The Cell Phone Only Effect - Up to 4.2%+

[tosh]

Great read on polls and CPO's:

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/final_update_on_the_cell_phone.php

<snip>If you make no CPO adjustment and give each state to the candidate currently leading, Obama wins 367 electoral votes, narrowly losing Indiana, Montana, and Georgia and narrowly winning North Carolina and Missouri. Making a conservative CPO adjustment by adding 2% to Obama's margin in each state pushes Indiana and Montana into Obama's column, giving him 381 electoral votes. Finally, if you make a 4% CPO adjustment to Obama's margins in each state (based on the differences in the national trends), Georgia suddenly shifts into Obama's column, giving him 396 electoral votes. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that the cell phone only population is not evenly distributed across the 50 states so not all states will be affected in the same way. But if you believe that there is a cell phone only effect that the state trends are not capturing, then states like Virginia, Nevada, and Ohio are not even that close right now and Obama has a good chance of winning in Indiana, Montana, Georgia, and possibly even Arizona.

Tomorrow night, we will have a better sense of how much a difference the CPO population has made in polling this race. Which of the national trends presented here comes closer to pegging the final popular vote tally? Does Obama win some of the states where the polls show him behind by a few percentage points? The bigger the Obama margin in the national vote and electoral college, the more likely that some pollsters missed some of his support by failing to reach the CPO population.

[Barack_America]

1. I'm CPO in Pennsylvania. As are many of my friends. We've never polled. nt

[Dawgs]

2. I was just about to make a post showing a 4.3 difference between CPO polls and non-CPO polls.

from fivethirtyeight.com--> http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/cellphone-effect-continued.html

Average of polls that used cell phones - 9.4
Average of polls that didn't use cell phones - 5.1

I guess gread minds sometimes do...

:hi:

[Clio the Leo]

3. I believe we will be surprised at how big of a landslide tomorrow is....

.... because the CPO's have been undercounted.

[Cairycat]

4. Yabbut

cell phone only people were supposed to help carry Kerry over the edge in '04 ... I hope you all are right, but I'll believe it when I see it.

[Lisa0825]

5. I'm CPO in Texas!

Lots of folks in Galveston County are CPO now because they are living in temporary residences since Hurricane Ike.