Carson Clothespin

Wireless Youth Cut the Cord for Kerry

Pollwatchers have been calculating a 3% undercount of support for Kerry based in part on the youthful voters who don't get called in the typical "Survey of Likely Voters" schema: They haven't voted before, and they don't have a phone with a cord on it. But Zogby did some heavy lifting, and got the numbers. The upshot? "Senator John Kerry [leads] President Bush 55% to 40% among 18-29 year-old likely voters...." Plus, they can use those phones to play games while they wait in line to vote!

Polls Post

Paul the pollmeister has another piece of bad news for Bush:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/markosmoulitsas/story/0,15139,1336232,00.html

Of course, the fact that 40 states' presidential numbers don't matter (Bush is polling at something like 65% in OK) doesn't mean that Democrats in those bright red states should stay home. Elections aren't just about raw majorities, they're about trends. If we want better Democratic candidates in Oklahoma, we have to be better Democratic voters. We show at the (voting) polls and show the (telephone) polls to be wrong, even by a few percentage points, and the kind of people we want will be more willing to step forward and speak the truth.

Why Polls Lean to the Right

More data on why cel phone usage and call screening undercounts Democrats and youthful voters. This comes from that biased mouthpiece of the Left -- the Consumer Electronics Association.

Add this to the The Guardian (10/21/04) article America's Hidden Vote by Sidney Blumenthal. (Couldn't get to the Guardian when I tried just now. Give it a go later -- the Brits are sleeping now!)

Carson is losing?

Jeez, now it looks like Our Boy may need us even more than we thought. I found this on the Refubplican site -- very fresh numbers! This shows the reverse of some digits I read earlier this week in the World.

More Polling Insights

And this, in the extensive comments on a DailyKos post:

A frequent criticism of mainstream polling has been that these polls are skewed by two factors: The voters that they don't reach and the voters they don't count. Most polling involves telephone surveys that are conducted by calling random land-line numbers, causing these polls to miss voters whose primary telephone is a cell phone. By choice, many mainstream polls do not include the results from newly registered voters in their results because of the judgement that these voters are less likely to vote. While this assumption may be true in a typical off-season election, the circumstances of this election - including massive GOTV operations - warrant the inclusion of newly registered voters in presidential polling. These glaring omissions have skewed presidential polls toward Bush, making the current tie between Bush and Kerry (nationally) highly suspect. By my calculations, when the mainstream polls show a tie, Kerry is actually up by 3 percentage points.

Why the interest in polls?

What does Undecided really mean?

Alert Reader sends in this quote:

How will undecideds vote on election day? Traditionally, there have been two schools of thought about how undecideds in trial heat match-ups will divide up at the ballot box. One is that they will break equally; the other, that they will split in proportion to poll respondents who stated a candidate preference. But our analysis of 155 polls reveals that, in races that include an incumbent, the traditional answers are wrong. Over 80% of the time, most or all of the undecideds voted for the challenger.(...)

Link to full story and backup statistics

Now, that's great news for Kerry, of course. But how about our Senate race? Does Carson have the onus, on the basis that he is currently holding office in the House? Or Coburn, because he is the Republican candidate running for a Republican seat?

Guess you can add one more thing that Carson can't take for granted.