Is The “Cell Phone Effect” Lowballing Obama’s Numbers?

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Do pollsters who don’t call cell phones make the election look closer than it actually is? Polling maven Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com thinks so. The traditional assumption is that young, cell-phone-only voters probably lean heavily toward Obama. It turns out that the four national polls that include cell phones in their samples are also the four polls that have him with the largest margins of victory. He charted it for you, too (after the jump):

cellphone-chart.png

The yellow bars are polls with cell phones in their samples. Nate’s said all along that there is a statistically significant cell phone effect. Read all his posts on it. He’s pretty convincing. (I interviewed Nate Silver in August for MoJo Video. We talked about polling, naturally. You can find the interview here.)

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“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

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