From SurveyUsa (via), a very interesting finding about cell phones and polls:
In a nationwide election for President today, 11/16/11, incumbent Democrat Barack Obama narrowly edges Republican challenger Mitt Romney, 46% to 44%, according to a SurveyUSA poll of 1,000 registered voters. If the survey only includes landline (home-phone) respondents, Romney wins.Among respondents who use a home telephone (72% of registered voters), Romney leads by 6 points.
Among respondents who do not use a home telephone (28% of registered voters), and who were contacted by SurveyUSA on their cell phone or other electronic device, Obama leads by 22 points. When the two populations are proportionally blended, Obama is up by 2 points, within the survey’s theoretical margin of sampling error.
Of course, it’s younger people who disproportionately do not use a home telephone. Also too, I suspect that people who do not use a home phone are more likely to get their news from sources other than establishment media.
The generational political divide fascinates me, and I’d like to get a handle on what caused it, whether it’s simply more diversity and tolerance among younger people, or whether technological changes have played a large role as well. My simplified opinion is that the corporatocracy learned how to control much of the public with its manipulation of establishment media and its creation of pure propaganda outlets, and that they have not yet learned how to control people who don’t watch Meet the Press or listen to Rush Limbaugh.
In the meantime, I expect an all out assault on young people from conservative and establishment pundits. We’ve already seen a great deal of this from Bobo — young people lack empathy, young people lack a work ethic, young people aren’t connected enough. It seems to me that this is likely to just alienate Millennials even more.
redshirt
An attack on young voters was precisely the motivation behind Maine’s tea bagger attempt to get same day voter registration removed – damn college kids from OUT OF STATE!!!
They failed, miserably.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
Of course, the issue isn’t trying to win them over to the GOP side. It’s to keep them from the polls, either through disenfranchisement (LOLStudents?! Go the fuck home and vote you brats, you ain’t a real (insert state)er/ian!!) or apathy.
Chris
They’ve done okay with new media. PJM is the one that comes to mind, but there’s plenty of conservative websites out there repeating the same drumbeat message as Fox News and the Washington Times.
slippy
Of course, Bobo knows this from all of the young people he meets over the salad bar at fucking Applebee’s, one assumes.
Ass-hat fucktard. I am so tired of seeing David Brooks’ face fart up our political discussion. Would someone please tell him he is in fucking outer space and has no connection to reality whatsoever?
lawguy
I sincerely want to think you for including me amoung “young people” who do not have a home phone.
Halcyan
I don’t get the sense that many people, you know REAL people (TM) watch Meet the Press or any Sunday morning political show. Junkies, yes. Regular ‘Mericans, No.
I suggest that the generational difference is that the younguns haven’t yet learned how to hate everyone for their lack of success in life.
elftx
There are those of us that go back to the “Smothers Brothers Show”.
Nutella
@slippy:
I hope the Millennials can concentrate their dislike for the entire boomer generation onto Bobo, the one boomer who really deserves it.
Jeff Spender
As one of those Millennials that DougJ’s jawing on about, I have to say that I think he’s pretty much dead-on. Even some of my most die-hard conservative Millennial friends think that some of these attempts by state Republicans are unjust. They aren’t really doing themselves any favors in the long run.
Perhaps this isn’t indicative of most young Republicans, but I get the feeling from my group of peers that many of them long to find a new party.
smintheus
Except that not many of them pay attention to the Bobo’s of the pundit world, or could care what those clowns think.
Knockabout
Surprise!
“Keystone XL May Be Approved in 6 to 9 Months”
He’s the environmental president, you know.
schrodinger's cat
Speaking of NYT columnists did anyone read Friedman’s column today? He is lamenting how leaders in the US and in India can’t act like the Chinese leaders because of pesky democracy.
pk
I never ever pick up my home phone when I cannot identify the caller. This recent elections my answering machine was so full of robocalls it was ridiculous. I don’t get how in this day and age anyone willingly answers surveys when it can be so easily avoided.
The Moar You Know
This, of course, is the goal. Alienated people do not vote.
Davis X. Machina
Not just young folks — poor folks, too. I’ve never seen a land-line phone for pre-pay/pay-as-you-go wired telephone services on sale at a dollar store.
Villago Delenda Est
Asswipe missed his true calling.
Running the projector down at the octoplex.
