of Obama's core of support isn't getting polled it matters.

I'm one of them as well.  It just doesn't make sense to have a landline phone anymore.

Kinda funny how much time I spend on my cell phone talking to other people on their cell phones about politics. I don't think I've ever been polled in my life (other than online).

only I am in the 40 age range.  Don't need a landline, for what?  

"I don't know how this impacts traditional polling techniques, but I am curious."

Full disclosure: I work at a polling firm.  Right now, the default assumption is to simply assume that excluding them won't matter, due to some combination of a) The wireless-only people are more or less similar to the population with landlines that we can reach, b) The wireless only people are less likely to vote and c) There aren't enough wireless-only people to be important.  Moreover, wireless-only is only one of the problems that cause sampling to not be truly random; others include people who work nights, low response rates, call-screening, and so on.

The problem is that all these other problems are getting worse as well (response rates are low and dropping, call-screening is on the rise, etc.)  So over the next, say, 5 years, there's going to be a lot of development in the field.  The place it's farthest along is Zogby, which currently uses email-based polling and heavily weights the data it gets based on a ton of demographics.  This sort of approach will probably get more and more common. Of course this introduces its own problems...we live in interesting times.

I'm under 25 and nobody I know has their own land line.  As younger cohorts start to take up more of the market share, the proportion of people that are wireless only is going to get a lot bigger.

I'm in the latter part of my 50's, so I don't fit the "profile".  I live by myself, and have an elderly mother whose health is fragile.  The cell phone is not an alternative, it's a necessity.  After paying for a land line and a cell phone for 2 years, I concluded it was nonsensical to continue to pay for both, and cut off the land line.  More and more people of my generation are concluding the same thing, even if they have to have more than one cell phone in the family.  The day will come that no one has a land line.  I would venture to guess that day isn't that far in the future.

Currently I have both, but as my roommate is moving out and I want to live alone at the next place...I've given serious thought to abandoning a ground line...(assuming I can get Internet through cable or something).

So I read this article with interest, but Matt's got an awesome point.

Except I really don't know how to say this...it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. This "disconnect" means that youths and Hispanics are becoming far less reliable voters. Polling aside, the sort of "pump-up" phone calls also don't reach cell-only types.

Now...the other part of the survey that is revealing is that young renters are really likely to rely on cell phones. This is also bad news, because renters move more commonly than homeowners and means they are less likely to register at their new place.

by this. His typical supporter is a tech savvy young man.

Wireless only since '04, but in an older demo. But I've always been a fairly early adopter (my first computer was in '78, which should give you an idea of which demo). Never gotten a political survey in my life. Well, maybe one, years ago. I don't understand why people who don't run home businesses or work from home have landlines anymore. Minutes are cheap, and who wants to check the machine?

And no surveys or telemarketers!

I'm wireless-only, my husband's wireless-only, and we're 42 and 52.  Ahead of our time on one demographic measurement, at last!

I'm 54 and wireless only for the past 5 years. I have never been polled.  There are more of us than just the 20 or 30 somethings!!!