Landlines vs. Cell Phones: how polling could get it just wrong enough.

It's a minor thing, but it could mean something. Just today, when I was satisfying my fix for more political news, a phrase from Wikipedia hit me in the face. In the article Opinion polling for the Democratic Party (United States) presidential primaries, 2008, the second sentence says, rather bluntly, "The public is generally sampled by land-line telephone only." Now, I usually role my eyes or throw up a little bit when something unexpected happens in politics and people shout "Hey, it's Dewey Defeats Truman all over again!" because they're usually saying it about the dumbest things that don't have nearly as much gravity as a newspaper announcing so surely that the wrong person is now the leader of the United States, but I'm going to probably make myself throw up a little later because, for once, these two things are very, very, very, alike, much more alike than Kerry picking Edwards and not Gephardt being compared to Truman defeating Dewey.

The problem with the Dewey Deafets Truman thing was that the polling company that did the work for that newspaper only did a telephone poll. Back in those days, if you wanted a poll about anything, you found a neighborhood that was the most like the rest of the country, and then you knocked on every door in the neighborhood until you got a good sample. Telephones were nowhere near as common now as they were then (duh), and were clustered in a few areas, like New York-- where Dewey was from. Telephone lines were unknown to vast swathes of America, particularly places where Democrats were more likely to get votes. That's why that poll was so wrong, but so sure about it. Their poll results showed Dewey way ahead-- but the methodology was shoddy.

So let's review that one sentence some anonymous Wikipedia editor submitted one day: "The public is generally sampled by land-line telephone only." What has changed? Cell phones. And who is more likely to have a cell phone? Young people.

I don't really think there's a such thing as a "youth candidate" or a "boomer candidate," and you've probably got a 50/50 chance of being wrong if you label a candidate as either before an election, especially a primary.

The only thing I know about how youth might vote (aside that I am a youth who votes) in the upcoming Democratic primary is that Hillary Clinton saying non-Iowa resident college students shouldn't be allowed to vote in the caucuses may hurt her. I'm holding out on saying whether the phone poll thing will mean that much, but everybody likes to be right.

Just as a final disclaimer, yes, I know it's an encyclopedia anyone can edit. I did get in touch with the person who edited that line into the article, and he told me it was his knowledge of polling procedures. I tried getting in touch with a couple of poll firms to verify, but, suprise suprise, they're not available the weekend before New Year's. I'll try to get some more information soon, but considering that the caucuses are right around the corner, it might just be academic by then.