JGabriel
slippy:
To paraphrase a comment I just made in the thread before this one, I’m pretty sure that if intelligent aliens exist, they’d be the first to tell us that only humans could come up with beings as preposterous as David Brooks and his ilk.
.
Davis X. Machina
@The Moar You Know: A political model based on enraged and engaged minorities rolling apathetic majorities can’t really go anywhere else…
Nutella
@pk:
So you’d say the people who get surveyed are the ones who a) have land lines, and b) are either lonely or not too bright. That would explain some of the results, wouldn’t it?
jheartney
@Chris: My recollection is that conservatives took to blogs earlier than lefties (I remember when the ole Perfessor and The Note were “must reads”), but when progressives finally arrived they produced much higher quality product (compare Red State to the GOS). However, even though younger demographics trend left, there are still plenty of young wingnuts, and it doesn’t take that many to keep a web outlet going. So I wouldn’t take much from the fact that we still have Free Republic; new media are much more left-friendly than right-friendly.
DougJ
@lawguy:
It’s much better by far to be young at heart.
pete
Never trust anyone over 30.
I’ve been saying that since about 1967 and every time I think I might have been wrong, I realize that I am only proving I was right in the first place. Also, too, this.
Seebach
I’m a millennial (I think) and any news I get is pretty much through this blog only.
schrodinger's cat
Didn’t David Brooks used to write for Bill Kristol’s rag the Weekly Standard. How did he get this NYT gig?
Menzies
@Jeff Spender:
My experience – as another Millennial – is that the younger generation thinks all of that stuff is unjust, but that their way of stopping it or reversing those trends is to go libertarian. The “political intellectuals” among my peers usually tend towards that political alignment.
Personally, I don’t have a home phone, I get my news from other sources, and while I think Bobo’s full of shit, ever since I joined the teaching force I’m beginning to think he might be judging our generation by the next one.
Or maybe they’re just teenagers. That’s never happened before, right?
seabe
Because young people such as myself care about these things:
1.) The environment
2.) Equal rights
3.) War
The Republicans and a lot of PTB are wrong on all aspects. I also think increased access to information — via the internet — allows us to find actual information.
Also, we’re less partisan.
Alexandra
Reminds me of the garment-rending and wailing over at DKos in October 2008 when a slightly bad-looking poll would come out and then the excuses and rationales would come thick and fast.
‘Polling during the weekends!’
‘Polling people on landlines!’
It’s about then I started reading FiveThirtyEight instead when it came to reading about polls. As I understand it, Gallup and a handful of other reputable pollsters have got a hand on this landline/mobile split thing.
I’m 48, have two mobile phones and a landline. Need the copper landline for ADSL2 at the mo, but fibre might soon be on the cards where I live.
Nutella
@schrodinger’s cat:
NYT loves them some right-wing pseudo-intellectuals, especially if they sound hip enough (to a typical NYT reader) that they can pretend they’re lefties.
smintheus
@pk: Something pollsters are loathe to admit: Respondents are very disproportionately the elderly and stay-at-homes. To get anything like a representative sample (excluding the huge issue of cell-phone-onlys), they have to extrapolate heavily from very small samples of other demographics in the likely-voter pool. IOW, polls are increasingly garbage.
Shinobi
I have to say that for one set of the millennial generation, change has been an important part of our entire lives. When I was a kid I had a rotary phone, now I have a smart phone.
Maybe I’m wrong and that kind of technological transition was common across most generations, but to me it seems like going from “what’s the internet?” at 5, to “always online” at 20 was a major change that the younger generation experienced. And I think that fluidity in our lives might make us a little less afraid of new things.
Although now I am pushing 30 and I find myself very annoyed by the entire concept of tablet PCs, and cars that are more computer than car. So maybe my openness will change. Though I think the root is really I find touchscreens infuriating. The lack of physical feedback before a number of letter or play button is pressed means I make quite a few mis-clicks. (Plus I have long nails that make it hard to be precise on a touch screen. And no, I wont cut them.) And while I love my car I don’t want it to be able to call the cops on me.
The Moar You Know
Haven’t had a landline for years.
