Warning: what follows is entirely un-scientific and is, accordingly, of little use to understand what might happen when the polls close tonight.

I've been surprised over the past few weeks at how much of a ground game Brown seems to have in Western Massachusetts compared to Coakely. Last weekend, I had to drive to nearby Belchertown for a swim meet and we passed countless yard signs for Brown as well as a small rally of Brown supporters. Not a single sign for Coakley. Today I had to travel to Boston for an appointment and I was 40 minutes into the drive before I saw my first Coakley sign.

Of course, once I got into Boston things changed quite a bit. Coakley signs were much more prominent and the handful of polling sites I passed were packed. This is consistent with what the news has been reporting regarding high turnout. But what was most interesting from my vantage point (and the vantage point of any pollster trying to determine who will and will not vote today) was a conversation I had with a young Democratic store clerk who, upon finding out that I was a political science professor, started complaining about how he ended up having to get up early today to go vote when he had been planning all along to skip this election. I've had similar conversations with a number of Democrats over the past few days; people who had no intention of voting a week ago, but now feel compelled to do so. These people are not at all excited about the Coakley campaign, but they suddenly feel as though they have to go out to vote in an election they were planning on skipping.

The interesting question, of course, is how would these voters be treated by a likely voter screen? And would response bias affect the propensity with which these types of voters would turn up in pre-election polls? It will be interesting to see how this plays out tonight. Like Mark, if forced to wager on the outcome, I'd have to put my money on Brown. But there is no way I'd want to put my money down on either candidate in an election like this one.

First, there is no way to control for other reasons that these polls might have generated different results, including different approaches to screening for likely voters and how undecideds are dealt with. With regard to the latter issue, it is important to note that the pollsters using live interviewing in New Jersey were showing more than twice the percentage of undecideds as those using IVR.

This leads to a second important point (related to the first): comparing these pollsters based on the final result presupposes that each pollster that has been entered into this fictitious competition was actually trying to get the final result correct in the first place. If that was the goal, then it seems as though each polling firm would have allocated all of their undecided respondents into one camp or another.

Third, one of the reasons for concerns with IVR polling is that citizens with only a cell phone cannot be reached by these pollsters and these citizens now comprise at least one-fifth of the population. Yet, while the cell-only problem may generally be an issue for IVR technology (and for live interview pollsters who aren't calling cell phones), it is less of a problem for polling on elections, and particularly in low turnout elections. This is because the types of people that do not have landlines are less likely to be voters (and particularly less likely to be voting in low turnout elections). Ultimately, an off-year low turnout election may actually be less of a challenge for IVR-based polls because the non-coverage bias should be smaller for these contests. Where these polls may run into greater challenges is when they attempt to make inferences about the American public rather than registered (or likely) voters.

Justin Milner explained the relationship in the Baltimore Sun a few weeks ago:

"In the health care debate, loss aversion helps to color the public's perception of potential reform. A recent Gallup poll found a clear majority of Americans favor health care reform in the coming year. But when pressed on specific aspects of the health care, Americans are decidedly loss averse. Almost 90 percent of Americans want to be able to choose any doctor or hospital they like, and 77 percent of Americans say it is important to have the option to keep the health insurance plan they have now. In sum, we may want change and reform - but not at the cost of any of our current options."

In other words, those that already have health insurance probably overvalue that insurance relative to what would be available to them under health care reform legislation, and this may be driving down support for reform.

Fortunately, the survey released by the Economist yesterday provides a nice addendum to these readings by illustrating how loss aversion can significantly alter public opinion depending on how a question is framed. In this survey, the sample was split randomly into halves. The first half of the sample was asked to choose which of the following plans they preferred:

"A plan with no lifetime limit on benefits."

or

"A plan that limited the total amount of benefits in your lifetime to $1 million, but saved you $1000 per year."

Four out of five respondents (80%) answering the question framed in this way selected the first option. They'd much rather have a plan with no limit on benefits than save $1,000, but be subjected to a $1 million lifetime limit.

