• Listen to this segment

With dozens of polls released each week about the chances of the two major party presidential candidates, it’s not easy to disentangle reality from statistics. While most polls agree that Senator Obama is in the lead nationally, an October 22nd Associated Press poll claimed that Obama and McCain were tied at 44 and 43 percent respectively. Some say that’s the result of McCain’s successful deployment of “Joe the Plumber” during the third debate. But, yesterday’s Gallup poll puts Obama at 52 to McCain’s 43 percent support. Are both polls right? What most polls these days miss are younger voters who exclusively use cell phones. Cell phone users are generally not polled although a new Zogby poll in collaboration with a mobile ad company surveyed over 4000 cell phone users and found a whopping 71% support for Obama versus 25% for McCain. The media are also discussing the so-called Bradley effect of support for African American candidates appearing higher in the lead up to an election than on election day itself. However, it is useful to remember that presidents are not elected by the popular national vote, rather by the electoral college which depends on who wins what state.

GUEST: Sam Wang, Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University, runs the blog, Princeton Election Consortium, which, based on state-by-state polls, gives 354 electoral college votes to Obama and 184 to McCain

For more information, visit election.princeton.edu.