You wouldn't think we would mention the US elections on a site devoted to mobile devices, but there's an interesting and fast-growing phenomenon known as the "cellphone effect" which is potentially throwing polls off by several percentage points, reported over on the excellent fivethirtyeight.com. Essentially it boils down to this: some polling companies have a tendency to only interview people through their landline phones, so anyone without a landline simply isn't represented in their surveys. That means politicians with strong support among mobile-only households would do much better on election days than landline-only polls predict.
Read on in the full article.
Incidentally, this effect seems to be particularly pronounced in this election, partly because mobile phone ownership is higher now than in 2004 and partly because more people are going mobile-only.
As one of the comments noted in the link's article, the polling companies have to give up this landline obsession. By 2012 the percentage of mobile-only voters will be much higher than now.
Yeah, I read about this before and apparently this is thought to likely help Democrats (i.e. they should do a bit better than the traditional polls show). Hopefully this means that Obama will win with an even bigger margin than most polls show.. 😊 Altough, I suspect the "Bradley effect" and this will cancel each other out.
I live in Washington DC and there is a clear sense of anticipation in the air. Champange, I hope, will be in order tonight!