Zogby comes calling

  • Share
  • Read Later

The call came Saturday evening before dinner. Curious Capitalist Jr. (who is 9) picked up. The caller asked to speak to a grownup. He handed the phone to Mrs. Curious Capitalist.

Mrs. CC sat there answering questions for a while. From the answers, they seemed like very strange questions. After a while CC Jr. came to me in the kitchen, wondering what kind of weirdo his mother was talking to. “Probably a pollster,” I told him. His eyes lit up. In the past couple of weeks he’s become totally addicted to Pollster.com (I’ve tried to convert him to FiveThirtyEight, but the graphics there are much harder to understand).

It turned out she was being questioned for the Reuters-CSPAN-Zogby national tracking poll, which gave Obama a 49.8% to 44.4% lead over McCain. She was part of the 49.8%. They also asked her a bunch of issue questions, including one about “supreme lending” (the pollster mispronounced “subprime”). But you have to pay Zogby to get those results.

Anyway, it was all very exciting. Voting is great and all. But as someone who has never been polled in a presidential race (the last political poll I remember participating in had to do with Don Siegelman’s successful run for lieutenant governor of Alabama in 1994), I’m deeply jealous of my wife and her role in shaping the national discourse. So come on Rasmussen, come on Survey USA, come on GWU/Battleground, come on CNN/TIME. Gimme a call!