ISSUE 1

 

The 1998 estimates of the US Population is 270,933,000. Assuming a pollster would not count kids under 15 (which represents 58,196,000 people) then the number of available polling candidates in the US is about 212,737,000 people.

 

On the Gallup Poll web site, they list 24 polls taken between August '98 through Dec '98. That's an average of 4.8 polls per month. Each of the Gallup polls will question an average of 1,000 people. That equates to 4,800 people polled per month or approximately 57,600 polled in 1998 by Gallup alone.

 

If Gallup polled 57,600 from the available 212,737,000 polling candidates in 1998, then 1 out of every 3,693 people in the US was polled in 1998 by Gallup. If San Antonio has a population of 1,200,000 people, then last year 325 San Antonioians should have been polled by Gallup in 1998.

 

If there are several National Polling companies that has been polling for many years then I would expect that literally several thousand San Antonioians would have been polled over the past 5 to 10 years. How is it that I have never been polled? No one that I know have ever been polled. None of my family, friends, acquaintances and associates knows anyone who knows anyone whose been polled. When I travel nationally, people call on the local radio and exclaim that they don't know of anyone whose been polled, and people who call the national radio programs laments the same discrepancy (and people who have been polled are not calling the radio stations to identify themselves). So where are the 57,600 people who Gallup alone polled this year?

 

Because I do not find the occasional individual who have been polled, I therefore strongly suspect that Gallup (and other national polling organizations) are deliberately targeting high population areas (such as the Northeast, Chicago, LA, etc.) which are largely liberal and ignoring the rest of America.