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It sure seems like they should. A lot of younger voters have no land line at all. A lot of older voters don't answer their land lines as much. But, according to a new Pew study, they don't seem to be distorting much of anything yet:
For a long time, pollster have wondered whether the increased use of cell phones over the last decade is skewing polling results and making them less reliable.A new Pew Research poll finds that Sen. Barack Obama holds a 48% to 40% lead over Sen. John McCain in their national sample that includes cell phones, and a 46% to 41% advantage in the landline sample.Furthermore, when the results are narrowed "to voters who are certain about their vote choice, there is almost no difference between the landline and combined samples: Obama has a 38%-28% advantage in the combined sample, while the margin is 38%-30% in the landline sample."Meanwhile, if we felt like it, the news organizations could pool dollars and invest in a few, better, polls with larger samples and cell phones included. That would, in the long run, be more accurate. But it would also mean there would be fewer polls showing daily public opinion shifts that the networks could then wildly exaggerate and aggressively misinterpret. And that's sort of the point, isn't it?
