Interesting analysis on polling in the Washington Post today.

[Longhorn]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3735-2004Oct27.html

Don't Ask Me
As Fewer Cooperate on Polls, Criticism and Questions Mount

By Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 28, 2004; Page C01

<snip>

As the director of polling for The Washington Post, I join my fellow pollsters in the hospitality rooms at professional meetings to drink cheap wine and listen as they talk nervously about the present and agonize about the future:

Two consecutive Election Day debacles have shaken public confidence in exit polls, once viewed as the crown jewel of political surveys.

Cell phones, Caller ID and increasingly elaborate call screening technologies make it harder than ever to reach a random sample of Americans. Prompted by the popularity of do-not-call lists, a few state legislatures are considering laws that would lump pollsters in with telemarketers and bar them from calling people at home.

<snip>

A growing proportion of Americans are giving up their household telephones for cell phones. And pollsters admit that this is a potentially huge problem. It's currently illegal for a pollster to call a cell phone number. And even if cell users could be easily contacted, many would be loath to surrender precious minutes to answer a pollster's questions.

[ProfessorGAC]

1. A Little Behind The Curve, Are We Boys?

You'd think they'd have learned from 1948. Bad stratification and reliance on phone polls, when only 70% of americans had a phone, had them sure it was Dewey, 53:47. Ooops!

Now, it's happening again as the tech curve and extrinsic social movements have polluted their methodology, and the pollsters are just not realizing it.

Doesn't say much for the intellectual acuity of the pollsters, does it?
The Professor