I discount the concern over REACHING the young voter. A pollster worth his salt (and most of the large organizations including Survey USA are) know to make sure that you get the right mix of ages. The real challenge for the polling organization in this election is what weight do you give to a particular age demographic–will they make up 10% of the likely voters or 15%?

My feel is that as we get closer to the election we will find some of the youth enthusiasm for Obama wane as they figure out that he really is NOT a different kind of politician–just more slickly packaged than ones like McCain. The end result will not be switching to vote for McCain, but rather that they will not vote and will end up voting in traditional numbers. Only time will tell.

This is a hard year for pollsters, when it comes to the presidential election.

Various polls have shown that in the presidential election, Obama has a significant lead among voters under 50, McCain has a significant lead among voters over 50.

Traditionally, senior citizens have the highest turnout on election day, and young adults have the lowest turnout.

However, this year, Obama’s supporters are more enthusiastic. On C-SPAN this morning, they were saying a pollster reported about 80% of the Democrats are satisfied with their candidate, and only 41% of Republicans were satisfied with theirs. Will this affect turnout levels? It might depend on the weather on election day.

Not just political pollsters, but all survey takers are having increasing difficulty getting representative samples for polling. They legally cannot make unsolicited calls to cell phones, so their samples skew older.

But what does this mean in state races? Will enthusiasm for Obama have “coat tails” for other Democrats, or will these independent voters pick and choose?

Sorry for having more questions than answers, and unanswerable questions at that; that’s how the cookie crumbles, I guess.