The National Annenberg Election Survey 2008 Phone Edition (NAES08-Phone) is a large-scale telephone public opinion survey designed to track the dynamics of political attitudes, perceptions, and behavior over the 2008 US primary and general presidential election campaigns. It is a continuation of the NAES survey series that includes the 2004 and 2000 US presidential elections.

NAES08-Phone consists of interviews with 57,967 respondents covering a range of topics about the presidential campaign and politics generally, including candidates and political figures, current policy issues, media use, campaign discourse, political participation, and voting behavior. Detailed demographic information was collected, and a section devoted to questions about social groups focused on comparative perceptions of race and gender in US society. The survey was updated regularly to stay current with the campaign, and questions were added, revised, and discontinued as developments warranted.

The main NAES08-Phone study, the National Rolling Cross-Section (RCS), consists of 30-minute telephone interviews conducted daily from December 2007 through the day before Election Day. During peak campaign periods, up to 300 interviews were completed daily, and weeks or individual days of data can be aggregated for cross-sectional analysis, or used sequentially for time-series analysis. A rolling cross-section methodology was used to minimize fluctuation in the day-to-day composition of respondents sampled for the survey.

In addition, 3,737 randomly selected National RCS respondents interviewed during the 13 weeks before the general election were recontacted immediately after Election Day to complete a second survey. The Post-Election Reinterview combined with the respondents' initial interviews for the National RCS forms a pre-post panel around Election Day.

The National Annenberg Election Survey is a project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania, which designed and managed the NAES08-Phone survey. Sampling and interviewing were conducted under the direction of APPC by Abt SRBI of New York.

NAES08-Phone is a companion to the National Annenberg Election Survey 2008 Online Edition (NAES08-Online), a web-based survey that was conducted during an overlapping field period and asked many of the same or comparable questions. NAES08-Online documentation and data are available on a separate website accessible via the main APPC website.

APPC provides the NAES surveys as a service to scholars and professionals. We ask that published analysis of the NAES credit the National Annenberg Election Survey of The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.