Mobile-Only Poll Overwhelmingly Favors Kerry
Sen. Kerry (D-Mass.) leads Pres. Bush 55-40% among likely voters 18-29, according to a poll of people that use mobile phones as a replacement for wireline, said polling firm Zogby International. The poll, done with youth voter group Rock the Vote, is Zogby International’s first political poll conducted exclusively on users of mobile phones. The survey is a response to critics who have criticized polling firms for overlooking the mobile- only demographic, which is younger and more urban (CD Oct 25 p7).
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The Oct. 27-30 poll, which surveyed 18-29 year-olds who own Motorola phones, found support for independent Ralph Nader at about 1.6% and another 4% of respondents undecided. The poll also found that 2.3% of respondents said they didn’t plan to vote and 0.5% who weren’t sure whether they would.
“The results of this text-message poll mirror what we're seeing in our more conventional polls,” said Zogby CEO John Zogby: “Among 18-29 year-olds, Kerry leads the president by 14 points -- 55% to 41% in our current daily tracking poll --virtually identical to these results.”
This similarity, while lending credibility to mobile- only polling, calls into question the potential significance of the numbers for election-day results. Rival polling group Gallup posted a statement on its website last week saying research that only about 3% of American households are mobile-only and that number increases only 1/2 point among 18-25 year-olds. Gallup sees “little to no difference” in policy attitudes of 18- 29 year-olds with and without land lines, and polling results are weighted to reflect likely voters among that age group, no matter their phone ownership status.
The mobile-only segment is actually closer to 6%, a spokesman for the Pew Research Center said, but that isn’t enough to require a major shift in polling techniques. “In a 50-50 election, it’s theoretically possible” that mobile-only households could swing the election in a way polls couldn’t predict, he said, cautioning that the results would have to be closer to “60-40 or 70-30 for one candidate” to move the general electorate even one percentage point. Young voters are hard to pin down “because of their lifestyles, not their cellphones,” he said.
Although the Zogby poll is the first major mobile- only poll in the U.S., international text-message and multimedia services group SMS.ac recently conducted a text-message poll among subscribers and found that non- U.S. mobile users overwhelmingly prefer Kerry. In its Fri. poll of 151,022 users in 50 foreign countries, SMS said 74.6% had “voted” for Kerry and 25.4% for Bush; “undecided” and Nader weren’t options. SMS didn’t release the age distribution in its survey.