Posted on 09/20/2015 8:03:17 PM PDT by VinL
(snip).... "Election polling is in near crisis," broods Cliff Zukin, a past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven't figured out how to replace it." The reason? In a word, cellphones.
For decades, professional opinion polling has relied on the ability to call landline phone numbers generated at random and be fairly confident of reaching an adult at the other end. But the explosive growth in cellphone use over the past two decades has fatally undermined that confidence. Today, according to federal data, more than 45 percent of American homes only use cellphones; another 15 percent, though owning landlines, get almost all their calls on cellphones. Thus any pollster who relies on landline phones to survey public opinion bypasses close to 60 percent of US households right off the bat.
Alas, polling firms can't simply adjust to changing habits. Federal law prohibits the use of automatic dialers to reach cellphones, so pollsters must pay for cell numbers to be manually called — a much more costly proposition. Plus, Americans nowadays are rarely willing to take a pollster's call. Over the course of his career, Zukin writes, telephone response rates have plunged from 80 percent to 8 percent.
Those aren't the only hurdles tripping up pollsters. Far more Americans now cast absentee ballots, undermining exit polls that rely on interviewing voters at local precincts. Online polling is alluring, but many elderly voters are still not reachable via the Internet. And an old problem persists: what Britons call the "shy Tory" effect, or the wariness of conservative voters to tell pollsters how they intend to vote.
For better or for worse, polling's heyday is over...
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
The last Bloomberg Iowa poll, had 40% of respondents had never attended an Iowa Causus.
I'm sure Trump is most popular, whether or not the poll findings transmute into primary results, -- I don't think so.
This reminds me of what had been called the “Bradley effect”, when black candidate Tom Bradley was running for governor of California. Polls showed him winning, but on election day, he lost the election. Pundits at the time attributed this to people being afraid to tell pollsters that they weren’t voting for Bradley, afraid of being perceived as racist.
The same effect has been noted in recent years, when states were still permitted to vote on defining marriage. There too, the results on election day to affirm traditional marriage were far in excess of the percentages of the vote predicted by pollsters. Here too, the punditry said that people were intimidated to say they were voting for traditional marriage, when the politically correct view was that we should allow homosexual marriage.
The real question that would need to be asked is “does the 40% who use landlines still compriae a reasonable cross section of society. If it does then that’s probably enough people from which to get a sample. If not....they better find some new method. Or they can resort to just making up the numbers out of whole cloth the way the government does with number of immigrants, unemployment etc....
Knowing how thuggy our government is toward conservatives (sticking the IRS on us etc) is it any wonder we don't want to give our political feelings to strangers?
The anecdotal evidence is that people with landlines tend to skew older, whiter, more conservative, and more rural. That’s what I have heard. Disproportionate numbers of millenial “yuppies” only have a cellular phone.
Take the polls with a grain of salt... they’re as reliable as an Ouija board forecast.
Land lines are better under times of stress.
Only one poll counts...
The percentage of people that have landlines is not the problem as the pollsters can weigh certain demographics more heavily. The problem with that is that when the pollster finally does reach the 28 year old single white male with a landline making 75k a year, his answers may be outliers for his cohort. His answers end up having too much weight.
I doubt that any poll counts - including the final tally of the elections.
Consider the increasing number of precincts that report more votes than they have voters. Consider that the majority of votes in many states are by absentee ballots. Consider that "software glitches" in electronic voting machines always favor one party.
"Votes mean nothing. Who counts the votes means everything"
I still use a landline and also have a cellphone. Another disadvantage is caller ID. Personally, I don’t answer a call if I don’t recognize the number and that mostly includes toll-free numbers. So, yeah, getting an accuracy in polls in today’s technological world is difficult. Years ago, I used to do polling for several candidates, and we would ask the person on the other end the same question in different ways. We would ask the person if they were likely to vote or not, give them the choice between candidates - then read them something negative about the candidate they wanted defeated and then ask them after knowing that - would they still vote for so-and-so. I don’t know how these polls are conducted, but that was my experience.
Well, I don’t have a landline. Got rid of it as I got sick of the incessant robocalls and pollsters.
Bigger issue than cell phones per se is the caller ID. If I don’t recognize the number or if its out of state, it gets declined. They can leave a message and I’ll never call them back.
While that’s possible (I’d say probable even), it shouldn’t cause too much of a skew as long as the sample is large enough. Not every 28 single white male making 75k+ that uses a landline will be an outlier
I don't believe the polls. They're just another tool the GOPe uses to attack Cruz.
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