Re: Fwd: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] kerry fakes a huge crowd for a politicalad

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 08:15:10 -0600, Spurling, Shannon <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
>
> Oh, Mike, you are doing what you accuse every one else of doing.
> You can say, I hope he is going to win.
> You can say, I think he is going to win.
> You can't, however, say he is going to win.

Philosophical nit-pick:  you can say the latter thing, but it is the
only case where you could be proven wrong based on external evidence.
 
> You also can't assume that dropping your land line for a cell phone
> makes a person vote a particular way.

I would hope nobody is assuming that.  What is easy to show, however,
is that people who drop all land-lines have different demographic
characteristics from the general (and registered voter) populations. 
They do tend to be younger, are more likely to be single, and
generally live where cell phone reception is good enough for everyday
life, which generally means that they live in or near the core of a
"metropolitan area".  I put that last one in quotes especially
because, hey, Jeff City is a metropolitan area these days, and so is
New York.  But, obviously, nobody thinks those two places are
identical in most other ways.

IF (big if) most of the cell-phone only crowd is actually a
representative sample of young, single, metro area types who just
happen to use cell phones instead of land lines for convenience (or
what have you) THEN we know pretty well how this market segment is
likely to tilt in an election, *if they do vote*.  That's another
problem, because young single metro types are not always among your
most likely voters; I vote for everything, and have since 1982 (with
the exception of one primary election).  I did that when I was
(briefly) a young single metro type, and I do it now.  When I got to
grad school, though, I found out that a lot of my fellow grads
actually never bothered to vote...at least until my friend Norm and I
got to them.

We do know that the cell-only demographic was pretty badly
undersampled by polls this year (but so were many others; poll refusal
was up over 2/3 this cycle).  If they do vote (on average) as many
suspect, Bush will not have a net gain from the segment.  I can assure
you that both parties and many other groups are going to spend a lot
of time and money trying to figure out how best to reach this
demographic, and that it's unlikely that 2008 polls will be missing
them so completely.

jking
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