After reading Amanda's post I thought I'd add a few links to stories that have been circulating about the under-polling of younger voters. This tends to happen, so goes the conventional wisdom, because virtually all major polling firm polls rely solely on land lines. Because voters under 30 are far more likely to only have a cell phone, they are less likely to be polled.
While these articles agree about the under-sampling of younger voters, I also remember that this was a thread of the conversation during the Bush-Kerry election in 2004, and the issue seemed to have no demonstrable impact on the final results. That said, younger voters seem (a) more numerous; (b) more excited about a candidate; and (c) more likely to be exposed to political news via the Internet in 2008 than they were in 2004. So, who knows?
Anyway, here are the links:
"The Cell Phone Polling Gap: An Artificially 'Close' Race"
"Is Youth Being Served?" (news article version)
"Is Youth Being Served?" (blog version)
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1 comment:
This is very interesting Professor Stenger. If only pollsters actually extended their polling to cellphones I am more than certain that the results regarding our age demographic, 18-24 year olds, would be more in line as it should be and not so low as many have shown in the past. Perhaps even if we expanded focus groups via communication technology like YouTube; then results be significantly different.
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