As the pace of political campaigns increases and the length of a news cycle plummets, one might think the political polling industry is in its heyday. As it turns out, that may not be the case.

If the head of one of the nation’s most prominent polling firms is to be believed, political pollsters could be closer to their twilight years.

At a large meeting of statisticians in Washington, D.C., last week, Jay Leve, the editor and founder of Survey USA, said the days of phone polling, as it is conducted today, are numbered:

Leve began to outline a set of challenges facing not just his company, but all telephone pollsters. He noted the havoc wreaked by the dramatic rise in the percentage of younger people with cell phones but no landline telephone service — a near tripling in four years among those aged 18 to 24, to over 40 percent, according to statistics produced by the National Center for Health Statistics.

“For every 100 young people, age 18 to 24, that we should have had [last year] in our [unweighted] samples,” Leve said, “we had only 24.” His chart showed a complementary over-representation of college-educated and upper-income respondents.

While SurveyUSA, like all pollsters, attempts to weight demographically to correct these patterns, Leve admitted that the problem of declining coverage is “a problem I don’t know how to correct.” Interviewing by cell phone represents a “dramatic” increase in costs for all pollsters, but especially for the recorded voice polling he conducts.

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All of this brought Leve to a somewhat stunning bottom line: “If you look at where we are here in 2009,” for phone polling, he said, “it’s over… this is the end. Something else has got to come along.”

Survey USA is one of the most popular public polling firms in the country, in part because its “recorded voice” system keeps prices low.

In Iowa, the company has conducted polls for WHO-TV (Des Moines market) and KAAL-TV (Mason City market), among other media organizations.

It may be a few more years before the Hawkeye State starts to notice any sort of effect from cellphone-only homes. Though there is not much reliable state-by-state data on this question, the surveys that are available seem to indicate that Iowa lags behind most other states in the percentage of families who eliminate standard phone lines in favor of cellphones. One 2006 study (cited here), for instance, found that only 5 percent of Iowa households were cellphone-only. Nationwide, the number was more like 10 percent.