Cellphone-only voters may be problematic for pollsters

George McHugh of Nashua listened yesterday to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney at a campaign event in Nashua. McHugh said the most important issue to him is illegal immigration. (Dina Rudick/Globe Staff)

CONCORD, N.H. - As New Hampshire poll results are being released in the countdown to primary day, keep in mind the story of Fergus Cullen. The 35-year-old Republican has managed to avoid being called by a pollster for months because he has no landline telephone.

Instead, he has only a cellphone - and pollsters tend not to call cellphones.

Cullen is hardly an anonymous New Hampshirite. He is the chairman of the state's Republican Party, and few have a better sense of the pulse of the electorate.

In a recent interview in his office, which is decorated with a picture of one of Cullen's heroes, President Nixon, Cullen wondered whether the polls are missing thousands of people like him - and whether that will have a significant impact on the polling results.

For starters, Cullen said, few of the state's thousands of college students have landlines. The same is true of the Granite State's younger, noncollege population. If these voters turn out in far larger number than in the past, as happened during the Iowa caucuses, then the polls could be undercounting the electorate here. Some analysts believe that is one reason Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic caucuses was larger than anticipated.

As people drop their landlines, pollsters have worried about missing segments of the population in their opinion surveys. Phone directories are rare for cellphones. And many carriers charge the answering party for each call, which makes cellphone surveys problematic.

But Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, said there are fewer people in New Hampshire without landlines than in many other states. He does not think exclusion of cellphone-only voters will have a statistically significant impact on polls this time around.

Nonetheless, Cullen said that possible under-polling could affect candidates such as Representative Ron Paul of Texas. Many of Paul's voters are young and might be more likely to have only a cellphone. The difference might be small, perhaps one percentage point in the polls. But it could be significant in a tight race. The question is whether Paul would draw equally from his opponents or take a disproportionate number from one candidate.

"A pollster would tell you that it doesn't matter if you exclude them provided they are voting in the same way as other voters are," Cullen said. "But I personally am not persuaded by that. It seems clear to me that younger voters have different preferences from other voters and that younger voters are disproportionately more likely to have given up their landline."

Paul, a libertarian, won 10 percent of the vote in the Iowa Republican caucuses, a stronger showing than some analysts expected. Paul appeared in Saturday night's debate on ABC, but he was excluded from last night's debate on Fox. Cullen believes the decision is so unfair that his party withdrew official support for the debate.

Fox made its decision even though a UNH poll released over the weekend showed Paul with 9 percent. Fox invited Fred Thompson, former senator of Tennessee, who received 1 percent in the same survey.

Cullen said Paul "seems likely" to get at least 10 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, which would give him a delegate at the national convention. If so, Paul could have a more significant impact on the GOP race in New Hampshire tomorrow.