This is turning into quite an extraordinary thread.
Last night, my wife got a polling call. The first thing they asked "Is there a male that we can talk too?".
My wife asked me. I said no, I'm Freeping!
My father-in-law was watching some football and didn't want to be bothered so my wife spent the next 20 minutes answering dozens of questions.
I had asked my wife to find out the name of the polling company but she didn't find out but she did say it seemed to be a Demonrat type of poll.
My point is that another methodology issue is the lack of males willing to even answer the phone. Men are 60%+ Republican and women are 60%+ Demonrat.
My wife is Palovian when it comes to answering the landline. I use the answering machine to monitor who it is.
IOW, severe underrepresentation of males results in higher Demonrat sampling.
This is turning into quite an extraordinary thread.
Your #29. You are completely right. We got a call from a polling agency last week and I didn't recognize their name. They wanted to speak to the male voter in the house because they already had more women than their quota.
I worked for a survey place in high school (1986-90). I got hired right before they started asking everyone for ID to prove they were 16 and it was great job for a teenager. Paid $2 more than minimum wage and you never got burned by a fry-o-later.
What you say is true -- women tend to answer the phone. So the first day of a particular survey, we'd ask to speak to the "head of the household". Sometimes the woman would pass the phone to the man. Sometimes the woman would say she was the head of the household (because she was single or because she was ornery). And that was fine. But the second day, we'd have already reached our quota on women and were just asking the men.
No one was happy.