I am thinking about getting one again. There are the 911 issues to think about, and when our entire SoCal electrical infrastructure took a dump for 12+ hours this summer, landlines were about the only communications method that still worked. Given how our local utility has chosen to address maintenance issues (which is to say not at all) as well as the disturbing news that both cell and internet providers are fighting proposed requirements for emergency backup power tooth and nail, I think we can look forward to more long power failures – which means long communication failures – in the future.
Chris
@Menzies:
Yeah, that’s my impression as well. Republican rhetoric hasn’t been successful at making young people like them, but it’s been pretty successful at hammering home the notion that government can’t fix our problems. (And really, considering that our political experience is entirely post-Reagan, I can see why people come to that conclusion).
I hope I’m wrong, or that that changes.
Jeff Spender
@The Moar You Know:
I’m not sure that this sentiment applies in this situation. True, there are a lot of morons who will shoot themselves in the foot by not voting and taking government into their own hands because they’re all upset and have the vapors, but there are people like me who are only motivated to fight harder by such nonsense.
I mean, I do find the general atmosphere to be depressing at times, but I know that no matter what action I take (including inaction), I impact the outcome. That’s significant, and I want to make sure I have a positive effect.
I try to remind the people around me of this fact every day. It’s easy to forget.
Comrade Mary
@Knockabout: OMFG!! Look what Obama said!!
Oh, wait …
But surely Obama is caving even as we speak, right?
Nice try. Here’s some lovely parting gifts.
pk
@Nutella:
No I would not say that. I just wonder how accurate the survey would be. People taking the surveys cannot be unaware that a lot of people simply do not answer phones from unknown organizations, plus a lot of people only have cell phones. So how is this factored into the results?
Martin
I’m really amazed at the degree to which young people have completely rejected traditional media. I don’t think society at large realizes just how much of a media shift has taken place here, mainly because marketing has hidden it from view.
I pointed out the other day how much the left is driven by putting responsibility on those in power, whereas the right puts it on those out of power, but I think you’re seeing a similar trend with media production and consumption. This has been hyped for ages, of course, but I think it really is happening – that young people are more likely to get their news and opinion from the leaves of the tree – blogs, twitter, youtube, etc. whereas older people go back to traditional media.
So it’s come a bit full-circle in that the left is now getting their information and opinion from those out of power, and pushing ever more consistently against those in power, whereas the right is continuing to get their information and opinion from those in power, and pushing ever more consistently against those out of power. It’s a good trend. It’s a bit of a dangerous trend for the left, because that message absolutely cannot be controlled, so it’s going to force them to be ever more honest in a way that the right will not be asked to be, but given time, the new media generation is going to overpower the old media generation.
Honestly, do you think young people are more likely to read TPM or watch 60 Minutes? More likely to consume twitter trending topics or listen to Limbaugh?
Maybe the most immediate problem is, what do we do with this? Obama got that right – and drew the most favorable matchup in 2008 against McCain who was still ranting about those newfangled counting machines, but he had a top-rate social media campaign. But in 2010, the Dems completely fucked it up, so I think we need to consider Obama’s campaign operation to be the outlier here.
I’m hoping the successes this year are showing that the Dems are figuring it out more broadly.
James
Here’s is a nice study on that question. The data may surprise you, or at least challenge your assumptions.
The Growing Gap between Landline and Dual Frame Election Polls – Pew Research Center
Here’s another quite interesting study.
Assessing the Cell Phone Challenge – Pew Research Center
Egg Berry
as a genxer without a landline can i just say: fuck the pollsters
Shlemizel
@schrodinger’s cat:
That is another hallmark of true conservatives – they loves them some strong-arm dictatorships. Those are the model for leadership on criminal and civil justice. They approve of the way they handle descent (unless it is religious and Christian in nature) and of course censorship.
Really, it makes you wonder why they “love America” when they hate so much of what has made us who we were.
Martin
@Comrade Mary: I love how the folks most eager to bash the media as useless/corporatist/propagandists are also the quickest to take a hot salty load from them if it supports their need to bash Obama.
Jeff Spender
@Chris:
My libertarian friends usually argue from an enlightening perspective, though.
And I have to admit that with the kinds of people that usually end up running government, I don’t know if it’s a good solution, either.
Though, I don’t really see the private sector as being any better.
The Moar You Know
@Shinobi: It is. My grandfather was born a sharecropper. No electricity, no cars, no sewage system, no (not kidding) running water.
He died fairly soon after the second shuttle disaster. His generation may have seen more technological change than any other.
