Post Election

Gail Collins gets my vote for as NYT columnist of the year, in part for writing as funny as this:

Americans are going through election withdrawal, trying to adjust to life without poll numbers. Really, we’ve heard quite a bit of whining on this subject lately.

But there’s still Minnesota! The U.S. Senate race there is up in the air. You may want to consider becoming totally obsessed with it, jumping out of bed every morning and racing to the computer to check for the latest vote count.

Or perhaps not. Still, it’s something to hang on to.

There are actually three Senate races that are undecided, and if the Democrats won them all, they’d hit the magic filibuster-proof number of 60. Alaska, determined to continue in its role as the vortex of all things politically strange, still hasn’t counted tens of thousands of ballots. Georgia has a Senate runoff Dec. 2, and the Democrats have dispatched tons of canvassers to help their candidate, Jim Martin. Martin is a long shot, but we should all be grateful that they’ve found something to do with the Obama campaign workers, who would otherwise have been set loose to wander the country, muttering about change and attempting to register household pets to vote.

Study: Omitting cell phone users may affect polls

WASHINGTON—People with only cell phones may differ enough from those with landline telephones that excluding the growing population of cell-only users from public opinion polls may slightly skew the results, a study has concluded.

The finding, in a report this week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, may increase pressure on polling organizations to include people who use only cell phones in their surveys. While many major polls including The Associated Press-GfK Poll already interview cell phone users, some do not, largely because doing so is more expensive.

Earlier studies -- including a joint Pew-AP report two years ago -- concluded that cell and landline users had similar enough views that not calling cell users had no major impact on poll findings. The new report concludes that "this assumption is increasingly questionable," especially for young people, who use cells heavily.

Combining polls it conducted in August and September, Pew found that of people under age 30 with only cell phones, 62 percent were Democrats and 28 percent Republicans. Among landline users the same age that gap was narrower: 54 percent Democrats, 36 percent GOP.
Similarly, young cell users preferred Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama over Republican nominee John McCain by 35 percentage points. For young landline users, it was a smaller 13-point Obama edge.