According to the AP's Mike Mokrzycki, cell-phone only-voters in the 18-29 age bracket broke only slightly more for Obama than for McCain, with just a five-point difference in Obama's margin of victory in that age bracket. But:
the national exit poll Tuesday - which asked the phone-usage question among nearly 7,500 voters - found the starkest difference in vote preference was among voters age 30-39:Obama took that bracket by 63-36 among cell-only voters, compared with just a 51-47 edge among voters with landlines, or 12 points better.
I think this makes a lot of sense.
Younger voters are a lot more like their older compatriots than we'd like to believe, and the five-point margin attests to that. The cell-phone only generation isn't much different than late boomers who had touch-tone only phones in their homes--nothing could have been more natural. They grew up with cell phones in their waist bands, and had to make an affirmative choice to add a landline.
The older bracket, however, had to make a conscious decision to get rid of their landlines. They had to look at the facts (they don't really need a land-line so long as they keep their batteries charged, and the likelihood that some kind of emergency will arise that would make a landline preferable to a cell is remote).
They applied the same logic to their presidential choices: one guy who was making sense versus another one who wasn't. One guy who seemed to be relying on rational thought versus the heir to the mantle (or mangle) of faith-based policy-making.
What I'm saying is that those slightly older cell-phone-only voters displayed a more deliberate and thoughtful approach to their life choices, and that was reflected in who they voted for. They picked not just the guy who was making the most sense, but the guy who seemed to be thinking things through.
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