Gallup World Polling: Obama beats McCain by 51 in Japan

[TheGlobalizer]

Obama: 66%
McCain: 15%
No opinion: 18%



http://www.gallup.com/poll/110758/Japanese-Back-Obama-Over-McCain.aspx

That's it, I'm writing in "Enola Gay" in the next Japanese election.

[TheGlobalizer]

How do they conduct polls in countries like Kenya and India, where many people don't have phones?

They, um, do have phones.  Just like people in TX.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/08/07/mobile.phone.poverty/index.html

[TheGlobalizer]

How do they conduct polls in countries like Kenya and India, where many people don't have phones?

Yeah. Even really poor people have phones nowadays.

In fact, many African cell phone carriers have more functional capacities (bill paying, wire transfers) than US cells phones.

It's like an anecdote I heard from a professor when I was in law school.  He visited Estonia, and his host asked to see what a check looked like.  He had never seen one before, because they do "everything" electronically.  (Probably hyperbole, but the point is salient.)

The US is really quite far behind in infrastructure.

[TheGlobalizer]

How do they conduct polls in countries like Kenya and India, where many people don't have phones?

Yeah. Even really poor people have phones nowadays.

In fact, many African cell phone carriers have more functional capacities (bill paying, wire transfers) than US cells phones.

It's like an anecdote I heard from a professor when I was in law school.  He visited Estonia, and his host asked to see what a check looked like.  He had never seen one before, because they do "everything" electronically.  (Probably hyperbole, but the point is salient.)

The US is really quite far behind in infrastructure.

not necessarily: I travelled in India last summer, and most people I met didn't have cell phones. China, obviously is a different story: it has a cell phone network that puts America's to utter shame.

India has some pretty special circumstances due to their legacy with the license raj.  But I also don't mean to imply that cell phones (or phones in general) are universal everywhere in the world, either.