Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, left, introduces his vice presidential running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, Saturday, Aug. 11, 2012 in Norfolk, Va. Pollster John Zogby has Barack Obama and Mitt Romney tied at 46 percent each.Amanda Lucier, Associated Press
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In an early test of Paul Ryan's impact on the presidential campaign, pollster John Zogby finds the race tied, matching recent findings from both Gallup and Rasmussen. Most notably, Zogby claims Romney has crested 40 percent of the 18- to 29-year-old age bracket, for the first time.
This is a critical threshold that the Obama camp can be none too pleased about. President Obama scored 66 percent of the youth vote in 2008. In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Zogby thinks Ryan may be opening up the youth vote to Romney.
"'It could be his youthfulness,' said Zogby of Ryan," the Examiner reported. "Plus, he said, more younger voters are becoming libertarian, distrustful of current elected officials and worried that they are going to get stuck with the nation's looming fiscal bill."
Zogby's poll comes at a moment when the polling industry is engaging in sustained naval-gazing, trying to figure out what to do with the increasing prevalence of cellphones and the ever higher refusal rate when they reach someone.
This uncertainty amidst changes results in vastly different philosophies producing markedly different results. The latest polls, aggregated by Real Clear Politics, could show Romney up by 4 points (Rasmussen) or Obama up by 9 (Fox News).
Rasmussen uses online interactive polls to try to compensate for the fact that its polling machinery cannot dial cellphones. Other pollsters hand-dial cellphones and lock in 25 or 30 percent of the slots for those who have only cellphones and no land line.
"The cellphone is not new; hence it is not a new problem," wrote John Zogby at Forbes last week. "There have been colleagues who initially eschewed calling cellphones, then began arbitrarily setting 'standards' for the proper numbers of cellphones in each sample, then determining who was a genuine cellphone respondent and who was not. In short, some of my best-known competitors were exercising the art of polling, just as I had suggested they would have to do. Those who deny new technologies and methodologies, criticize others for using them and then arbitrarily embrace them are only causing confusion. But ultimately, a good pollster is one who embraces new means of communicating with consumers and voters can reasonably explain why his methodology works, and can prove that it does work over time."
A key point of contention is the split among Democrats, Republicans and Independents in a given poll. Republicans often contest polls that show markedly more Democrats than Republicans, arguing that exit polls in 2008 and 2010 suggest something much closer to parity.