I was born right before the first moon landing. I have seen something different.
As a child, I lived in a world where we had a working space program, a working political system, a working economic system, and supersonic airliners. We now have none of those things, and no plans to even try to regain them.
Comrade Scrutinizer
Like that’s a new thing?
cat
So… You buy a new car and its all shiny, reliable, and it treats you well. Its 15 years down the road and its had some issues, but you still remember the first 5 years so you still have a place for it in your heart.
You pass that car onto the next generation and call it shiny, reliable, and will treat you well they’ll be greatly dissapointed even bitter.
There is no need to look futher then the economy as to why young people are very unhappy with the GOP. The under 40’s are being left a run down economy and have no memory of a booming economy. Its a safe bet the GOP is to blame for it and is happy with the status quo of the economy. Factor in the GOP dislike of minorities and the demo shift of under 30’s being the most diverse demo and thats another reason the Young dont vote GOP.
Jeff Spender
You know what I think should be discussed is that I, along with a great deal of my friends, don’t even have TV.
I don’t have TV. My closest friends don’t have TV. We don’t see any reason to have it when we can get everything we need from the internet (including the Daily Show and whatnot).
I think that this trend is accelerating. There really is no point in paying for Cable when you have Hulu, Netflix, and torrent sites.
Nina
I’m 46, my husband is 55, and we do not have a land line. We gave it up during a rough spell of unemployment, kept the cell phone so that employers and family could get in touch.
It isn’t just generational, it’s based on class too. I suspect a large number of poorer households have made the same tradeoff that my husband and I did.
Face it, a landline is a luxury purchase these days, and a lot of folks choose to do without.
schrodinger's cat
@Shlemizel: I thought Tom Friedman is supposed to be a centrist not conservative. His latest series of columns on India are so ridiculous and superficial.
bemused
Brooks lives “in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness”.
I doubt most young people know who Brooks and company are and even if they did, would laugh and laugh at their “moral” lecturing.
alhutch
Gen-X here, with landline and cell phone. Our home phone gets survey-ish calls (based on Caller ID listing) 1-3 times per day, every day.
Those calls will never be answered for 2 reasons (everyone is usually at work and/or we don’t answer survey calls when home).
DougJ
@The Moar You Know:
Adjusted for age, millennials are more likely to vote.
That’s what’s scary about this situation for Republicans — you have a group of people who tuned in, turned on, and dropped out of establishment media but who still vote in large numbers and vote Democratic in a way that no generation has in the last 40 years.
Chris
@Shlemizel:
They love the dark side of America. The ethic that allowed the Founding Fathers to say “votes for white male property owners only,” to restrict democratic voting through things like the electoral college or the way they used to choose senators, the slavery, the genocide of the American Indians, the days when cities could pass anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Irish or whatever rules without someone from the Justice Department looking over their shoulder and going “can’t do that.”
Liberals love the idea of America as “a more perfect union” and the constant self-improvement. Conservatives revere the way it used to be and think it should never, ever have changed. To them, the American Dream is “freedom for me but not for thee.”
dude
That Bobo stuff is not to alienate young voters, it’s to make non-young voters feel alienated from young voters. Why should Mr. Middle Class Dad’s Friend Got Him A Job In The 80’s care about student loan debt? Don’t those selfish loafers have dads with friends?
Ruckus
It seems to me that this is likely to just alienate Millennials even more.
They aren’t the only ones.
@The Moar You Know:
I’m 20 years older than you but have a similar story. What I see now is quite different from what I saw for the first half of my life. But I don’t want to go backwards to the fifties/sixties, I want better than that, I just don’t expect it anymore.
cintibud
Really, how can these fricking surveys even work? I have a landline but I’ll be dammed if I’m answering calls from an unrecognized number. I can’t be that different from other folks with landlines!
Walker
Conservatives are big into New Media as well. Or am I the only one seeing Newsmax push-poll advertisements every time I go to a site?
patrick II
I don’t think the difference in polling between old and young is entirely due to differences in culture especially relating to media. There is also just the circumstance of being young vs. being old. The core difference is that young people are more interested in the long term, older people in the short term. A hot earth 50 years from now doesn’t affect old people. Old people don’t actually die in foreign wars, young people do. Young people care more intensely and immediately about the cost of education.
