McCain Takes Lead After Convention Bounce
John McCain is now leading or tied with Barack Obama in every national survey conducted after the Republican Convention:
Let’s presume that the 10 point lead in Gallup is a wild outlier unless and until we see anything like that result in other polls.
One presumes this bounce is primarily a reaction to the choice of Sarah Palin as the VP choice and her speech to the convention Wednesday. McCain’s performance was fine but it’s hard to imagine that it was responsible for a sizable movement.
The head-to-heads are interesting but the Electoral College maps are more useful. The usual suspects have yet to update theirs.
I’ve seen a number of Obama folks maintain that polls as presently administered are inaccurate because cell-phone-only users are not contacted (and many young people do not have land lines).
This reflects a problem that polling organizations have:
I gather from the article, that it’s unclear what effect, if any, lack of cell-phone-only polling has on the political polls. The pollster.com article I cite above ends with:
The date of the article is July 13, 2007, and I haven’t found anything more current on the question. Does anyone know of any current research?
Ah, nebbermine. Here’s some current (current as of July 2008) Pew Research findings (as far as their polls go):
I’m still not sure, after reading the Pew article, if there’s a substantial effect or not. It says:
As they say, read the whole thing.
I’ve always wondered if that effect is substantial or not. You’d think that, if it was a major effect, we would have seen its impact in 2004 when cell phone penetration and land line abandonment was well underway. Personally, I’ve never been contacted by a pollster, which seems to defy the odds given how long I’ve been a registered voter and how frequently the polls are taken.
Another question with these polls is how they weight the RV and LV populations. In some states voter registration is radically increasing for this election. If the pollsters don’t track it, their weights can come out wrong.
I agree, I think this year the likely voter screen may actually make the polls less accurate if they’re relying on past voting behavior, given how many first-time voters we had during the primaries.
Does anybody know if any of these polls took into consideration a combination of not voting in the general 2 and 4 years ago, but having voted in this year’s primary? And do they classify those people as likely voters or not?
Pew aside, I have but two words: Number portability. How would they know what kind of phone they’re calling?
Bithead, to answer your point about number portability, cell phones are generally unlisted numbers. Unless you’re dialing randomly, you know exactly what kind of number you’re calling and to whom you expect to speak. Additionally, “young people” who don’t have land lines would not have ported their numbers from a land line because they never had one; their parents did.
I’m not all that young myself, but haven’t had a land line in years. I do not receive telemarketing calls of any kind except for robo-calls, and even they are exceedingly rare. The last time I was called or polled in an election, I had a land line.
There’s a nation-wide database which notes which numbers are mobile and which aren’t. It is tied into the number portability database in realtime. Telemarketers and others are required to use that database to avoid calling a number which pays a toll to receive a call.
Here’s what the pollster.com article says, Bit:
I have a VoIP line, I wonder if that would prevent polls from contacting me. Anybody know?
Not in and of itself; you could have ported a land line number to the VoIP line, and in any case a random dialer could hit your number if it is connected to the general exchange (i.e., if it’s not, say, a free Skype account). I’m not sure if there’s a listing in the database mentioned above for VoIP like there is for cell/land lines, but since there’s presumably no additional charge for a VoIP line to receive a call my guess would be that it’s closer to a landline than to a cell.
In my specific case, it was originally a Vonage number that was ported to my cable operator.
I wasn’t so much thinking about that, but rather the fact that my VoIP line isn’t connected to any geographic region except in regards to E911 routing. Especially with Vonage (not so much with cable), you could plug your VoIP modem into any internet connection anywhere in the world, and your calls would be routed to you. I could have signed up for the number in Maine, but be living permanently in California, so it becomes problematic for geography sensitive polls.
I assume that the main problem is that it is younger people who tend to have stopped using landlines. If the poll weights for age shouldn’t it largely address it? Or is there some suggestion that even among young people, cell-phone only would vote differently from young landline users?
Seems like Caller ID would have similar impact, with wider demographic. If I see a number I don’t know, I let voice mail get it.
The problem is that the weighting would be inaccurate for that age group, which is an age group that tends to favor Obama.
Why?
Hmmm, upon further reflection, you’re right, weighting should be determined by census data, not sample size, so age weighting is out.
My second guess, then, is that there is an assumption that those without land-lines, technology early-adopters, are not being proportionately heard from.
I guess when Obama was leading in the polls we concentrated on how the polls were taken, who responded and by what device. Facts are facts. McCain leads Obama outside the margine of error. He does now and he will in the only poll that counts. The one on November 4.
I think the real story of the polls is that the race is really too close to pick a favorite at this point.
I am not convinced thousands and thousands of brand new voters added to the roles are going to show up to vote in communities across the nation.
I am willing to bet turn outs in most places will be good and that the national popular vote will be very close-hard to say with the electoral vote.
Either way I still think Obama has the advantage, but it isn’t in the bag.