Re: Israeli Polls

So I was giving some thought to that Israeli poll I cited showing the right making big leaps ahead and how weird it seems to me that in a country with the draft so many people would favour sending more of their kids to war. Of course it's possible that Israelis are just horrible people or fierce nationalists or whatever. But then I started to consider it in terms of what I learned from Nate Silver over the past months, and one thing in particular occurred to me: cell phone bias. If you went to Israel ten or twenty years ago, the first thing that would have struck you would have been that everyone, and I mean every single fucking person old enough to speak, owned a cell phone. This was because for a very long time it was cheaper for each person in a household to have their own cell phone than it was to get a landline for the house. This might not be so striking now that everyone in Canada has a cell phone too, but they really are even more culturally pervasive in Israel (if you can believe it). So, my question is, do Israeli pollsters cal cell phones? A lot of American pollsters this year didn't and that was a big reason that Obama overperformed the predictions of many polling firms; more and more young people (i.e. Obama supporters) are cell phone-only and so were not a part of the sample polled by these firms.

On one hand, thinking that Israeli pollsters don't call cellphones seems like wishful thinking on my part, trying to justify why the right is making gains when I just really, really don't them to. It seems pretty ridiculous that they wouldn't poll cell phones when everyone has one. HOWEVER, if they don't, or even if a few firms don't while the rest do, it would probably be a huge factor in these polls. For one thing, the huge jump in seats for Avigdor Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu would be easily explained, seeing as their support comes largely from middle-aged and elderly Russian immigrants, a group I imagine would probably not be among the highest cell phone-using demographic in the country. Meanwhile, the young folks who would actually have to go to war if Netanyahu and Likud get enough seats would have no voice at all in the polls.

Some simple Googling isn't helping out much in terms of determining whether or not cell phones are called. The only information I could find is here, and all it says is that they polled "500 Israeli adults." I'll keep looking later, but for now there are two people furiously making out on the couch beside me in the SSMU lounge, so I'm going to walk to the train station. See you all next week.