Andrew Sullivan has a post up today demonstrating that while it did not affect the outcome, two pollsters — Fox and Rasmussen (essentially the propaganda wings of the Republican party) — skewed Republican support by 3-4% throughout the entire election cycle by not including any cell phone-only users in their data at any point.  That’s why we saw numbers like these in amalgamated poll results: Republicans, 50%; Democrats 41%.  The actual numbers were 49% and 43%.  But Fox and Rasmussen were providing the GOP with ludicrous 13% leads, and that tilted all of the data heavily in the party’s direction.  And it can’t be that they didn’t know what they were doing — they were outliers the entire time and they knew what the effect on polling averages would be.

Now, again, it didn’t affect the outcome directly, but the Dems nevertheless had more support than was registered — and, by no coincidence — among the demographic Republicans fear most and have a self-interest to exclude: young, urban, liberal.

There’s also a cynical self-fulfilling prophecy about all of this; if people think an election’s a forgone conclusion (which of course is what Fox was screaming at the top of its lungs for weeks on end), then the so-called “enthusiasm gap” (also shrieked about endlessly) may be fed until it is feeding itself.

The point is that this is a familiar Republican trick: voter caging — to keep, by whatever means possible, either directly or indirectly, Democrats away from the polls.  And it is, moreover, enabled by a lazy and incompetent mainstream news media which prefers “narratives” to facts.

At the very least, it demonstrates that pollsters must now make a point of polling cell phone-only users.  If they do not, they are effectively staking the Republicans an advantage every time that does not actually represent voter intent — which of course makes pollsters not only useless, but dangerous to the democratic process.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzHcqcXo_NA

The Republicans elected a lot of candidates tonight who — judging by the behavior of their compatriots — will be eager to collect the graft that will shortly be coming their way from big oil and Wall Street.  But not the one above, who represents everything that is wrong with the Palin brand of Republicanism, and, happily, went down to defeat in her bid to become the junior Senator from Delaware.

The Republicans are nihilists at this point.  They stand for nothing but gaining and holding onto power while comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted.  They’re not even republicans in any meaningful sense.  They are plutocrats who make it clear by their actions that their vision of America is heartless predation affirmed by the Constitution.  Let’s see how far that gets them.

One last observation from the preternaturally savvy Nate Silver on what is a hobbyhorse of my own:

The cellphone effect. This one is pretty simple, really: a lot of American adults (now about one-quarter of them) have ditched landlines and rely exclusively on mobile phones, and a lot of pollsters don’t call mobile phones. Cellphone-only voters tend to be younger, more urban, and less white — all Democratic demographics — and a study by Pew Research suggests that the failure to include them might bias the polls by about 4 points against Democrats, even after demographic weighting is applied.

There is also some indirect evidence for the cellphone effect. What follows is a list of each firm’s final generic ballot poll, arranged from the best result for Democrats to the worst:

You can see that there is a rather strong relationship between whether a company included cellphones in its sample or not and the sort of result they showed. The polls that were conducted without cellphones showed Republicans ahead by an average of 9.3 points; those with them showed a smaller, 4.8-point advantage. That’s a difference of 4 or 5 points (and one that is statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence threshold), which is about of the same magnitude that Pew identified.