Jimmy Breslin

Making call on sham of political polling

Anybody who believes these national political polls are giving you facts is a gullible fool.

Any editors of newspapers or television news shows who use poll results as a story are beyond gullible. On behalf of the public they profess to serve, they are indolent salesmen of falsehoods.

This is because these political polls are done by telephone. Land-line telephones, as your house phone is called.

The telephone polls do not include cellular phones. There are almost 169 million cell phones being used in America today - 168,900,019 as of Sept. 15, according to the cell phone institute in Washington.

There is no way to poll cell phone users, so it isn't done.

Not one cell phone user has received a call on their cell phone asking them how they plan to vote as of today.

Out of 168 million, anything can happen. Midway through election night, these stern-faced network announcers suddenly will be frozen white and they have to give a result:

"It appears that the winner of the election tonight is ... Milford J. Schmitt of New Albany, Ind. He presently has 56 percent of the vote, placing him well ahead of John Kerry, George Bush and another newcomer, Gibson D. Mills of Corvallis, Ore. It appears the nation's voting habits have been changed unbeknownst to us. Mr. Schmitt was asked what party he is in. He answered, 'The winning party.'"

Those who have both cell phones and land lines still might have been polled the old way - on their land lines by people making phone calls with scientifically weighted questions and to targeted areas for some big pollster. These results are announced by the pollsters: "CBS-New York Times poll shows George Bush and John Kerry in a statistical dead heat in the presidential race."

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.

Common sense would say that the majority of the 18 to 25 who do vote would vote for the Democrat. The people who say they want to vote for Bush are generally in the older age brackets, and they don't have as much trouble with the lies told by Bush and his people. The older people also use cell phones much less because they can't hear on the things and when trying to dial a number on these midget instruments they stand there for an hour and get nothing done. The young people on cell phones appear not to be listening and they hear every syllable. They punch out a number without looking.

They are quicker, and probably smarter at this time, and almost doubtlessly more in favor of Kerry than Bush.

Older people complain about Kerry's performance as a candidate. Younger people don't want to get shot at in a war that most believe, and firmly, never should have started because it was started with a president lying.

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.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

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Everyone doesn't have a right to his opinion. The person who doesn't know what he's talking about does not have a right to  his own opinion.  It's why I'm never too much in favor of get- ting everyone out to vote on election day.  Some people are too  dumb or know too little about the issues and I hate to have one of them negating or canceling out the vote of someone who has bothered to inform him or herself!
(Andy Rooney)