The Diddy Factor

by Robert X. Cringely - I, Cringely

Thursday, October 28, 2004

All parties in this presidential election are making extraordinary efforts to get Americans to vote. Among these campaigns, hip-hop entrepreneur P. Diddy is headlining an ad campaign right now on cable TV urging young American music fans to register and vote. I think the impact of this get-out-the-vote campaign is being underestimated. A communication revolution is taking place and simultaneously creating confounding influences on presidential tracking polls. All the polls right now say close to the same thing, that the race for president is neck and neck, but I'm here to predict that it is not. I'm sticking my neck out a bit, but I'm pretty confident that the polls are wrong. What's most interesting is why we aren't being told that.

The simple story is that nearly every tracking poll is conducted by telephone. A pollster selects a random sample of 500 or so voters, calls them up on the telephone, and asks who the respondent would vote for if the election were being held today.

One confounding influence in all these polls is the fact that people without phones aren't counted at all. Fortunately, for the last 50 years, telephone penetration has been 95-plus percent in this country, so that hasn't been much of a problem...until now.

Just down the street from my place here in Charleston, SC, is a house filled with women students from the College of Charleston. I'm not exactly sure how many girls are living in that house, or whether their boyfriends should be counted or not, but I do know for sure that the house, which has somewhere between five and 10 occupants, doesn't have a telephone. Every kid has a mobile phone they use for everything. And that means no tracking poll is ever going to learn who those girls and boys are going to vote for President because it is literally against the law for pollsters to call mobile phones in this country.

Yeah, but how much of an impact could that have? More than most of us expect, and a LOT more than most pollsters expect.

Anna Greenberg of pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research told the BBC, for example, that only three percent of Americans use their mobile phones as a sole communication device, but the FCC said two years ago that five percent of U.S. homes have only mobile phone service and that 15 percent of university students have only mobile phone service. And with 77 million U.S. mobile phones owned by people age 18-24, many of those supposedly counted are probably still associated with a parent's hard-wired telephone number but are really mobile. So the numbers of unpolled votes could be huge.

And though pollsters (who after all are generally in business to do this work) deny it, the switch from fixed to mobile communication is already having an impact on the outcome of elections.

In the last presidential election, one might have expected the final tracking polls to pretty closely reflect the actual outcome of the election only a few hours later. But no. Gore was generally two to three points down in most tracking polls conducted on November 6, 2000, but won the popular vote on November 7 by about half a million voters, or half of one percent. True, this is within the statistical range of most polls, but if the deviation from the actual vote count was truly random noise, then half of the tracking polls would have counted high and half counted low. But that's not the way it happened, and the reason isn't noise, but a consistent sampling error.

More recently in the 2003, Philadelphia mayoral election the final tracking polls gave incumbent mayor John Street a slight statistical lead over challenger Sam Katz, yet the actual vote went 59 to 41 for Street. How could those Philadelphia tracking polls be so far off? They missed the extensive effort to register student voters in that city, with its several major universities.

Now how about Diddy and all the others urging young people to register and vote in the upcoming presidential election? Their stated goal is 20 million new voters (out of a total of perhaps 110-120 million voters) and given the fervent message and extensive advertising on MTV, VH1 and elsewhere, that goal just might be reached, presumably with most of those kids voting for Kerry, the Democratic challenger. If the polls are skewed, then Kerry is actually doing much better and can probably expect a comfortable win.

But if that's the case, why aren't we hearing about it?

The likely answer is simply because Democratic strategists fear any sign of cockiness will result in many of those newly registered young voters not bothering to vote at all, leading to a Bush victory. So nobody says anything, holding their breath and hoping for a particular outcome.

And Diddy, I hear he's planning to sublet the Lincoln bedroom.

Robert X. Cringely, a recovering technogeek, was the host and writer of PBS's Triumph of the Nerds, Plane Crazy, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet, Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course, Y2K: The Winter of Our Disconnect, and Electric Money. Since 1997 he has also written a weekly column, I, Cringely.

Note: Portions of this article were taken from an original piece published on the I, Cringely Web site on October 21. Reprinted with the author's permission.

Do you use your cell phone as your primary phone? Are you planning to vote? What role should polls play in an election? During an officeholder's tenure? Should celebrities voice their political opinions publicly?

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