Cell Phone Only Population

Brian Schaffner over at Pollster.com provides some interesting insight into the Cell Phone Only population. He ran a multinomial logit model based on Pew Survey data to control for a host of demographic factors to see if preferences were the same. Despite an extraordinarily inclusive list of controls (even party ID), he found there to still be differences among the CPO and landline populations (though not statistically significant if you look at his 90% CIs carefully).

The most interesting thing to me is the staggering difference in sampling errors for each of the groups. Look at how much wider the 90% intervals are for the CPOs than the landliners. I'm not sure what exactly we can take that to be indicative of in the populations, but it certainly is fascinating.

While I want to agree with the results on a gut level, I have some concerns about the structure of his model. When I checked out the STATA output Schaffner provides, one thing that stuck out to me was the p-value of .845 on the age variable predicting the McCain/lean outcome relative to the base of Obama. I'm not sure if there might be some multicolinearity issues here. I'm going to download the data myself and play around some. I'm off to lunch now, but soon I will revisit this. I'll report back later.

Senate Debate on Defense

Harvard's Social Science Statistics Blog linked to this really cool visualization. It depicts the change in partisan frequency of different terms in Senate debates on defense from 1997-2004. I've posted the video below. The absence of partisanship post-9/11 and then surge around Iraq is really cool to see - even if it is hardly profound.