Bush has no lead. Look at this. And remember, Gore had a 5% lead going into the 2000 voting and ended up winning:
“Pollsters use landline call sheets, the same way they’ve done for the past 20 years,” he said. “Cell phone-only homes aren’t listed. They can’t be accessed.”
McInturff said Americans who relied solely on cell phones were “a significant problem,” representing as much as 20 percent of voters under age 29.
“You’re missing a chunk of people,” McInturff said, adding that the problem would only get worse in the next two to four years.
Equally at fault, McInturff said, is the reality that technology allows more people to work longer days or non-traditional shifts. “The number of people who are home is dwindling” when most pollsters call in the early evening, he said.
McInturff said the NBC/Journal poll corrected for these difficulties by making calls over a longer period of time, to catch more Americans and to catch them at home later in the evening. In the future, he predicted, pollsters would move toward using a combination of telephone calls and the Internet to find and screen respondents.
“We’re seeing a drift in the demographic as we understand it,” he said.
People who use only cell phones and those who work evenings and weekends tend to be younger and to live in urban areas. “As a result, these folks are off the rolls, they’re off the charts, they’re not being called, and they’re not being counted.”
Avlon noted that “young voters give Kerry an edge ... and urban voters tend to vote Democratic traditionally. This is a group that could really swing the election and cause an election surprise.”
“I think with an election this close, every little bit counts, and this is more than a little bit,” he said. “This is millions of voters — it could easily cause an Election Day surprise.” |
