Youth Vote Could Surprise

I was just wondering whether the polls we see are giving us an accurate picture. You know, the national polls we've seen after Friday's debate are all showing Obama with leads in the six-to-eight-percent range. That includes pretty reputable polls like the Gallup tracking poll. It occurs to me to wonder whether Obama's lead might actually be higher. Yes, significantly higher.

Have you ever heard the story of the Literary Digest magazine and its famous 1936 poll? They polled 2.3 million people, an absolutely huge sample, and predicted that Kansas Governor Alf Landon, the Republican, would defeat the incumbent Democrat Franklin Roosevelt by 57-43%. Of course, FDR piled up an enormous landslide, winning 62% of the popular vote. How could the Digest have been so wrong? Well, they sent out 10 million ballots to four types of people: their subscribers, people in the phone book, registered voters and people off the auto registration lists, and got 2.3 million of them back. The problem, of course, was with their sample. People who owned cars and telephones, and people who subscribed to the Literary Digest were substantially better off than the average American in that Depression year of 1936. And people who were well off were extremely more likely to vote Republican.

I'm wondering whether these surveys are properly counting younger people, for a couple of reasons. First, these surveys are done by land line telephone. A growing number of people do not own one of those, and I tend to think these are disproportionally younger people. Fox News reported back in August of 2007 about a survey done by Mediamark Research that found 12.3% of homes had only a land line while 14% had only cell phone or cell phones. Are these surveys missing 14% of the potential electorate, and the 14% most likely to be for Obama?

My second concern is youth voter turnout. The pollster has to estimate what percentage of each age group will actually come to the polls. What if 16% of the Democratic vote is youthful voters aged 18-29 as in the primaries this year, instead of the 11% it was in the 2004 primaries, or the 9% of the electorate that showed up in earlier elections? And what if these younger voters continued their preference for the Democrats, as they did in the primaries, by better than 30%? Or even by the 20% edge that current surveys report for Obama over McCain?

The result would be a large under reporting of Obama's support, roughly in the neighborhood of four percent of the aggregate popular vote. If you increase Obama's national average edge from 5% to 9%, or if you add 4 points to his showings on a state by state basis he not only widens his leads to safe levels in Michigan and Pennsylvania, but also pulls ahead in Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Virginia and even North Carolina and Missouri. A close electoral contest turns into a rout. That is, if the people with only cell phones are indeed a younger crowd, and if younger people in general are going to vote with greater regularity this year than they have in the past. I have a sneaking hunch both those "ifs" will be answered in the affirmative. We'll find out soon enough.

Addendum: Since this was first posted I received word of a study that has been done on this topic from reader Carol E. It appears that the inclusion of "cell phone only" voters gives Obama a 2 to 3% bump. See the numbers here.