Wireless Phones and Polling : What it all may mean

[jefferson_dem]

There's been talk here in the past about how cell phones may be impacting the poll results that we all live and die by. Here's an extremely interesting take by "mystery pollster."


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National surveys draw samples of randomly generated telephone numbers, a technique with the power to reach any working wired telephone (or "landline") in the United States. Ariana is right that this method excludes mobile phone numbers* and, obviously, cannot reach those who lack telephone service altogether. If the pool of excluded respondents is large and different from those covered by the sample, the results of the survey could suffer from what survey methodologists call "coverage error." Are polls suffering from coverage error this year? That is a more difficult question.


For the last 20 or so years, telephone surveys have excluded the roughly 5% of U.S. households without any form of home phone service. Those who lack phone service are disproportionately younger, non-white, and lower income, but their numbers are small, they vote at much lower rates than other adults, and pollsters typically weight by age, race and income, so the impact on political polling has been negligible.

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We do not have data on the political attitudes of wireless only adults, but their demographic profile suggests a Democratic skew. In the latest AP-IPSOS survey, for example, John Kerry leads President Bush by a wide margin among renters (68% to 29%) and those with incomes under $40,000 (60% to 37%). AP-IPSOS had the race even among younger voters, but Kerry is ahead among 18-30 year olds in the recent surveys by CBS (56% to 35%) and the Washington Post (50% to 43% on Oct. 11-13)

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Still, assume for the sake of argument that wireless adults are 5% of the electorate, that a survey of wired households shows a 48%-48% tie and that the missing wireless-only voters prefer John Kerry by a 20-point margin (58% to 38% - a pure but plausible guess based on the numbers for renters, low income, etc). If we were able to include the wireless only adults, it would change the overall preference by only one point - Kerry would lead 48.5% to 47.5%.

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http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/10/arianna_huffing.html