rssPew: Cellular Polling Bias Hurts Obama
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 2:29 pm
- 2 Comments
Here’s another reason to doubt the blizzard of polls that dominate political talk.
Pew, the respected non-partisan research organization, reports that polls that exclude cell phones may be a bit off — and effectively biased against Sen. Barack Obama. (H/T Michael Connery, and Mark Blumenthal has a good summary here.) Based on three recent election surveys:
[T]here were only small, and not statistically significant, differences between presidential horserace estimates based on the combined interviews and estimates based on the landline surveys only. Yet a virtually identical pattern is seen across all three surveys: In each case, including cell phone interviews resulted in slightly more support for Obama and slightly less for McCain, a consistent difference of two-to-three points in the margin… As implied by these results, in each of the three polls, the cell-only respondents were significantly more supportive of Obama (by 10-to-15 percentage points) than respondents in the landline sample.
Regular landline polling is supposed to account for these trends, but Pew concludes that’s getting harder:
[A] substantial minority of the cell-only sample is younger than 30 – a demographic group that has consistently backed Obama this year. Traditional landline surveys are typically weighted to compensate for age and other demographic differences, but the process depends on the assumption that the people reached over landlines are similar politically to their cell-only counterparts. These surveys suggest that this assumption is increasingly questionable, particularly among younger people. (emphasis added).
This finding — even with its caveats — complicates most current polling coverage, which barely discusses the margin of error, let alone inaccuracies in the age and cell sampling.
Republicans have been complaining about a press bias against McCain, maybe Democrats will start flagging the polling bias against their candidate — and his young, cell-toting supporters.
Photo Credit: Mike Kline Flickr
2 Comments
Comment posted September 24, 2008 @ 12:07 pm
Very good point. The American cellphone penetration rate is now higher than landline penetration, and 85% of Americans have a cellphone. Furthermore, 15% of American households have “cut the cord” ie have no fixed landline phones at all and rely only on cellphones for telecoms needs. These are actually universal trends that we in the cellphone industry observed out of Finland and Scandinavia ten years ago and for example today Europe has more cellphones than the total population (yes, this means many people carry two phones, think for example in America of a business user with both a Blackberry and an iPhone). And one in four European homes is now without a landline.
How can this trend distort the current polling in America? The shift from fixed landlines to cellphone-only households is not across all age groups, it is very strongly reflective of young adults who are most addicted to cellphones. As the current election features candidates with a strong age split in their support – young people support Obama more than McCain, then this parallel split in cellphone-only Americans will indeed create a need to sample cellphone-only voters, to balance out these types of customers.
There is a related phenomenon that may further accentuate this difference. Obama's campaign has made open, active and broad use of social networking services both on the internet (MySpace, Facebook, etc) as well as on cellphones (the SMS text message announcement of the VP choice, and cellphone social networking services such as Twitter).
So for those young American voters, who are particularly active in social networking (and very addicted to their cellphones) will also have been targeted by the Obama campaign from the start, and were found to be a key constituency with the primaries against Hillary Clinton's support base, which was older users and not as much online.
So there is good reason to believe, that if a pollster has neglected to poll cellphone owners, they are missing a significant portion of Obama supporters (arguably the vast majority of the 15% who have “cut the cord”) and if the parallel social networking side is true, that this is still an Obama advantage, then the pollsters will also have undercounted those Obama supporters who are most active and energized..
Good point to the story.
Tomi T Ahonen, Hong Kong
author of 6 books on cellphones
and lecturing at Oxford University on digital media and cellphones
Comment posted September 24, 2008 @ 7:07 pm
Very good point. The American cellphone penetration rate is now higher than landline penetration, and 85% of Americans have a cellphone. Furthermore, 15% of American households have “cut the cord” ie have no fixed landline phones at all and rely only on cellphones for telecoms needs. These are actually universal trends that we in the cellphone industry observed out of Finland and Scandinavia ten years ago and for example today Europe has more cellphones than the total population (yes, this means many people carry two phones, think for example in America of a business user with both a Blackberry and an iPhone). And one in four European homes is now without a landline.
How can this trend distort the current polling in America? The shift from fixed landlines to cellphone-only households is not across all age groups, it is very strongly reflective of young adults who are most addicted to cellphones. As the current election features candidates with a strong age split in their support – young people support Obama more than McCain, then this parallel split in cellphone-only Americans will indeed create a need to sample cellphone-only voters, to balance out these types of customers.
There is a related phenomenon that may further accentuate this difference. Obama's campaign has made open, active and broad use of social networking services both on the internet (MySpace, Facebook, etc) as well as on cellphones (the SMS text message announcement of the VP choice, and cellphone social networking services such as Twitter).
So for those young American voters, who are particularly active in social networking (and very addicted to their cellphones) will also have been targeted by the Obama campaign from the start, and were found to be a key constituency with the primaries against Hillary Clinton's support base, which was older users and not as much online.
So there is good reason to believe, that if a pollster has neglected to poll cellphone owners, they are missing a significant portion of Obama supporters (arguably the vast majority of the 15% who have “cut the cord”) and if the parallel social networking side is true, that this is still an Obama advantage, then the pollsters will also have undercounted those Obama supporters who are most active and energized..
Good point to the story.
Tomi T Ahonen, Hong Kong
author of 6 books on cellphones
and lecturing at Oxford University on digital media and cellphones
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