate weighting of 18-29 year olds in their sample set, it doesn't matter whether they are land-line or cell-phone users, because each group will vote the same way.
There you go.
So over at dKos, there's a bit of excitement about the results of a Zogby Text Message Poll. Somehow, the results of this poll validate suppositions that there exists a large demographic of voters - cell phone only users - who would tend to vote Democratic and for John Kerry and who are not taken into account in traditional land-line based telephone polls.
Sounds great, I suppose, but here's the messy news: these results pretty much prove the opposite. Zogby himself, in his press release, says:
“The results of this text-message poll mirror what we’re seeing in our more conventional polls. Among 18-29 year-olds, Kerry leads the President by 14 points—55% to 41% in our current daily tracking poll—virtually identical to these results. Our text-message poll seems to have been validated by this experiment. All in all, I think we’ve broken some new ground in polling.”
So what has Zogby discovered? That 18-29 year-olds would vote the same way whether they are surveyed by traditional methods or whether they are surveyed by the newfangled text message experiment. Good for him. And since traditional polls are nomally already weighted for demographic factors such as age distribution, as long as the traditional polls have an accurate weighting of 18-29 year olds in their sample set, it doesn't matter whether they are land-line or cell-phone users, because each group will vote the same way.
There you go.
