Bleg: Polls Statistically Justifiable?

I have a bleg for a good article on whether cell phones and aggressive telemarketing and the culture of generation X+ (X, Y, etc) together will make polls statistically useless.

Here's my premise. Whenever I get a call on my house phone, and I hear the words "I'm calling from National Research Associates" or whatever, I hang up. I know I can't make them stop calling since it's not a sales pitch, so there's no point in even complaining. I just hang up.

Behind the scenes, that removes me from the poll's sample. If that pollster called 100 people that day, and 50 of them hung up on him, and 30 of them told him that they like Obama, for example, then for the purposes of their calculations 60% of people like Obama. The problem is that if people who like Obama are less likely to hang up then you can't conclude that at all!

So here's the factors involved. Many people my age don't even have land lines. Others, like me, have them for 911 and making local / 1-800 calls, and generally don't ever receive legitimate calls on them. Even among people who have and use land lines, they're inured to sales calls and push polls. And even if they aren't specifically upset at telemarketing, it's so NOT Gen-X to tell a phone pollster how you're feeling.

This article has a little bit on the cell-phone angle but I think it goes deeper than that. Given that politicians generally, and your beloved Dems especially, follow polls like they were God's received Word, won't this distort the governing of our country? Possibly catastrophically? Crappy decrepit old people already run politics; what happens when not only are they disproportionately voting and contributing, but also disproportionately just answering a landline phone???

This is an official formal bleg for a good article about that.