Carl Guderian on Sun, 14 Dec 2003 13:17:19 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> The Dean campaign and the Internet |
I'd hate Dean's supporters to confuse his popularity with internet-literate voters with that of voters at large. If Dean is doing well by traditional metrics--Gallup or Harris poll figures and amount of money raised--then the buzz is warranted. As well, Iowa and New Hampshire will provide a reality check. Remember the 1936 polling debacle . The Literary Digest, which had correctly predicted outcomes from 1916 to 1932, failed spectacularly in 1936 when it backed Alf Landon against Franklin Roosevelt. Up-and-coming pollster George Gallup predicted not only Roosevelts's win over Landon, but he also predicted FDR's margin AND he predicted The Literary Digest's prediction. Gallup's method of statistical sampling beat the LD's method of mailing ever larger numbers of postcards to people whose names they'd gotten from telephone books and state auto registration records: http://www3.uakron.edu/schlcomm/Caplan/stderr/stderr.html The Literary Digest's sample was skewed heavily toward the relatively well-off, who tended to vote Republican or at least conservatively. 1936, in the Depression, this group was in a majority. Today, the economy is sluggish, and people who care about the internet are in a minority. (Also, don't get too confident in early numbers. In 1948, the pollsters stopped polling a month before the election, and gave Dewey a narrow lead over Truman. Oops.) Carl -- Games are very educational. Scrabble teaches us vocabulary, Monopoly teaches us cash-flow management, and D&D teaches us to loot the bodies. -- Steve Jackson # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net