Rethinking Polls. Whistling Past the Graveyard – The Threat of Low Response Rates in Political Polls

Media File ^ | October 3, 2016 | John Newhagen

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“Rip” Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, solved the problem of getting respondents to take part in a telephone poll in the 1947 film Magic Town. He found the perfectly representative Midwestern city and simply asked a few folks around town how they felt about the day’s burning issues.

Stewart’s character, just back from the war, had his work cut out for him. He wanted to break into the then new science of public opinion polling. But he was broke and his competition, George Stringer, was well established. Then he discovered Grandview, which was perfectly representative of the county as a whole. Of course all that fell apart when citizens found out what he was up to and became self-absorbed with their own importance.

Well, in the intervening 67 years drawing a random sample with an acceptable confidence interval in three days’ time has become not just worse, but nearly intractable. This is even worse when the election is “scary” in the sense that some of the candidates, such as Donald Trump, are not bred in the traditional mainstream of the political system.

Here is what the pollster faces in drawing a good sample. The first part of the task is largely technical.

First, calls to non-human telephone exchanges such as computer modems, fax machines and other IT applications, have to be culled out. While most polls don’t report a number for that process, only one or two calls out of 10 may connect to a real human in a big city like New York City....

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“Bernie Sanders had these huge rallies just like Trump is having huge rallies today but in the end Hillary’s voters did turn out for her.”

I thought it was the super delegate thing that put her over. Wasn’t the scandal that Bernie had more votes but Hillary won anyway?