Polls That Leave Out Cell Phone Users Significantly Favor Conservatives

Tuesday is primary day in Illinois and the contest we're concentrating on is the swing district stretching from Champaign to the St. Louis suburbs, IL-13, currently held by weak Republican backbencher Rodney Davis. The Dick Durbin Machine and hapless DCCC chairman Steve Israel picked some mystery meat "moderate," Ann Callis, who refuses to tell anyone where she stands on any issues if, indeed, she stands anywhere on any issues. The grassroots progressive in the race is particle physicist George Gollin, who has been endorsed by Blue America, by every major newspaper and by Alan Grayson.

As of February 26, Gollin had spent $250,450 and was left with $227,112, cash on hand. Callis has spent $378,084 and had $449,496. The only publicly disclosed polling showed Callis's Machine campaign with a wide lead over Gollin's insurgent efforts, 41-25%. How significant are those findings in a district like IL-13, where so many students vote in the Democratic primary and have no landlines, just cell phones? The Blue Dog/New Dem polling firm, Anzalone Liszt Grove Research made the case to their clients last week that polls that ignore cell phone users who have no landlines-- now 40% of voters-- are inaccurate, if not worthless. In reading this analysis, keep in mind that Anzalone polls for Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, conservatives, not real Democrats. Their bias in all things is inside the context of Blue Dogs and New Dems vs Republicans. When reading the opinions below, it is helpful to replace the word "Republican" with "conservative," something they would never do themselves, of course.

More than 60 percent of adults under 45 had only a cellphone in early 2013, while only 13 percent of people 65 and older had only a cellphone… Latinos were far more likely to only have a cellphone (50 percent) than African-Americans (39 percent), Asian-Americans (35 percent), or white people (35 percent)

…It is instantly obvious that these younger, more-Latino cell-only voters are a Democratic-leaning group. In our combined 2012 surveys in battleground states-- tens of thousands of interviews-- we saw that cell-only voters were more Democratic (38 percent Democrat and 27 percent Republican, or +11 Democrat) than people who we reached on their landlines (35 percent Democrat and 33 percent Republican, or +2 Democrat).

…Just replacing cell-only people with someone similar that owns a landline is going to skew polls towards Republicans, so pollsters must reach people on their cells. Finally, there's also a big difference in cell-mostly voters we reached on their cellphones (+16 Democratic) and those on their landlines (+1 Democratic), so some cell-mostly voters must be called on their cellphones too.

Leaving cell-only voters out of polls has biased polls toward Republicans.

Landline-only polling problems went deeper than just Mitt Romney's widely-covered polling problems. For example, in the 2012 U.S. Senate race in Indiana, after Republican Richard Mourdock said that a pregnancy resulting from rape was a gift from God, our late-October poll that included 20 percent cellphones showed Joe Donnelly leading by seven points. Mourdock's pollster showed Mourdock with a two-point lead, and Donnelly won by six. More broadly, Nate Silver in his 2012 after-action report correctly cited polls that "called only landlines or took other methodological shortcuts" as polls that "performed poorly and showed a more Republican-leaning electorate than the one that actually turned out."

Why doesn't everyone just dial cellphones already?

Doing polls right and dialing cellphones is expensive and time-consuming. For starters, a lot of technological advances that have made political phonecalls and telemarketing cheaper (and more annoying) have kept polling costs from ballooning, too. But federal law says cellphones must be dialed by hand, meaning they are more expensive to call. The law also means pollsters who use only cheaper automated-recording calls-- "Press 1 if you are supporting Barack Obama"-- are legally barred from including cellphones in their polls.

A huge number of cellphones are also owned by people under 18, who we must hang up on for voter surveys. And finally, pollsters have to spend time calling (and gracefully hanging up on) people whose area code says they are in one state, but actually live all the way across the country. These and other factors combine to make the cost of a cellphone interview more than double the cost of a landline interview in the worst-case scenarios.

...Cell-mostly populations must be reached via landline and cellphone.

As our 2012 polling showed, cell-mostly voters we reach on cellphones are different than cell-mostly voters we reach on their landline. This means that some cell-mostly people must be called on their cellphones.

To their credit, Republican pollsters including the highly-professional Public Opinion Strategies have now recognized the need to dial cellphones. Including cells, and a lot of them, will not be the only measure of a quality poll in 2014 and 2016. But campaigns, the media and the poll-consuming public should be skeptical of any poll that doesn't include cellphones.