I voted, and then I carried a sign at the 100-foot limit for Mr. Obama for 30 minutes or so. The cars coming into the polling place were running about 6-to-1 wavers vs. not-wavers. The guy I carried my sign with turned out to be the town Democratic chairman, and we had a nice chat. He said that the real issue in town (and he thought across the country) was going to be the “cellphone vote”.
Pollsters can only call landlines, of course. Land line owners tend to be older, and as a group tend to lean Republican. They’re more likely to vote against a candidate on racial grounds. Younger voters tend to have only cellphones or to share land lines with multiple friends and house-mates. They use answering machines and voice mail services to screen calls. The Party Chair pointed out that here in town there were several hundred new voters, all of them under thirty, and all of them had cellphones rather than land lines. Most of them registered as Democrats. If this is the pattern nationally, then the polls may be wrong by a good 5% or more, favoring McCain over Obama.
It’s going to be an interesting day.
