While Zogby's interactive model of polling may be untested, he's saying that the telephone model
is obsolete.
"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.
I don't have a land-line, so I will never get polled. But Zogby misses what's the most salient benefit of polling -- gauging trends and momentum. Even if telephone polling sucks at predicting results, it doesn't suck at telling us who's on the way up and who's on the way down. And given that cell phone are exclusively used mostly by younger voters, the results can't skew too poorly just yet. Young voter are the least likely to turn out and vote.
Meanwhile, confused about the latest polls? Check this out:
Darn things say that it's either a tied race, or Bush leads big (the graphic hasn't been updated with the latest Pew poll, which also shows a tie). So which is it? Well, Al Hunt at th WSJ takes a look at the state of the polls.
Gallup explains it has what it considers a time-tested formula for determining most likely voters. It asks eight questions, such as current intensity of interest, past voting behavior and interest, and whether you know where your voting place is.
"We've discovered that if we ask a set of more indirect questions, we can better predict who is or is not likely to vote," Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, has said.
But there is reason to suspect those criteria are outdated, especially in an election where both sides say the intensity level is much higher than four years ago and get-out-the-vote organizations are considerably better than ever -- few people on Nov. 2 will be in the dark on where the voting polls are.
"A formula that made sense years ago may not recognize all the changes in society," notes Mr. Hart. "It gives more credence to past behavior and too little to current interest."
"For low-turnout elections those old models work well," suggests Bill McInturff, a Republican, and the other WSJ/NBC News pollster. "But in today's presidential election those models tend to [tilt to] a little older, a little more white, a little more affluent and a little more Republican voters. They may miss some of the extraordinary activity going on in African-American and Latino communities." [...]
The Wall Street Journal and NBC News have settled on one question to screen likely turnout. Registered voters are asked their interest level in the election on a scale of 1-10, and those that respond 9 or 10 are considered likely voters.
In other words, much of the differences between the polls is based on the "likely voter" screen. Gallup may turn out to be the undisputed champ on Nov 3rd, or they could be lapped by their not-so-venerable competitors. It all depends whether Galup's likely voter screen is, in fact, still relevant in today's political environment.
Update: Zogby has released a statement saying he still conducts telephone polling. His concerns about cell phone usage and other problems (like caller ID) will kill telephone polling within the next 10 years. But for now, he still feels a representative sample is possible using telephone calling.