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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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