Dispatches from the Creation Wars

Campaign Polling and Cell Phones

I had a conversation the other day about how cell phones might be making political polling less accurate. Cell phones are less likely to be called for political polls because they’re not generally listed in phone books, but there are a lot of people, especially younger people, who use cell phones exclusively and don’t bother with land lines at all. I speculated that because that demographic skews younger, it’s more likely that those folks support Obama than McCain.

Turns out I was right. Pew research just conducted a survey that compared the results from those with landlines and those with cell phones only (as well as those who had both, but used primarily their cell phone). The results are quite interesting. For example, when asked which candidate they were learning toward, the landline users split 46% for Obama and 41% for McCain; those who used cell phones exclusively were leaning 61% to Obama and 32% to McCain. That’s a huge difference.

The same result was there with Congress. When asked whether they were leaning toward voting for the Democrat or the Republican in their Congressional elections, landline only users split 52% to 37% for the Democrats; cell phone only users split 63% to 31%. Again, a huge difference. Here are the demographic numbers for both groups:



It would be interesting to know how the major polling companies weight their results to account for those differences.