unpollable cellphones and kerry

how about both young people and urbanites support Kerry to a greater - perhaps a far greater - extent than all voters do?

the issue isn't the 'unpollable', it's the won't-pollable. do you answer your landline when you don't know who it is? do your friends?

actually, who am i kidding, i always answer the phone, WHAT IF IT'S IMPORTANT!!! [subtext: woohoo! someone likes me]

yes. but what does that have to do with cellphones?

if you have a cellphone, you are more likely not to receive landline calls from people you know, and you are more likely not to pick up landline calls if you don't know the caller. This is a bigger issue than cell-only people because, per a recent Mystery Pollster post, there are more people who have a landline but use their cell for 3/4 of their calls than there are people who don't have a landline.

but don't cellphone users, in general, also have higher incomes than non cell-users?

Above-median-income white people are like this! Well, maybe they are, if they don't live in cities. Do you know young, higher-income people? Who do they support?

xp

Yep, you are wrong.

No, it's "unpollable" -- it's illegal to poll a cell phone (because it costs the cell phone user minutes), and you pay a fine if you do so.

And remember that there's one very big swing state that presumably does have a big cellphone-primary population - Florida. Maybe the failure to count these people explains why a state that Gore won looks better for Bush in some polls than Ohio, where Gore lost by 3.

It puts Kerry an average of 2.7% down over the last week.

xpost: yeah, I worry about the vote for the winner. but it's unclear there will be one. most of the polls show a tie within the margin.

NO. if you're undercounting blue-state Kerry supporters in a national poll, you're also undercounting, inferentially, swing-state Kerry supporters, because you're assuming an accurate geographic distribution of Kerry's support.

Also, we're assuming that most of these people can and will vote. There's a lot of talk about get-out-the-vote drives. However, there's a cohort that cannot vote (felony or noncitizenship issues), and another that in theory is eligible but for individual reasons will not vote (apathy, disgust).

I'm assuming that the pollsters working the phones definitely weeded out of their samples those who declared themselves ineligible to vote, and probably weeded out those who didn't consider themselves to be likely voters (apathetics/disgusteds).

"In the mid-nineteen-thirties, at the dawn of polling’s modern era, the biggest and best-known poll in America was the one conducted by Literary Digest. Before each Presidential election, the magazine would send out as many as twenty million postcards to people all over the country whose names it gleaned primarily from automobile registries and telephone books, asking them how they planned to vote. It received as many as five million postcards in response, and so the sample size was enormous. The poll was famous because it had correctly predicted the outcome of three successive elections, from 1924 to 1932.

"In 1936, Roosevelt was running for reëlection against the Republican Alfred M. Landon. That year, a young pollster named George Gallup made a bold public bet: not only would he predict the election result correctly but Literary Digest would get it wrong. He forecast a Roosevelt win; Literary Digest, he said (with amazing effrontery, since the magazine had not even started polling yet), would predict a fifty-six-per-cent victory for Landon. Sure enough, Literary Digest’s results forecast a Landon win (indeed, within a percentage point of Gallup’s prediction), and the magazine was humiliated. The trouble was that Literary Digest’s sample, large as it was, was rotten, because people who owned cars or telephones were disproportionately affluent and disproportionately Republican. After 1936, the new breed of pollsters such as Gallup, Archibald Crossley, and Elmo Roper canvassed random samples of a few thousand in person rather than non-random millions through the mail."

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041018fa_fact5

I don't really know enough about the demographics of cell-phone-only users or people who don't answer their land-lines to hazard a guess on what the impact of this would be, though it does seem likely that these people would be somewhat more affluent than the mean and more concentrated in urban areas - these two factors might tend to cancel out any bias in favor of Kerry or Bush.