How Cell Phones Are Changing the Political Landscape

Cell phone or land line? The question has become as ordinary as regular or decaf, red or green salsa. Most of us don’t even consider the question because most of us have both.  But there is a growing number of us that are scrapping their landlines in favor of mobile exclusivity. And it’s changing the way we do politics. More precisely, its changing the way we look at political polls.

The majority of us have been carrying cell phones around with us for a decade or so. We’ve developed an entire etiquette around the devices, we depend on them, we panic if we lose them, God forbid we leave home without them. And we have certain expectations about our cell phones; telemarketers are non-grata. Here’s where a recent Pew Research Center study sheds some light on how our cell phones and our expectations of them are changing the political landscape. “Pre-election surveys conducted this year finds that support for Republican candidates was significantly higher in samples based only on landlines than in dual frame samples that combined land-line and cell phone interviews. The difference in the margin among likely voters this year is about twice as large as in 2008.”

That’s right, the GOP gets the edge in political polls that don’t include cell phones, and that edge produces a skewed perception. Case in point: “In six polls conducted in the fall of 2008, Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain was on average 2.4 percentage points smaller in the landline samples than in the combined samples.”

And what does Pew tell us about people who use cell phones? “Dual users reached on their cell phone differ demographically and attitudinally from those reached on their land-line phone. They are younger, more likely to be black or Hispanic, less likely to be college graduates, less conservative and more Democratic in their vote preference than dual users reached by land-line.”

But let’s face it, how many of us would be PO’d if we got a call from a pollster on our cell phone? Isn’t that what the voice mail on our land-line is for?

The bottom line is that when you combine political polls and cell phone technology you get an interesting hocus-pocus. The 12 point GOP lead on land- line polls disappears in a cell phone exclusive survey.