Remember, younger voters use cell phones

[Nancy Waterman]

and are not usually polled. The trick is to get them to vote. Obama speaking at colleges is exactly the right thing.

[ingac70]

1. All this old voter has is a cell phone. n/t

[DrToast]

2. Pollsters adjust for that. This debate came up during 2008

And an aggregate of the pollsters were still pretty accurate in predicting the final vote count.

[Radical Activist]

5. No, they don't predict final vote counts very well.

Pollsters like to brag when their poll taken a few days before an election is close to the results. At the state and Congressional district level, they are often far off.

But polls taken 2-6 months before an election do not predict election results with any accuracy. National Presidential polls in the Democratic primary had nothing to do with who won the Iowa caucus or who became the nominee. Yet, these polls influence the race.

If polling is limited to the week before an election then they can claim accuracy. Otherwise, it's a pointless and sometimes manipulative game that displaces meaningful coverage of issues.

[Clio the Leo]

6. Some of them do....

most notably Pew, Gallup and The New York Times do. Others, SurveyUSA and Rasmussen Reports dont.

Read this if you haven't already....
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/the-uncanny-accuracy-of-polling-averages-part-iv-are-the-polls-getting-worse/#more-1713

[karynnj]

3. With the decline in the economy, this may be the election where this really does affect enough

people that there is an impact. The people doing the polls do insure that the demographic groups are represented in the correct proportions. However, there is an assumption that the people they can reach are similar to the people that they can't reach within a demographic group. As the proportion that can be reached declines, that assumption both becomes less tenable and it has more impact.

I would guess that with cell phones becoming something that almost everyone has, there are likely many low or moderate income people who might have given up their land lines when they wanted to cut costs by eliminating one or the other.

[Exilednight]

4. It really depends on who is doing the polling ...........

more and more polling companies are adding cell phone numbers to their rolls.