Pollsters used to worry that cellphone users would skew results. These days, not so much.

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It wasn't long ago that pollsters were fretting about a looming crisis in politics. It was called the cellphone, and its growing popularity threatened to skew surveys and ruin elections everywhere. Imagine not getting an accurate reading of a race because surveyors had only been able to reach wealthy, older people on landlines. At best, you'd risk giving voters the wrong impression of which candidate was ahead. At worst, you might unintentionally change the outcome of the race as campaigns scrambled to misspend their resources based on faulty figures.

Cellphones still pose a challenge for polling in some smaller races. But for the most part, the disaster that was supposed to be never took place, according to Scott Keeter, the Pew Research Center's director of survey research. "Employing cellphones in the sample is more expensive," said Keeter. "We've been looking at that over the years and it's a problem that gets worse the more local your geography is. But for national polling -- cellphones are not presenting a problem for us other than that they're more costly to call."


Pollsters used to worry that cellphone users would skew results. These days, not so much.