Not since the 1948 election, when all the major "scientific" pollsters of the day predicted Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry Truman for president, have pollsters felt so under the gun as they do today. As Peter Coy of BusinessWeek wrote several months ago, "More and more Americans believe polls are unscientific, unreliable, biased, privacy-invading, and a waste of time. The reputation of pollsters is down around the abysmal level of that of journalists or used-car salesmen in the public's mind. Pollsters know this depressing news because they asked."
In an article last week, the famed Jimmy Breslin of New York's Newsday weighed in with his denunciation of polls, asserting, "Anybody who believes these national political polls are giving you facts is a gullible fool." If you want a poll on the Bush-Kerry race, he writes, "sit down and make up your own."
Breslin argued that because telephone polls typically do not include cellular phones, pollsters are missing a good chunk of support for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who Breslin presumes is leading among the younger set. Being consistent, Breslin does not cite a poll to justify his assumption that younger people prefer Kerry, but theorizes, "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."
In his view, the country's salvation lies with the cell phone-chattering younger voters, because they are much more adept at using their fingers to punch the numbers. Older people can't hear on the cellular phones, nor can they dial the numbers on these "midget instruments," so they "stand there for an hour and get nothing done," while the younger people can "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."
This tribute to the superior judgment of youth was in vogue during the Vietnam era, when the mantra of anti-war protesters was that you couldn't trust anyone over the age of 30. But the difference is that now we exalt the new generation because of their manual dexterity with cell phones, rather than their superior principles.
Still, the major point, that polls can't be trusted because pollsters don't talk with cell phone users (of any age), is not exactly correct. Most people with cell phones also have landlines. Young people are interviewed and their opinions are counted in the polls.
It is possible, of course, that pollsters will not get the proper proportion of young people in their samples, if the more dexterous youth are out and about, gabbing and playing games on their cell phones instead of stolidly waiting in their apartments for a call from Gallup. To correct for this problem, when we compare our sample statistics with the U.S. Census and find too few people in any age group, we "weight" their responses so they count in the same proportion as the national statistics.
All the same, Breslin is partially right -- pollsters will miss those households that rely solely on cell phones, and these households are in fact disproportionately younger and more urban than the rest of the country. But the number of such landline-challenged residences is small -- just 3%, according to latest National Center for Health Statistics data, though the number is growing.
Does our inability to talk with these cell phone enthusiasts nullify our polls altogether? I am not as pessimistic as the Newsday columnist. If the cell phone-only people are uniformly for Kerry, then it could change our results by a few percentage points. But if the group is "only" 60% to 40% for Kerry, our numbers would show just a point difference in the presidential contest. We would still be close, though maybe not perfect.
In the future, as more and more households drop their landline phones and rely only on cellular phones, we pollsters will indeed have to re-evaluate our telephone methodology. In fact, most pollsters are already planning for this eventuality. In the meantime, the real "gullible fools" will listen to Breslin's tirade. For the rest of us, the polls are not precise estimates of public opinion, but they are better than sitting down and making up your own.