The Cellphone Effect

Amber wonk warning: I used to do surveys in Latin America for Uncle Sam for a living, 1979-1983, and I am still a bit of a political junkie. I am particularly interested in the impact of several of the new technologies of communication on politics, both USA and elsewhere.

Many younger people don't have a standard wired phone line. I really wanted to dump ours this year, both to save money, and to thumb my nose at least some of the wired aspects of ATT and Time Warner, although it is almost impossible to get away from them -- since our cellphones are on ATT, anyway.

But I have been very curious to know how that tilt toward cell phones might affect political polling, which had traditionally been done by randomly calling traditional wired telephone lines. Turns out that a number of the pollsters are already on to this issue, enough so that 538.com, which is one of the smarter groups combining and comparing polls, can compare the results of polls that do tap cellphone users and those that don't.

The result confirms that younger people, who use cell phones are tilting to Obama. When you compare the polls with cellphones in with others, cellphone users add a 2.8% advantage to Obama on average. That is quite a lot and says all kinds of interesting things about where politics and media are headed.

Check out the story at

Estimating the Cellphone Effect: 2.8 2.2 Points

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/estimating-cellphone-effect-22-points.html.