Obama Landslide Likely

Written by: Michael Kuykendall on Nov 4, 2008 1:09 PM EST

The Presidential election will be a landslide, thanks in part to faulty polling models.

I have been saying all during the primaries up until now that the polling techniques in use in the mainstream media are disproportionately disregarding minorities and cell-phone only users. Why? Well if you think about it, the marketing firms that sell the lists used for polling are based on sales, purchases made, inquiries filled out, etc; basically the lists that include home phones. One would assume those at the bottom of the income spectrum would not be as well represented as, say, the average-income member of the majority. Race and income aside, Pollster has a piece (h/t to Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly) that explains my gut feelings about cell-phone only users (CPOs) in more mathematical terms;

While many of the major national polling firms have made a great effort to include CPOs in their polling this fall, it is important to keep in mind that most of the state-level surveys fail to reach CPOs. Thus, there is a possibility that the state trend estimates may be under-estimating Obama's support. What happens if we try to account for the CPO effect in the statewide trends? ... 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.

So it seems all this "poll porn" we have been wallowing in over these last few weeks may have been fundamentally flawed in its analysis, and most importantly in its methods of reaching a representative slice of the population

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