Polling and Telephone Demographics

Pollsters are struggling to capture the opinions of the cell-phone-only population in their polling for the 2012 presidential election, reports the New York Times. Some are making a valiant attempt to include a representative sample of these potential voters in their survey results--and with good reason. Nearly one-third of the nation's adults now live in a wireless-only household, twice as many as in 2008, according to the federal government.

The demographics of the wireless-only group are strikingly different from the demographics of those with both cell and landline phones. No doubt, their political attitudes are strikingly different too. The wireless-only population has expanded to encompass the majority of adults under age 35, the majority of renters, the majority of the poor, 37 percent of blacks, 43 percent of Hispanics, and 41 percent of students.