The Polls may be dying

Most of the polls we see on a day to day basis are done over the telephone. According to Zogby these list are compiled from external or internal sources:

Telephone lists generated in our IT department are called from the 2002 version of a nationally published set of phone CDs of listed households, ordered by telephone number.

Pollsters call people talk to them about demographic information and find out whom they plan to vote for given various scenarios. It occurred to me that this system isn't as accurate at they likely think it to be, because I personally know many people who simply don't show up on their telephone lists. Why? Because they use cell-phones and VOIP.

I'm sure there's always a bit of noise from people whose numbers no longer work, but I don't think there's a huge political bias for those folks. Most of the people I know who have either abandoned their landlines in lieu of strictly wireless or wireless/VOIP lifestyles are under the age of 25, and there is likely a political bias for that demographic, even if most of them don't vote. Do the pollsters recognize this? They do, or at least Zogby does, but their response is to ignore these people:

Increasingly, people are relying on cell phones and don't even have a home phone, he said. They still make up only a small percentage of the population, he said. But these cell phone-only users are "demographically distinct," he said, and are almost always "young adults."

"The current approach to cell phones (in polling) is to exclude them," he said. "You can do that with the current numbers. But it becomes less and less acceptable as more households have only cell phones."

I would bet that there are millions out there who only have cell phones, and that most of these belong to young people. This Forbes article suggests that we are operating in the magnitude of millions:

But last year the total number of local phone lines declined 4.7% from the year before as customers cut off 9 million more lines than they added, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

That was 2001-2002. This is clearly a problem for the phone companies, but it's also a problem for the pollsters, and, by extension, Politicians. The number may be offset by young peoples' disinclination to participate in the political process, but it may not be. If the cell phone generation rocks the vote (still a scenario which is unlikely), we could all be shocked this November.

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Article Author: Jeremy Chrysler

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