Butch
@Shinobi: I think the change has sped up but it’s affected us all; I can remember when my telephone number was 143J9 (seriously). But I don’t think trying to make the cellphone/landline split a philosophical divide is accurate. We don’t have a cell phone because we live in a rural area and there’s no service, so a cell phone would be mostly an expensive paperweight.
Chris
@Jeff Spender:
I have libertarian friends my age (close friends, in fact) who are genuinely different from and often distrustful of baseline conservative voters (pro-legalization, anti-racist, anti-fundamentalist, anti-militarist, and not poor-people-haters or rich-people-worshippers either), but who simply don’t trust the government to fix things… in large part, in my opinion, because they grew up in an era where “government” meant the clusterfuck POS made possible by the Nixon/Reagan legacy.
But there’s not really any political faction that represents people like that. Either they hold their nose and vote for one of the existing two parties, or they don’t vote, or they jump on some utopian, way-out-there bandwagon like Ron Paul’s because of an illusion that he’s on their side (he’s not).
I’m not exactly knee-jerk pro-government either, and I don’t think a healthy distrust of government is a bad thing to nurture. But I don’t think most liberals would disagree with me on that. My attitude’s basically “of course government agencies suck a lot, they’re made up of human beings, but they’re there for a reason so let’s see how we can improve them instead of tossing the baby out with the bathwater.”
Trick’s getting my generation onto that bandwagon.
agrippa
I have caller ID. If I have been called to answer a poll, I did not answer the phone. I screen phone calls.
Brachiator
@DougJ:
A clutch of tech savvy younger people don’t get news at all. They get info bites and gossip from Twitter and checking in on their FaceBook pages. This creates an opportunity for maximum disengagement.
The more practical impact of the decline of land lines is that pollsters have to jump through extra hoops to get a statistical valid sample. The worst case scenario would be another “Dewey Beats Truman” embarrassment. Pollsters got that one wrong because they depended on telephone polls, and in 1948 telephone ownership was skewed toward Republicans.
And yet, ironically, FaceBook encourages people to sell themselves and their friends to corporations. Services like Spotify practically require a FaceBook account, and will notify your friends when you listen to a new song on the service. And I continue to be amazed at the degree to which tech heads declare that privacy is, and should be obsolete.
When you have people who are happy to get a notification on their smartphone telling them to “check in” when they pass a store where their friends are buying something, we are well past any quaint notion of corporations manipulating people. People are happy to get manipulated. And they have “badges” and alerts to prove it.
When political parties find a way to use these new tech tools to alert, control, and rally their supporters, things will really get wild.
Rick
@The Moar You Know: Mind if I borrow your “as a child” line? I’ve tried several times to explain it to people, and that just puts it perfectly.
Chris
@Brachiator:
Something like that already happened (on a much smaller scale) in 2010, I think. I’ve read that the media underestimated the Democrats in several districts because of pollsters’ tendency not to call households that are marked as Spanish-speaking… which keep growing and the majority of which, of course, vote Democrat.
bemused
I grew up in a rural area and still remember when we had party line landlines. Sure was fun when a neighbor would butt in on a call and say we were talking too long.
geg6
I honestly don’t know anyone, young or old, who still has a landline. Not a soul.
Which is why I am always skeptical of any polls.
gelfling545
@lawguy: Me, too. I gave up my home phone when I retired in 06. On the other hand, my daughter who is, not surprisingly, a good many years younger than I, just got a home phone because there are a lot of people she doesn’t want interrupting her day and now they can leave a message on the the home phone to be dealt with at leisure. I haven’t found it to be about age but about needs.
Eric S.
@geg6:
I wouldn’t say no one but the trend was complete when my 67 year old father – who doesn’t own a computer and doesn’t use ATMs because he doesn’t trust them and wants to see the teller face-to-face – gave up his land line.
Living in Chicago most people I know that have them need them for the door buzzer / security system on their apartment buildings.
gelfling545
@Butch: I can remember when out telephone exchange was “Fairview”. My family’s first phone number was Fairview 6153 and I’m kind of amazed that I could pull that out of my brain but I think the Fairview part helped. God, I’m old.
geg6
@Ruckus:
Ditto.
Kane
The face of the country is changing faster than what analysts had expected. The 2010 census shows that 46.5 percent of people under 18 were minority, a dramatic jump from 39.1 percent in 2000. According to the census, the number of whites under 18 declined by more than 4 million over the past decade, even as the number of minority young people increased by more than 6 million.
