Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

Mark Blumenthal at Pollster.com has published an extensive and detailed look at the  challenge that the growth of "cell phone only" households are presenting to political polling. In Part 1, Blumenthal answers such questions as why pollsters don't call cell phones, how many "cell phone only" Americans are out of reach, and how that may impact polling results. In Part 2, he looks at a variety of technical challenges to polling via cellphones.

So what is the bottom line? Surveys via cell phone are feasible, but much more expensive than landline surveys and with some methodological kinks (like weighting) yet to be worked out. Supplemental cell-phone interviewing is going to be important for the multi-million-dollar government surveys that track health and health related behavior (including some measures that currently show statistically significant bias when the cell-phone only population is missed). However, it is not yet clear that very expensive supplemental RDD cell-phone samples will make a noticeable improvement in routine political studies over the next year or two (see Part I). The cost alone puts this approach out of reach for most media and internal campaign surveys.

Read the whole thing.