538 On the Cell Effect (We keep hitting controversial polling topics, haha)

[Nym90]

We're talking about people who don't have landlines, States.

If you read the article, it claims that seven out of eight cell-only users have favorable opinions of Obama.

Yeah, but they are young voters and we know their history of reliability when election time rolls around. So it probably evens out.

In the past that's definitely been true. Turnout among young voters was far higher in the primaries this year than before; remains to be seen whether that will carry over into the general.

[Nym90]

It would seem to me the question is not if cell phone users vote differently, but rather do they differ from non-cell phone users of similar demographic charateristics.

There is no doubt that the 21 year old cell phone only demographic is substantially different than the 47 year old land land owning demographic, but that is not the question..

Pollsters already ensure that young people are appropriately represented in the sample, and that their income, education, etc matches the totality of their demorgraphic -the isolated variable here is just the cell phones, not age, income, education, etc...

IE is the totality of 23 year old males with just a cell phone intending to vote differently that the totality of 23 year old males who may also have a landline?

Well, I imagine the demographics of cell-only users are disproportionately:
a) College students
b) Wealthy
c) Technologically savvy/hip

One would imagine that this year, far more than other years, these demographic descriptors are part of the Democratic base.  I would say that results WOULD differ from the population as a whole.  FivetThirtyEight, in the original article, claims that seven out of eight cell-only users have a favorable opinion of Obama, but I don't know how they got that statistic.

However, even if voting cell-only users are 10% more Democratic than youngin's in general, that's not really significant enough to affect the vote, assuming the pollster weights by age groups. 

Why would they be wealthy? If I had more money I would get myself a land-line in addition to my cell phone...though they are probably more urban.

True, in a lot of the rural areas around here it's not possible to receive a cell phone signal.