On top of the widespread devastation that so many communities and families will face in the coming days, we know that the election will be impacted also. How will the presidential polls be effected by Sandy?
From now to the election, because of phone and power disruptions, nation wide polls and state polls like VA and other states in the path of Sandy, will be severely disrupted. I'm unsure how reliable polls will be in the coming days since they won't have a representative sample across the nation.
Here's some information about what happened to the phone system.
"Verizon is discovering that many poles and power lines/Verizon cables are down throughout the region due to heavy winds and falling trees," the company said in a statement.
Sprint Nextel, the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider said it was seeing outages at some cell sites because of the power outages across all the states in Sandy's path including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Maryland, North Virginia and New England.
People complained of outages to their cable telephone, Internet and television services from providers ranging from Comcast Corp, Cablevision Systems Corp and Verizon in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York.
And the
power grid.
There are power lines down in many coastal states in the path of Superstorm Sandy. Thousands of people are in the dark in Massachusetts alone. A spokesman for the power company National Grid warned customers to be prepared for extended outages.
So how do you conduct a national poll when so many people don't have phone or internet service, or have evacuated the area, or are simply too busy to answer a poll? And how do you conduct a poll in a swing state like Virginia when the same reasons apply.
For poll junkies like myself, this is going to be devastating for the election. All the polls will have questionable accuracy, and all the models that depend on polls will be in doubt. From here on out we're going to be flying blind and will have to double down on our GOTV efforts.
And even a poll junkie understands that the people of the northeast are going to be experiencing some very difficult times in the near future, and I hope that we can all pitch in to help them get through this difficult time as quickly as possible.