The second half of the sample chose between these options:

"A plan that limited the total amount of benefits in your lifetime to $1 million."

or

"A plan with no lifetime limit on benefits, but cost you an additional $1000 per year."

Functionally, these options are equivalent to those presented to the first half of the sample. In the first presentation, the limited plan will increase the respondent's wealth by $1000 per year by saving him or her that money; in the second presentation, the limited plan will increase the respondent's wealth by $1000 per year because that respondent will not have to pay the cost of the unlimited plan. However, the different framing of the options (emphasizing "savings" rather than "cost") is critical. Among those choosing from the second set of options opinion was more closely divided--44% chose the plan with limited benefits while 56% chose the unlimited benefits option. In short, more Americans wanted the unlimited plan when it meant forgoing a savings of $1,000 per year than when it meant incurring a cost of $1,000 per year.

It is also important to note that the changes in how the options are framed do not affect all groups equally. In particular, loss aversion appears to be conditioned by income. This makes sense since wealthier respondents may not be as sensitive to a $1,000 per year change in their wealth as those with lower incomes. To demonstrate the relationship, the chart below compares the percentage of respondents who would choose a plan with no lifetime limit depending on whether they received the question with the "savings" frame or the "cost" frame. Respondents are broken down into three income categories.

What stands out from this chart is that respondents in each income category are much more likely to chose the option with no lifetime limit when they received the question with the savings frame. However, under the "cost" frame, responses differed more significantly across income categories. Thus, among respondents making less than $40,000, support for the plan with no lifetime limit was 32 percentage points higher when that plan was presented as a way to forgo a savings of $1,000 rather than incurring a cost of $1,000. The framing effects were much smaller for those with higher incomes.

Of course, these aren't actually the choices being presented to Americans during the health care reform debate, but this survey experiment does provide a neat way of illustrating not only how the framing of health care reform as a potential loss can affect support for the measure, but also among which groups those frames will be most effective. Indeed, the New Yorker article ends by noting that it may still be possible to gain public support for health care reform despite the public's tendency toward loss aversion:

"The key may be to work with, rather than against, people's desire for security. That's surely one reason that Obama has consistently promised people that if they like the health insurance they currently have they can keep it. This promise will make whatever reform we get more inefficient and less comprehensive, but it also assuages people's anxieties. It might even be possible to use the endowment effect and the status-quo bias in the argument for change. After all, although people tend to feel that they own their health insurance, their entitlement is distinctly tenuous...Changing the system so that individuals can get affordable health care, while banning bad behavior on the part of insurance companies, will actually make it more likely, not less, that people will get to preserve their current level of coverage."

For the public to support health care reform, the reform needs to be framed as something that will help keep most individuals (who do have insurance) from losing what they already have. Furthermore, the analysis of the Economist survey suggests that individuals with lower incomes are most likely to respond to such an attempt to re-frame the debate in this way. This is notable since there is much ground to be gained among these individuals. In fact, the same survey shows that respondents in the lowest income group are substantially more likely than others to be unsure about whether the health care reform plan would make them better or worse off. This group appears to have their minds least made up on health care reform and their opinions may be the most susceptible to the efforts by both sides to frame this issue during the coming weeks and months.

In 2008, I included a battery on the Cooperative Congressional Election Study which asked 1,000 American adults to indicate which types of people each candidate had focused more attention on (the actual wording of the question was "During the presidential election campaign, which of the following groups do you think [Barack Obama/John McCain] has focused most of his attention on?") Respondents could select up to five groups from a list of 21 and each respondent was asked to complete this exercise for both candidates.

I am using these data for a project I'm working on looking at targeting during campaigns; however, I thought that I'd share some initial results here. The chart below aggregates the responses to these questions to show how the public viewed both candidates' campaigns. The chart shows what proportion of the public that thought that Obama (on the y-axis) or McCain (on the x-axis) had focused on winning the votes of each group.

