Our household falls into the completely "wireless" category. If this article is correct and the pollsters are eliminating the "wireless" demographic because it is unlawful to use automatic dialing systems to contact cellphones, Obama's support could be miscalculated by millions of voters.
Salon.com | Can you hear me now? Obama's missing 2 percent
Clips:
...This year, the increasingly inexcusable failure to count a growing pool of voters could prove mathematically embarrassing. Let's say that with the campaigns' increased focus on the Web, Facebook, phone-texting and other targeted ways to communicate to younger Americans, voter turnout rises and this cellphone-only universe climbs from under 10 percent of the electorate to something closer to 20 percent. If these voters' preference is 60-40 for Obama, they alone will increase his national total by 2 percentage points. And those could easily be conservative projections. In fact, Gallup Poll results from earlier this year (prior to Obama's designation as the presumptive Democratic nominee) had a 4-point swing in favor of Obama once cellphone-only respondents were folded into the overall sample.
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The most recent estimate places the number of "wireless" adult Americans at around 30 percent -- with slightly more than half of those only using cellphones and the rest possessing both land lines and cellphones but using the latter far more often. Looking at the data over time, it is clear those numbers are getting higher each month. The 2004 presidential election exit poll conducted by the National Election Pool found that 7.1 percent of all voters in that election were cellphone-only. Recent data indicates that the percentage could be twice as high in 2008.
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