THE PRESIDENTIAL campaign has another week to run and the tension is rising for supporters of John McCain and Barack Obama.
The Obama people are worried? Why should they be worried when they have an almost bottomless bank account and their candidate is leading in the polls?
The polls may be the problem.
Over the weekend, the Lawrence Journal-World ran an article by an enterprising journalism student at Kansas State University. The student, Mark Wampler, looked at the problems raised for pollsters by Americans’ changing telephone habits.
More and more people — especially younger people — are dropping out of the old landline phone network and using cell phones exclusively. Pollsters, on the other hand, are still wedded to the landlines, depending on telephone directories for numbers to call.
Wampler cited a study this year by the National Center for Health Statistics that found that 14.5 percent of households can no longer be reached by a typical survey because they do not have landline phones.
One of the reasons the polling groups depend on landlines is that cell-phone users are charged for incoming as well as outgoing calls. If pollsters can get cell-phone numbers, they are faced with the problem of reimbursing the people being called for the cost of the call.
The result of the changes is a growing uncertainty about the accuracy of political polls. That uncertainty is increased by the increase this year in voter registrations by people in the very age group that is likely to be out of reach for the polls. How will those people vote?
Nobody knows, and that means that the people who are paid to know are guessing.
Nothing is certain this year, and whatever happens at the polls a week from Tuesday is going to be a surprise.