On Oct 15, 2010, at 10:26 AM, Bill Quimby wrote:
> The Huffington Post (I read it for the Hollywood gossip) reported a Pew
> analysis that should be taken into consideration.
>
> I am forced into keeping a land line for Internet access, but I personally don't
> know anybody else who has one.
>
> - Bill
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Does it matter that many polls -- including the vast majority that we are currently
> watching at the state and congressional district level -- do not call Americans who
> use only a cell phone and thus lack landline telephone service? Yes it does. It
> creates a growing bias that appears to benefit Republican candidates. That's the
> message of a new analysis released this afternoon by the Pew Research Center.
>
> <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/13/pew-research-cell-phone-p_n_761760.html>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
But, as Blumenthal notes:
> TAt the national level, many organizations now routinely sample and call both landline and mobile phones. These include, in addition to the Pew Center, ABC News/Washington Post, AP/GfK, CBS News/New York Times, Gallup (both their daily tracking and the surveys in partnership with USA Today), Kaiser Family Foundation, McClatchy/Marist University, NBC News/Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.
>
> At the statewide level, however, more expensive cell phone interviewing is far more rare. Except for a single experiment conducted by SurveyUSA this summer (involving live interview calls to cell phones) we have not seen any cell phone sampling or calling by the pollsters that use an automated, recorded voice methodology. The organizations we know of that are currently calling samples of both cell and mobile phones include California's Field Poll and Public Policy Institute of California, the University of Cincinnati Ohio poll, and the Marist Poll's statewide surveys. While the Quinnipiac University announced plans to begin calling cell phone samples earlier this year, polling director Doug Schwartz tells the Huffington Post that they "decided to suspend cell phone calling, which is much less efficient than calling landlines," until after the election.
So the brand-name polls mostly call cells.