Why Republicans Won't Win On Tuesday

The generals are always fighting the last war, as the saying goes, and the pollsters are polling the 2008 electorate.
There are two problems with this, one demographic, and one technological.

Demographically, there are a significant number of younger voters this cycle, ones who registered for the first time in 2008. Many of them may have moved,  many of them may have not participated in the run-up to this election (more about this in part two) but they were sensitized to politics through both the party primary contests of 2007&2008, and then the actual election that brought Obama to the White House with over three times the vote margin that Junior Bush had across both his (s)elections.
The vast majority of this cohort were Obama voters. They're still Obama "monitors." And most of them are still registered.

Second, 2008 was the first presidential election since the cell phone became widely used as the primary or only phone for a large number (majority?) of Americans, and moreso among voters. Even though a huge number of voter registrations were processed nationwide, only the new ones got changes in phone numbers to cell phone numbers, if they put the number down at all. Remember, phone number is not required on registrations in most states, just encouraged. And people who still have home land-lines as well as cell phones usually put down the land-line as their phone number on legal docs.

What this means is that this election cycle is the first cycle where the landline population is ignoring their home phones because all their friends, family and co-workers have their cell numbers, which aren't on the voter reg.
Meanwhile, cell-only phone owners, even if they gave their numbers on their registration, usually ignore numbers they don't recognize or that their phone's phone book doesn't match to a name.
And while robo-calls are out there, and phone banks are burning up the air, the calls are falling on deaf ears, because the robo-calls leave messages that are dumped, and the phone bankers, generally, leave no message at all, but just hang up after four rings, mark 'NoAnswer' on the call sheet and go to the next number.

Polling companies will claim they are taking this into account, but they can't, by definition. They may include a statistically significant number of the younger age bracket, but the quality of these will not match that of the politically aware, if not campaign-engaged, that are registered. Their polls will use younger voters who are hoping for a call, from anyone. Ones who can't or don't hide behind caller-id. Which, you and I know, is not even the average youth, much less the young Obama voter.

But on Tuesday, the energizer gap will have closed significantly by the close of the polls. Because these 2008 voters, living their lives behind caller-id and voicemail, will show up in sufficient numbers to seriously screw with the pollsters' numbers.

And John Boner will still be the limp dick he's always been.
(5:58:41 PM)(6:04:49 PM)