One of the biggest issues I think is that the polling is still done by just randomly calling people. I think I agree that there is a large skew introduced by the simple fact of only reaching people willing to answer a call from an unknown number.
huh... I have literally never met a single person that answers cold calls on personal lines, this was already SOP when I was a kid.
Seriously, who's picking up those calls?
People who don't live in countries where the problem is this bad?
I'm in the UK and I get about 1 unsolicited call a month. If I didn't pick up numbers I didn't recognize I would have missed my Doctor (this week), several new client leads and multiple friends and acquaintences that changed their number.
However, I do not have a landline at home now, and have not in many years.
It's easier to just answer given the overall chance of it being a waste of time.
If somebody really wants something, they'll call again.
Also, sending an SMS to the unknown number and asking for a name works wonders.
If someone really wants something they will take the time to type.
The phone number on my website rings a phone on my desk. When it rings, I pick it up.
But the better pollsters don't just call. They use various online methods as well. 538 lists the following methods, and rates a pollster higher if they use more of them:
Live — Live telephone interviews, including cellphones.
Landline — Live telephone interviews, not including cellphones.
Live* — Live telephone interviews, but FiveThirtyEight cannot confirm whether cellphones are included.
IVR — Interactive voice response, otherwise known as automated polls or “robopolls.”
Online — Poll conducted by internet; generally, this means by web browser, but it’s inclusive of text message or application-based polling of mobile phones.
Mail — By U.S. mail or other “snail mail” service.Exactly this. I'm forced to answer a lot of calls even when I think it's 80% likely that it's a spam call. I own a business and need to keep my employees fed with work. My likelihood of landing a contract with a person drops by about half if I don't pick up the phone right away.
This is a bit of a tautology, but I guess it skews towards people who actually advertise/distribute their primary phone numbers (i.e., for business, or as a contact point for some club/group/community/org) or are otherwise in a field/business that basically boils down to networking.
I'm not sure exactly when I stopped answering calls outside of my contacts, but I know it's in the past ~9 years (and I feel like I've only been very consistent about not answering for 2-3 years). I'm fairly phone-avoidant, and almost never receive a "real" call from a non-contact.
But it wouldn't shock me if my last real-estate agent answered her personal cell if I called from a number she didn't recognize.
For spam calls, I lost all pretence of politeness years ago. In the best case I just hang up.
However, I only get a spam call every 3 months or so.
I somehow managed to get the name of one of the companies responsible for it. Then, I called them up — not the call center employees who were making the calls, the actual corporate office — and I told them to please stop calling me, or, real soon, I was gonna start looking for someone to sue.
The calls stopped. I don’t think I even got any this cycle.
It's done by a number of means, including online. IIRC, live caller polls still tend to produce the best results, though.
It's probably more accurate to say it's harder to effectively weigh or average responses in a setting where there are 4 or 5 different channels you are collecting responses from.
That list mostly includes landlines, and biases towards older landlines as well (since IIRC phone book registration switched from opt-out to opt-in at some point).
So the polls strongly overemphasize older voters (because no one else has a landline phone anymore).
If the source set of names and numbers is truly representative, I think random calling could work if you make sure to include "did not response" as a line item. Then you might get something like:
> 45% Biden, 39% Trump, 1% Jorgensen, %15 ???
With the no-response removed you get a skewed:
> 52% Biden, 45% Trump, 1.1% Jorgensen
I can't even tell you if a pollster called me... I'm getting about half-a-dozen calls a day from rando numbers that want to refinance my nonexistent student loans or talk to me about my home's nonexistent warrantee. I went to permanent do-not-disturb months before the election was even in the news. If you don't leave me a voice message I don't even know you exist; if you do leave me a voice message you've got about 3 seconds to convince me you're not a spammer before it's trashed.
But then the polls should undercount a population that is more likely to vote for the Dems and so the polls should have shown more support for the republicans than what happened in the elections.
Maybe we should just have taken the lesson of Dewey defeating Truman and not trusted polls is the first place.
I would also suspect that there are some other factors:
- people hoping for change are more willing to answer polls
- people who are ashamed of their opinions are more unwilling to answer polls
The second one, perhaps, gives too much credit for self-awareness, though.
- people who have too much free time on their hands will answer polls more
- gullible people, who tend to click on spam emails and ads and trust their news, will answer polls more
- people who've been vilified by the media for their views are unlikely to answer polls
- people who are afraid to be 'cancelled' or harassed for their views are unlikely to answer polls
- people who don't trust particular news organizations spreading political propaganda are unlikely to answer polls from those organizations
Guess we'll never know why those dummies would possibly hide their true preferences.
The article gives evidence. Here is the section:
"I use the General Social Survey’s question, which is, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” ....
It turns out, in the GSS, that 70 percent of people say that people can’t be trusted. And if you do phone surveys, and you weight, you will get that 50 percent of people say that people can be trusted. It’s a pretty massive gap.
[Sociologist] Robert Putnam actually did some research on this, but people who don’t trust people and don’t trust institutions are way less likely to answer phone surveys. Unsurprising! This has always been true. It just used to not matter."
it's hard to trust someone who calls you 'racist' without evidence.
It's also hard to trust people who are willing to destroy your life if you're not on their side.