http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres163973220sep1
Jimmy Breslin interviews Zogby and points out the obvious.
Beautiful. There are 169 million phones that they didn't even try. This makes the poll nothing more than a fake and a fraud, a shill and a sham. The big pollster doesn't know what he has. The television and newspaper brilliants put it out like it is a baseball score. Except not one person involved can say that they truly know what they are talking about.
"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.
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Zogby has no opinion because he is a professional figure man and he has no figures he trusts.
"I am making a segue into Internet polling, which is going to be the future," he was saying yesterday. "You use screened e-mails of hundreds of thousands. Every household has some chance of being polled. How can you not do it that way? I have three children. The one in Washington uses only a cell phone. The ones at home use cell phones."
If you want a poll on the Kerry-Bush race, sit down and make up your own. It is just as good as the monstrous frauds presented on television and the newspaper first pages.