Is Youth Being Served?

My NationalJournal.com column, on whether pollsters should be weighting by age, and if so, to what value, is now online. It follows on last night's post on changing weighting of the GWU Battleground survey.

Two pieces of added context. First, yesterday I emailed a handful of national pollsters to ask about the age compositions of their samples, and I got quick responses from those listed below. The table includes the estimates of 2004 turnout from both exit polls and the U.S. Census Current Population Survey (CPS). See my column for more discussion of the 2004 estimates. Note that most pollsters report on the percentage of 18-29-year-olds, which is included below:

Second, I want to re-post the very helpful graphic produced by the Pew Research Center last year that shows how how the rise of cell-phone only households has dramatically affected the ability of pollsters to reach younger respondents when relying on random samples of land-line telephones. The percentage of 18-34 year olds in Pew's un-weighted national samples declined by roughly ten percentage points between 2002 and 2006 -- the same time period in which the percentage of adults living in wireless only households has grown from 3% to 12% (I originally posted this chart as part of an entry last year on cell phones and their impact on political surveys).