The polling numbers in primary states where Senator Barack Obama does well are consistently low compared to his results. Look at the numbers in the Potomac primaries last Tuesday. Most of the polls in Virginia and Maryland said he would win with numbers in the mid-50s (percent wise). He won with almost 2/3 of the vote in VA and 60% in MD. What are the pollsters missing?
If you're under 30, do you have a phone? Of course you do. What someone who asks that means (including pollsters) is, "Do you have a landline?" Now many of you would say, no. The fact is that many (most?) younger voters will not be captured in a representative way by traditional "phone polls" because they don't have traditional "phones." It's said that young people don't vote, but apparently they are for Senator Obama.
The question now is, how do traditional polling companies include younger voters without landlines? How can they do last minute polling without relying on landlines? Internet polls often capture the zealots rather than the "average" voter. I don't know the answer.
Last year we formed the ITS-ITANA focus groups which represent vertical, but broad topics in information architecture (e.g. Storage and IAM). In our charge to these groups, we asked them to consider the effects of "horizontal" enabling/disruptive forces on their "verticals." One of these "horizontals" is "mobility and mobile devices." How do we deal with the fact that an increasing number of our students are carrying very capable mobile devices with them? Most of us call these "cell phones," but I include things like Apple iPods and Amazon Kindles too. These devices can send/receive phone calls (but not the iPod Touch or Amazon Kindle for instance), send/receive text message, "do Web", and provide/consume location aware information. As we develop new architectures for our Penn State customers, we need to take this into account.
I was talking to someone about this and she pointed out an interesting story about the 1936 U.S. Presidential election. Here's a version of a story from PBS. It turns out in the 1936 election, the votes were along class lines, where the automobile registration and telephone directory listings undersampled the less affluent.