Diversity is sprouting up all over the country. The growing minority will not only have a profound impact on future elections, but more importantly they will have an impact on future policy as a young, increasingly minority population is likely to view Democratic policies of public investment in schools, health care and infrastructure as critical to their economic prospects, while the predominantly (yet shrinking) white senior population might be increasingly reluctant to fund such services through taxes.
RareSanity
Doug,
I have considered this many times, here’s what I have come up with.
Starting with children, generally born from the mid-60s or later, there has been no nationwide, deeply fundamental, polarizing, event to occur in our lifetimes. None.
This has lead to a several generations, that have grown up together, never having to chose sides on some gigantic cultural issue.
Sure, there are still good old fashioned prejudices, but a lot of those have been minimized by the the two most significant, cultural events, in our lifetimes…wait for it…MTV and hip hop music, during the 80s and 90s.
Our generations are fundamentally different from the older ones. That is because of how the major events that molded the older generations, were ones of separation and anger. The events that molded us, were ones of coming together and happiness.
At least that’s how I look at it…
Tim P.
As a card carrying young person, I think it comes down in large part to the Internet and other communication technologies that are much more amenable to a liberal mindset than your traditional TV, radio, newspaper, magazine axis. Liberals just don’t do a top-down approach very well; authoritarian organizations like the traditional media will always be largely a conservative game as liberals tend to be more uncomfortable with deploying the methods and language that are most effective in those media for attracting waverers. I guess it’s that part of being a liberal is highly valuing pluralism – and that can be both a strength (morally) and a weakness (tactically). They can be effective (like Maddow), but it’s very hard to find genuine liberals who have the stomach for it. The Internet is a much more comfortable environment for liberals, as it allows more detailed and free exchange (doesn’t require shouting matches or soundbites), which has prompted the development of a liberal language (see the BJ Lexicon for a small example) by which young people disposed to liberalism can find the words to express their feelings in a way that was more difficult in the past. I’m optimistic that a larger proportion of the currently young will remain liberal than in previous generations as they age: I would be interested to see what percent of young people identified with leftist positions in past years (especially relative to the overall population).
grandpa john
What I find amusing is the amount of time and money spent on the national polling by percentage of voters that is popular vote, in a contest that is not determined by popular vote but by the electoral votes of the individual states. So unless the polling is done state by state of all the states, the results are basically immaterial.
dcdl
@pk:
I never answer my home phone or my cell phone unless I recognize the caller. If nothing else I let it go to voice-mail and see who is calling.
Who in the heck are the people answering their phones to complete strangers and then taking the time to answer questions? Do they really have that much time on their hands?
geg6
@Tim P.:
Don’t have time at the moment, but many studies have shown that the political persona you adopt in your 20s is pretty much the one you have the rest of your life. Most people don’t go from being conservative to liberal over their lives or vice versa.
My own political awakening was the Watergate hearings, when I was 15 years old. Made me a diehard liberal. I’m 53 now. Still a diehard liberal.
Chris
@geg6:
Sounds plausible to me. I switched from Republican to Democrat in my late teens, partly as a result of what I was reading and learning, and partly out of disgust for the Bush administration. I may be wrong, but I don’t see that kind of switch happening to me again – I’m 24, but already pretty set in my ways.
Cris (without an H)
To follow this aside, the phrase “I don’t have a TV” means something completely different now than it did 20 years ago. Back then, it meant the only way you could see a broadcast was to leave the house. You could go to a bar to watch a sporting event, you could go to the theater to watch a movie, and you could go to a friend’s house to watch shows, but in general it meant markedly diminished access to video media.
Now, it really just means “I don’t have the appliance known as a ‘television.'” But it also nearly always means you still have a video screen — the one on your computer — and access to professionally produced content†. It’s like saying “I don’t read the papers” when you don’t physically pick up a printed-on-paper edition, but still visit nytimes.com several times a day.
† fun fact: I even know people who say “I don’t have TV” to mean they have a television, but don’t pay for cable. for reals.
Cris (without an H)
Nine eleven do what now?
Brachiator
@Chris:
Reputable pollsters employ Spanish speakers. But part of the challenge is to assemble a significant representation of Latino voters, including English and Spanish speakers, that will match likely voters.
