There's an interesting article on salon.com that discusses how polling companies are ignoring the segment of the population that doesn't own land-lines, but only owns cellphones. It's thought that ~15% of Americans fall into this category. This could skew polls against Obama, because this demographic tends to lean Democrat... meaning that Obama is likely 2-4% higher than polls currently show...!
It's "a sample that's predominantly under 40 years of age (oops, that one
favors Obama); disproportionately renters rather than homeowners
(Obama-leaning again); full of college students (sounds like a
Starbucks Obama thing to me) -- and, for good measure, includes a
higher proportion of blacks and Hispanics than the national population
does."
Why are they doing this? Basically, it's just too expensive to call cellphones for purposes of political polling. There are laws forbidding auto-dialing of cellphones, which forces manual dialing. And cellphone users are less likely to pick up, and/or call back. And of course there's the issue of people not living in the area code of their phones (myself included!). But pollsters are ignoring this group at their own peril... landlines are a dying breed, so it won't be long before 30-50% of Americans ditch them entirely in favor of their mobiles.
It's "a sample that's predominantly under 40 years of age (oops, that one
favors Obama); disproportionately renters rather than homeowners
(Obama-leaning again); full of college students (sounds like a
Starbucks Obama thing to me) -- and, for good measure, includes a
higher proportion of blacks and Hispanics than the national population
does."
Why are they doing this? Basically, it's just too expensive to call cellphones for purposes of political polling. There are laws forbidding auto-dialing of cellphones, which forces manual dialing. And cellphone users are less likely to pick up, and/or call back. And of course there's the issue of people not living in the area code of their phones (myself included!). But pollsters are ignoring this group at their own peril... landlines are a dying breed, so it won't be long before 30-50% of Americans ditch them entirely in favor of their mobiles.
2 comments:
I'd be pretty surprised if we ditched our landline any time in the next decade. The hilly terrain in this area makes clear triangulation difficult, and getting the town boards to allow new towers is difficult. We don't have cell service at our house at all.
On the plus side, though, we do still have honey bees :-)
I'm one of those cell phone only democrats. I've never been involved in a poll since I went cell only. I know a lot of people who only have cells now.
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