Cell Phone Only Voters and the Electoral College

[deminks]

http://www.mydd.com/

Writing today over at Pollster.com, Brian Schaffner notes the real difference between those national polls that include in their samples cell phone only voters (CPO voters, or the landline-less) and those that don't include such voters. In short, Schaffner writes, "As of Monday morning, Obama's lead was 4.2% larger in the national trend accounting for the CPO population than it was among the landline-only polls."

Schaffner then goes a step further in applying this difference to the individual states, the polling in which for the most part excludes the CPO population. The results are quite interesting.

If you make no CPO adjustment and give each state to the candidate currently leading, Obama wins 367 electoral votes, narrowly losing Indiana, Montana, and Georgia and narrowly winning North Carolina and Missouri. Making a conservative CPO adjustment by adding 2% to Obama's margin in each state pushes Indiana and Montana into Obama's column, giving him 381 electoral votes. Finally, if you make a 4% CPO adjustment to Obama's margins in each state (based on the differences in the national trends), Georgia suddenly shifts into Obama's column, giving him 396 electoral votes. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that the cell phone only population is not evenly distributed across the 50 states so not all states will be affected in the same way. But if you believe that there is a cell phone only effect that the state trends are not capturing, then states like Virginia, Nevada, and Ohio are not even that close right now and Obama has a good chance of winning in Indiana, Montana, Georgia, and possibly even Arizona.

Pollster link:

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/final_update_on_the_cell_phone.php

Tomorrow night, we will have a better sense of how much a difference the CPO population has made in polling this race. Which of the national trends presented here comes closer to pegging the final popular vote tally? Does Obama win some of the states where the polls show him behind by a few percentage points? The bigger the Obama margin in the national vote and electoral college, the more likely that some pollsters missed some of his support by failing to reach the CPO population.

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So vote tomorrow and make it so!