Re the Iowa caucus polling.

[saltpoint]

Does anyone know if the Iowa polling we get from the various polling organizations and media represents proportionate calls to urban, suburban, and rural parts of Iowa?

Or are these percentages coming in from Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and Des Moines, while the rural towns are not proportionally represented in the actual call contacts?

If you are out working on your farm, maybe you aren't in the kitchen to answer the phone when ARG or Gallup phones you for your take, even if you've participated in the caucuses all your life and intend to this time as well.

Just wondered where these numbers are coming from generally and if the rural vote is proportionate.

[petersjo02]

1. I don't know for sure, but I suspected there is a good

distribution across the population. I say that primarily because of Huckabee moving up. His support would be the rural, very conservative, right wing western parts of the state.

[saltpoint]

2. Hi, petersjo02. That sounds right, but I'm wondering if the polling would

be different, using different mechanisms, since demographically, each state would have "pockets" of support for various candidates.

I can see Huckabee's support coming from rural areas possibly and possibly strong in suburb areas where "mega-church" populations are clustered.

But for Democrats, I'm not sure where those "pockets" are this time. I kept the Iowa "pockets of support" map from 04 but haven't seen one for 08 yet.

[Bluzmann57]

3. Damn hillbillies

Yeah, maybe the now hired out farmers, due to all the fucking corporate farms, are not in their kitchens to answer the phones. Or maybe they are at their jobs, since, again, they don't own farms since the corporate farms bought them out. Or maybe, and it's just a maybe, THEY ALL HAVE FUCKING CELL PHONES LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I live in the third largest city in Iowa, not Iowa City, and I have been called. I know many rural people who have been called as well. The way polling works is that there is a list of prefixes, such as 326, the first three nos. of my phone. They usually have a computer to keep going through all possible combos until there is a hit. And besides that, there are lists of registered Democrats, as well as registered Republicans. And quite often, the respective parties have the phone numbers of the registered people. Pretty simple huh?
Anyway, I'm sorry for the mini rant above, but I'm tired of people thinking we're all a bunch of rubes. The idea of farm familes being around home all the time is a romantic one, but no longer realistic in the corporate 21st Century. Most farm people actually are out in the work-a-day world now. Sometimes they are working at the very farms which were bought out from them. And they talk on cell phones a lot too.

[saltpoint]

4. Dense as I am, even I have heard of cell phones.

Ain't nobody callin' nobody a rube.

[saltpoint]

5. I live in the world and do not have a cell phone, which I offer just as a

point of reference. I am nevertheless able to navigate airports, large cities, subway systems in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, New York, San Francisco, and so on. They aren't a requirement for "modernization."

Some people who have them live in rural areas. Some people who do not have them live in cities.

My grandmother was the chapter secretary for one of many socialist Farm Alliance organizations in the midwest. Out of this region came "fiery progressives like Robert La Follette, and practical unionists like Walter Reuther...and radical farmers across the region forever enlisting in militant agrarian organizations with names like the Farmers' Alliance, or the Farmer-Labor Party, or the Non-Partisan League, or the Farm Holiday Association." (from WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS, by Thomas Frank, "The Two Nations," p. 15).

Her husband, my grandfather, homesteaded in extreme western North Dakota.

Farming -- of the principally family farm model -- pervades one entire side of my family tree.

I count among them no rubes. There are, to be sure, different attitudes toward learning and formal education, but these run a long and various gauntlet between "The more you learn the worse you get" all the way to "Strive for the best you can be in all venues, and don't let anybody stop you."

My grandmother was a La Follette farmer socialist. Half her children were Eisenhower Republicans, another half soon-to-be Kennedy Democrats.

My mother was born in a cement block home on a wind-blasted farm (soybeans and corn, some livestock, 1 goat and 1 collie) less than two miles from a railroad track, a still-in-use grain mill, and one of the most modest post offices you ever saw in your life.

[Bluzmann57]

8. You, me, and about 5000 other people

have no cell phones. So what? The point I was trying to make is that most Iowans are hooked up whether they are farmers or not. And also that most of the farms are now corporate owned.
Shit, I remember riding my bike out to a farm when I was around 8 or 9 so we could have fresh eggs weekly. I also remember swimming in a farm pond when I was younger. But alas, those days are gone.

[saltpoint]

9. When change takes away good things, they only survive in a few places.

Fortunately you are a living repository for those good things. Fresh eggs. A bicycle. A swimming hole.

To those potent images can I throw in 6-lb test line and the biggest bluegill you ever saw?

Some many years ago now, Joe South (?) -- I think -- did a tune called "Don't It Make You Want to Go Home" with a verse that went:

"There's a 6-lane highway down by the creek
Where I went skinny-dipping as a child
And a drive-in show where the meadow used to grow
And the strawberries used to grow wild

There's a drag strip down by the riverside
Where my grandma's cow used to graze
Now the grass don't grow and the river don't flow
As they did in my childhood days..."

Anyway, it brought that passage in that song to mind.

I think I would have liked that 8 or 9-year old you were then, Bluzmann57. And I like it that that 8 or 9-year old did such a splendid job remembering the important things from those early years.

[Ravy]

6. I guess to answer your questions, we should look at the polls in the past...

and see how predictive they were to the actual results. My guess is that there is a huge MOE. It always seems that Iowa suprises me, and you may have hit on the reason why.

[saltpoint]

7. Hi, Ravy. Yes. The MOE is the big fate-shifter out on those frozen fields.

It's odd, but on one hand it feels as if the Iowa vote is happening too soon, but on the other, an awful lot of shifting in that margin of error can still occur.

Thanks for throwing in on this thread.