2008 Pew Polls Cell Phone Users
posted by on September 24 at 10:14 AM
And it looks like they’re gonna help Obama… but they’re not gonna save him.
Current polling in the 2008 presidential election shows a very tight race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. In part because of the strong support Obama is attracting among younger voters, and as the number of Americans who are reachable only by cell phones rises, interest continues to grow in the question of whether public opinion polls that do not include cell phones are accurately measuring the relative levels of support for the two candidates.The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has conducted three major election surveys with both cell phone and landline samples since the conclusion of the primaries. In each of the surveys, there were only small, and not statistically significant, differences between presidential horserace estimates based on the combined interviews and estimates based on the landline surveys only. Yet a virtually identical pattern is seen across all three surveys: In each case, including cell phone interviews resulted in slightly more support for Obama and slightly less for McCain, a consistent difference of two-to-three points in the margin.
Time to double your dosage of Cellexa.
Even if the added support from cellphone users doesn't break out of the margin of error, that doesn't make it statistically insignificant, if it's always in the same direction.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/estimating-cellphone-effect-22-points.html
538 figured it's worth 15 electoral votes. Sounds pretty fucking significant to me.
Have they bothered conducting a poll to show the influence of new voters? Those voters could make this a blow out for Obama.
ok. but does the new study isolate cell phones not owned by landline owners? in other words, is it possible that many of the newly polled cell users are also landline owners, and thus more likely to vote for mccain? arent the "obama" cell users the younger ones who don't also have landlines? without isolating cell-only from cell-and-landline, you tend to test the landline sample more than once.
right?
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