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

[Gustaf]

You do realize that Pew, CBS/NYT and Time have always had a historical Democratic lean, even before the invention of the cell phone.

Meanwhile, Gallup shows nothing.

Citation? When presented with numbers, retort with numbers

Read the numbers we are presented with in the opening post for the second part. The bias of polls like CBS/NYT is very well known.

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a correlation between bad polls and polls that include cell-phone users?

[Gustaf]

Im really hoping this  cell phone effect turns out but here are some questions.  Don't poll samples already have a sample of that demographic?  So I don't really see cell phone only young people as being more likely to vote Obama than landline young people.  Or does not including cell phones throw off their sample size of young voters altogether?

Finally, how exactly does a pollster find cell phone numbers?   

You may a) believe that "cell phone only" young are more likely to vote Obama than "landline young" or b) that their likeliness to vote has increased but doesn't show because they're not included. Though I think this second part would also demand a difference between cell-phone young and landline young.

[Gustaf]

The cell phone effect doesn't happen mainly because the difference in voting between landline youngs and cell phone youngs is minimal. It's not as if only conservative younguns have landlines and only liberals have cell phones. It just depends from person to person and I doubt it is political.

But it results in the young vote being undersampled.

Only if young cell phone only users increase their turnout while no one else does. Or, I guess, if the pollster is completely clueless when it comes to weighting.

[Gustaf]

Only if young cell phone only users increase their turnout while no one else does. Or, I guess, if the pollster is completely clueless when it comes to weighting.

It's not a relative increase in turnout, but a relative increase in the demographic size, probably combined with a more Democratic result among them than previously.

I'm not following. I thought the population was getting older, rather than younger? And that a good turnout model would factor in those things?

[Gustaf]

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.