[lbo-talk] gender and polling stuff

[Jim Westrich]

Could I add a smallish critique to your list?  One of the things I notice in
looking at random digit dialing surveys/polls is that women answer the phone by
a 2 to 1 margin (after all, answering the phone is housework and women still do
a disproportionate share of housework).  Now, I am sure they reweight by gender
but that would definitely increase the margin of error for men (by weighting the
responses they do get more).  There seems to me to be a small bias toward Kerry
in that (the men who actually do answer the phone would be more likely Kerry
supporters).

Has any expert written about this expertly?

Jim

"The Bush campaign should be able to make an argument without having it
reflexively dismissed as distorted or inaccurate by the biggest newspapers in
the country."

     --Steve Schmidt, Bush 2004 spokesperson

Quoting Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>:


> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> >Yes, I've noticed that people tend to have way too much faith
> >in the precision of these polls.  It's important to keep in
> >mind that the pollsters are trying to estimate the voting
> >patterns of tens of millions of voters with a sample of
> >1000-1200; sampling error is unavoidable here.  If the poll
> >estimate is within a few percentage points of the actual vote,
> >that's actually quite impressive.
>
> This year could prove very interesting - some of the AAPORites seem a
> little nervous. Cell phones, new registrants, intense feelings, what
> they deem to be unusual volatility from week to week and an unusually
> wide spread among pollsters, etc.