If you really want to annoy someone, call them up on their cell phone with a poll or survey for them to take. Unlike using a landline, people pay for their minutes when they receive incoming calls on the cell phone. So they don't want to talk to pollsters while the meter is running. Pollsters traditionally collect their data by landline, so they're having a real problem in the age of the mobile phone. One in seven people no longer have a home phone, and that number rises to about one in three for households with people up to the age of 30. A San Francisco Chronicle story that Clark read recently made the point that it's going to be very hard to have realistic polling data for the 2008 presidential race because of the popularity of the cell phone.

The unlikely impact that going mobile has had on politics isn't limited to skewing the results for pollsters. Cell phone-only homes are more likely to be Democrat than Republican, with 53 percent of the households identifying themselves as blue voters and 30 percent as red voters. And if in the future, home phones may die out all together, that's when polling will become really difficult. Already traditional call-out research in the radio and TV industries (where people in a given area are called and asked about their favorite artists, songs or shows to help compile playlists) is on the decline. So where is polling research headed? To the internet, of course, thanks to online surveys! There may even come a time when politicians have to go back to making decisions based on their gut, rather than what some survey or research tells them.