Groups in the upper left hand corner are those that a large proportion of the public thought the Obama campaign focused on targeting, but only a small share thought McCain did. Clustered far up in that corner are young adults, lower income Americans, and African Americans. Also near that top left corner are liberals. None of these groups are surprising to see in this corner, though they may be there for different reasons.

Groups in the bottom right corner are those that a large share of voters thought McCain targeted but which fewer thought Obama focused on. These groups included whites, conservatives, and upper income Americans. No surprises here either.

In the top right corner are groups that Americans thought both candidates focused on winning votes from. Interestingly, there are very few groups in this area, with middle income Americans standing mostly alone. Aside from this group, the public did not appear to identify too many groups that they thought both candidates were trying to win over.

Some other interesting findings from this chart:

• More Americans thought that McCain tried to win the votes of women than Obama. It is interesting to ponder how big a role the Pallin selection was in affecting this perception. It is also worth noting that while more Americans thought that McCain was trying to win the votes of women, the gender gap strongly favored Obama in the actual voting.

• Women are not the only group where the public's view of the candidates' strategies didn't quite match with the actual success of the candidate among that group. For example, Obama edged out McCain among Americans earning $150,000 or more. He also won big among those describing themselves as ideological moderates.

• It is also interesting to see where Born-Again Christians fall on this chart. Despite the publicity Obama gained for targeting young evangelicals, few in the public actually credited him with trying to win over the votes of this group. However, perhaps more intriguing is the question of where this group might have fallen along the x-axis in the 2004 election. While between 20 and 30% of Americans thought McCain, it seems likely that this number is significantly lower than it would have been for Bush in '04.

• Finally, there appears to be some polarization in these perceptions. In particular, note how far apart the income and racial groups are distributed on this chart. The public viewed African Americans as being almost the exclusive domain of the Obama campaign while whites were overwhelmingly viewed as being only targeted by McCain. Furthermore, the Obama campaign was viewed as being the only campaign focusing on lower income Americans while McCain was the only candidate viewed as focusing on those with higher incomes. On the other hand, both candidates were viewed as targeting middle income Americans.

• These perceptions undoubtedly vary depending on whether a respondent is or isn't a part of each particular group. For example, those with higher incomes may have been more likely to think that Obama was focusing more attention on those with lower incomes compared to those who actually have lower incomes. I'll be exploring these dynamics when I analyze the data in more detail.

Overall, the chart provides some interesting insight into how the public viewed the candidates' strategies and raises an interesting question...how comparable would these perceptions be to the judgments of journalists and political pundits who follow the campaign for a living?

One of the major themes in the paper is that understanding the cell-only population is about more than just age. In fact, residential mobility has a strong influence on whether someone has shed their landline. Even after controlling for age and a litany of other demographic variables, we find that respondents who moved within the last year were 24 percentage points more likely to be cell only than those who had lived in the same residence for at least five years. Renters, singles, and those without children were also much more likely to be cell-only.

Our explanation for this pattern:

"There are several reasons that highly mobile Americans may be more likely to go without landlines. First, whenever someone moves from one residence to another, they have an opportunity to reassess their phone needs. Thus, the act of moving provides an opportunity for individuals to shed their landlines. Second, mobile Americans may choose a CPO lifestyle because cell phone numbers tend to be more portable than landlines. When moving from one metropolitan area to another, individuals must change their landline phone number, but do not need to change their cell number. This may provide an incentive for choosing not to maintain a landline in a new residence. Third, those with fewer family and community ties may feel less of a need to have multiple phone lines on which they can be reached by members of their social networks. "

The fact that the cell-only public tends to be more mobile has some important political consequences. Some highlights:

Ultimately, we argue that weighting for standard demographic measures such as age, education, income, and race may not be sufficient. Pollsters relying on landline samples may want to consider weighting by other factors such as time in residency, renter/home owner, and marital status. But check out the full paper for a more detailed discussion of all of these points.