What does the 17-point McCain/Palin post-convention bounce among likely voters (reported by Gallup on Monday) really mean in light of the cell phone gap?
This issue began concerning me in the last election cycle. At the time, while I knew few people who were cell phone only users, the number was growing, and in their own lil social niche, the ones I knew were opinion drivers.
Now, according to a Pew Research article attempting (but not succeeding with me) to explain away the impact of cell-only or cell-mostly users on phone polls,
The number of Americans who have a cell phone but no landline phone has continued to grow, reaching a total of 14.5% of all adults during the last six months of 2007, according to U.S. government estimates. In addition, 22.3% of all adults live in households with both landline and cell phones but say that they receive all or almost all calls on their cell phones.
Call me a Chicken Little, but the number of folks falling off the phone polls’ radar creates just a wee itch between my shoulder blades. And yes, I know pollsters do their best to discover the differences between groups and weight things (“handicap” *heh*) to even out such things. But, frankly, the “only-cell” group (from the growing sample of such users I know–admittedly a smaller sample than Pew has to work with) is just about the least politically astute group I know–young, brain-numbed by public education followed by what passes for higher education nowadays, getting their best political “news” from Jon Stewart (which, admittedly, isn’t much different from the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind sewage).
No, really. Seriously.
Who knows how they’ll vote? Seriously. Who really knows? Certainly not the telephone pollsters who almost entirely poll on landlines.