Last week, Mark Pack explained the impact that mobile phones have polling.
[… T]his year’s Presidential election [… shows] phone pollsters who include mobiles regularly finding a higher level of support for Barack Obama than those who ignore mobiles. The difference in support between these two approaches is large enough to matter in a close election: Obama’s lead is around four percentage points higher when mobile phone only households are included.
As polling day closes in on us, the gap has widened – with some pollsters as many as 13% ahead for Obama when they include cell phone users. The explanation? Nate Silver at stats blog fivethirtyeight.com says
I did a radio hit the other afternoon with Mark DeCamillo of California’s vaunted Field Poll, which does include cellphones in their samples. He suggested to me that it was much easier to get the cooperation of cellphone users on the weekend than during the week. How come? Because most cellphone plans include free weekend minutes. Conversely, one might expect that young people are particularly difficult to reach on their landlines over the weekend, since they tend to be away from home more (especially on a weekend when some nontrivial number of them are out volunteering for Obama). So, while I haven’t tried to verify this, it wouldn’t surprise me if the “cellphone gap” expands over the weekend, and contracts during the week.
Read the rest of the article – and see the amazing graph – here.
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