The Cell-Phone Gap
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Every poll you’ve read this year may be wrong. The reason is in your pocket – your cell phone. Democrats and Republicans have been slow to adjust their industrial-age strategies to this information-age reality. The price could be a rude awakening on Election Day.
This is the first presidential election held since cell phones began to replace traditional phones in American homes in significant numbers. There are now 177 million cell phone users in America, an increase of 70 million in the past four years alone. According to the Yankee Group’s Mobile User Survey, 6% of all adult cell phone users have “cut the cord” – stopping their landline service altogether. This number doubles to 12% for the coveted demographic of adults under 35 and climbs even higher for college-age Americans. This amounts to millions of people who are not counted in the public opinion polls we’re inundated with during this election season.
There is no national cell phone directory, no 411 that can be called. Cell phones are portable, so the New York number you dial could connect with a person living in San Francisco or Tokyo, throwing off voter samples. Plus, it’s actually illegal for pollsters to charge a person for a call they make, and most cell phone users’ minutes tick off whether they make or receive a call. The combination of all these factors means that traditional polling firms – which still rely on call lists of landline voters – are at a loss, with no clear idea of how to adapt. To make matters worse, the implementation of Do Not Call Lists and the changing ways people use their phones at home means that response rates have dropped to 25% from 40%. In industry-wide ostrich-like denial, polling firms have not changed their techniques to adjust for the changes in the way Americans live. The result could be a real November surprise.
America has seen an election where the polls were dramatically off because of limits in technology and imagination. In 1936, the prestigious Literary Digest poll confidently predicted a victory for Alf Landon, a Kansas Republican, over Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic incumbent. This proved to be a bit of wishful thinking. The problem was that the Literary Digest poll sent out its survey postcards according to addresses it got from telephone books and automobile registries. Seven years into the Great Depression, folks who had private cars and home telephones tended to be rich – and Republican. Roosevelt won the election in a landslide.
So what does the cell phone gap in this year’s polling mean for the 2004 election? While no comprehensive study of cell phone alone voters’ politics has been completed, the demographics seem to favor the Democrats. Young Americans are not as knee-jerk liberal as they were in the past – they’re more likely to be Independent than Democrat or Republican. But one way of indicating how they might break is that among likely voters under 30, Kerry leads Bush by 52% to 42% in a post-debates Newsweek/GenNext poll. Likewise, an October Gallup poll showed Independent voters nationwide favoring Kerry by 53% to Bush’s 39% and the independent-labeled candidate Ralph Nader’s 4%. In addition, singles, single parents and lower-income individuals are more likely to cut the cord than their married counterparts making over $75,000 a year – a class division between the rootless and the rooted that traditionally benefits Democrats.
But perhaps the biggest area of concern for Republicans comes from the urban location of many cell phone-alone users. Just 4% of rural cell phone users have cut the cord compared to 10% of urban cell phone users. This may not cause much concern until you remember that there are still only a handful of Republicans who have been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from urban areas. The political divisions between average Americans have been exaggerated, but the partisan voting pattern gap between urban and rural America is real.
This year, pollsters and pundits have made a classic mistake in overlooking the obvious. Since the last election, the societal shift of cell phones from accessory to near necessity has changed the way people live. The more than 70 million new Americans who have purchased cell phones amounts to almost twice the population of swing states Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania combined. The number of homes using only wireless phones has tripled. By not accounting for broad segments of the rising tide of wireless workers in such a close election, we have been presented with something of a phantom horse race. In the end, the war on terror and personal likeability may still prove to be President Bush’s trump card, but in the millions of unpolled cell phone-only voters the door is open to an Election Day surprise that will force both parties to update their industrial age strategy and wake up to the information-age reality.