23 Nov When pollsters only call landlines

A US study by the Pew Research Center finds that pre-election polls favor Republican candidates when the pollster only calls landlines, and not cell phones. The gap appears to be growing as more people abandon land lines for cell service.

[S]upport for Republican candidates was significantly higher in samples based only on landlines than in dual frame samples that combined landline and cell phone interviews. The difference in the margin among likely voters this year is about twice as large as in 2008.

And then there’s Skype. This calls to mind the 1948 US presidential election, in which polls (and pundits) predicted a landslide for Republican Thomas E. Dewey, but Harry Truman won handily. The widely accepted explanation: fewer Democratic-inclined voters owned telephones.

To extrapolate this phenomenon to Canadian election polling would be to leap over various cultural and political chasms, but something similar could be happening here. There’s no reason to believe the accelerating switch to cell phones in Canada is evenly distributed across party lines.

Via TMP.