A pollster cannot just skip over Spanish speaking households and have a poll that is meaningful.
catclub
@Cris (without an H): plus geg6 was replying to something else and wrote this:
“My own political awakening was the Watergate hearings, when I was 15 years old. Made me a diehard liberal. I’m 53 now. Still a diehard liberal.”
I would suggest that the OJ trial had a substantial impact.
Brachiator
@Cris (without an H):
Would this be “cord cutters?”
What I find interesting is that there is a cohort of younger people who never had over the air broadcast TV. They only had cable or now, the InterTubes, or a combination. My niece and nephew, teens, cannot imagine a time when people had TV antenna and “rabbit ears” to watch the pictures transmitted to TV screens.
There may be a group of young people who never listen to music on FM or terrestrial radio. I also find interesting the attitude of some techies that it is primitive to “own” music or video. They disdain people who have music and movie collections. Streaming entertainment, via Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, etc., is for them the only civilized way of “consuming content.” DVDs, CDs, and all forms of physical media are for the underclass.
However, I don’t find this group to be consistently or even primarily liberal, especially with respect to civil liberties. Many have no problem, for example, with Internet companies turning over information to the authorities on demand.
cckids
@slippy: perhaps the problem is that the young people Bobo does meet are like that. They are fewer in number, God knows, but they exist. And they are almost exclusively conservative, from very conservative families. They, personally, are the antithesis of their party’s “values” of bootstrapping, hard work, etc. As always, IOKIYAR.
Cris (without an H)
As somebody who loves his physical media, I’ll agree with them in one narrow regard: consumable cinema like Green Lantern or Adam Sandler movies or most romcoms are not worth owning and should be streamed. But you’ll have to tear my offline copy of The Big Lebowski from my cold dead hands.
Nutella
Can I just say thank you to everyone on this thread for a remarkably thoughtful and enlightening discussion?
It’s so far above the usual level of “Boomers suck! No, Boomers rule!” that it brought a tear to my eye.
Dr. Morpheus
@The Moar You Know:
FTFY
fuzz
@schrodinger’s cat:
Latest columns? Friedman’s everything is superficial, I think every once in a while a hack columnist for a major newspaper should be fired and replaced because he has no new ideas, this hack can “suck on this.” F him.
fuzz
@schrodinger’s cat:
Latest columns? Friedman’s everything is superficial, I think every once in a while a hack columnist for a major newspaper should be fired and replaced because he has no new ideas, this hack can “suck on this.” F him.
MGLoraine
“I expect an all out assault on young people from conservative and establishment pundits.”
It’s OK. The young people are not listening to “conservative and establishment pundits”. Most don’t even know who they are. I have three adult children ages 23, 25 & 27. None of them know (or care) who David Brooks is. The eldest has heard of Rush Limbaugh, but so what? Some old fat guy hater. Big whoop.
Also, I’m an old fudd, but I haven’t had a landline phone for years. When I had a paying job (remember those?) which required 24/7 cell phone availability, I switched. Why pay for both?
It would seem like there are several assumptions in this post and related references which may need to be challenged.
RareSanity
@Cris (without an H):
What about 9/11 was polarizing?
Wasn’t it just the opposite?
Jjm
The survey would weight for age so it’s not the fact that younger people are more likely to support Obama ( although they are) it’s the fact that for some reason people that use cell phones (and actually answer surveys on them) are more likely to vote D. Maybe it’s an urban/rural thing (which I don’t think would be weighted)
pluege
The generational political divide fascinates me, and I’d like to get a handle on what caused it
are you kidding me? (your not embarrassed to say such a thing.) Try 25-40 years of completely different life experience.
S. cerevisiae
Call me an old fart but I don’t trust The Cloud. I like digitizing my old records and being able to play my content whether I have internet access or not. I guess this is because I lived for a long time in the boonies with barely DSL and no cell service.
Canuckistani Tom
Guess I’m way behind the times, cuz not only do I have a landline, but I’ve never owned a Cell phone. Never needed one. Did I mention I’m in my early 30s?
Butch
@gelfling545: Yes, when our number changed it became Browning 9-6383. Don’t know how I remember that, either.
Butch
@gelfling545: Yes, when our number changed it became Browning 9-6383. Don’t know how I remember that, either.