Presidential Polls - "Eligible Voter" v. "Most Likely Voter" Important

How many times this year have you seen a presidential poll that says it surveyed "most likely voters"? Chances are you've seen or heard this a lot -- almost every day. But think. How many times have you listened to someone use the term "eligible voter"?

Chances are, not a lot.

This difference reflects poll manipulation in action. Eligible Voters are those people old enough to voter. Period. But the designation "Most Likely Voter" blocks young people from consideration in polls because only older people are considered. It's a very important difference because...

" In A Journalist’s Guide to Public Opinion Polls, another 1992 situation is described in which additional changes in eligibility procedures dramatically altered the polls. In this example, the authors document how CNN’s change from "eligible voter" to "most likely voter" in the latter days of the ‘92 campaign, impacted the Bush-Clinton numbers by a full six percentage points... overnight!

It's also interesting that CNN's matched with Clinton in the example above. CNN uses the term "most likely voter" today, in what seems to me like an attempt to skew the polls toward people who are more conservative and thus more likely to vote for Senator Clinton over Senator Obama.

Then CNN reports on the results of such out-of-wack reports nationwide, making people think that she's got it in the bag.

Nope.

This is because the "Most Likely Voter" approach consistently avoids surveying new voters, according to Ruy Teixeira, at the Joint Fellow at the Center For American Progress, and who claimed that the Gallup Poll's design benefited more older, more conservative voters who were more likely to vote for Bush in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in this election.

The polls also don't pick up cell phone users. Again, according to Teixeira,...

"Cell phones are yet another thing that pollsters are scrambling to try to figure out how to deal with. The thing that mitigates the cell phone problem is that most people who have cell phones also have landlines. The number of pure cell phone users is relatively small, though it is growing fast. However, even if you confine your intention to that group, there is some evidence that by excluding the cell phone-only users, it is a group with a fairly distinct demographic profile which leads to a certain kind of politics. They tend to be poor, they tend to be renters. There is some evidence that excluding them from polls does skew the polls slightly."

In addtion, there's every indication to believe that cell-phone-only homes are near 25 percent of the voting population now.

One dynamic is clear in the 2008 Presidential Election to this point. While the youth vote is driving campaigns, especially Senator Obama's effort with its reliance on social networking online tools commonly used by young people, and Ron Paul's almost totally internet-based campaign surge, the polls and the mainstream media are all but ignoring the youth vote, thus creating the climate for what will be the most suprising election in history.