Newsday’s legendary (and cantankerous) columnist Jimmy Breslin, who announced his retirement today, goes out with a bang in his final column. As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir noted, Breslin is unusually confident in a Kerry victory.
When published reports showed a million new voter registrations in Florida and about 800,000 in Ohio, I made the election a lock. They were not rushing out for George Bush. And these poll takers were ignoring them. Any part of a million votes in Florida, most of them of color, would sweep the state.
The reporters said the nation was divided. They were afraid to say anything that might upset this view. You’ve been had by the news industry. Not once, even after the first debate when Kerry scored a technical knockout, did they take a step and call it as it happened.
But the really interesting part about Breslin’s farewell column dealt with a campaign variable that may turn out to be a highlight of the year. Forget NASCAR dads, security moms, freestyle evangelicals, and office-park dads — say hello to cell-phone voters.
[O]ne thing kept clawing at you. Cell phones. Long I have wondered how many there were. Everybody I know, smart people, politicians, news directors, thought that there were, oh, 40 million or so. I call the cell phone institute in Washington last Sept. 12. They told me that there were 165 million cell phones in use in the United States, That is 165,000,000. One month later, I asked again. It was up to 170 million — 170,000,000. Yes, a great number also had land lines. But of this 170 million cell phone users there were 40 million between the ages of 18 and 29, and these people usually have no other phones.
Unfortunately, no pollsters bothered to call any of these cell phones. That is, up until this week.
Then a night or so ago, somebody finally tried a poll of cell phone users between the ages of 18 and 29. John Zogby conducted the survey in conjunction with Rock the Vote and the results showed Kerry at 55 percent and Bush at 40.
Then the Kerry people ran their own poll, which took a lot of work. It was the first time they had reached any cell phone users. The result was Kerry 59 and Bush 39.
Then I saw on television yesterday, and I hate to single him out, but he singled himself out, this fellow Bill Schneider on CNN and he is their election expert and he said that cell phones didn’t mean anything. He’s right. They didn’t mean anything in 1950.
Schneider, whom I generally find annoying when he isn’t being useless, didn’t mean the voters didn’t mean anything, only that their political preferences will be inconsequential because they don’t vote. Breslin thinks the threat of a draft will be more than enough to bring these younger voters to the polls.
If he’s right, this race really won’t be close.