35000 calls were made to get 1122 participants? That seems like a lot of calls for such a low participation rate.
Not really hard to believe... a huge chunk of the calls will be voicemail/answering machines. And then once they get a hold of a live human, it may be a kid or someone who doesn’t speak English. After that, there’s only about a 10% or less participation rate.
Most people hear “Hi, I am Fred from Gallup...”
The pollster then hears: < Click, Dial Tone >
That's about a three (3) percent response rate! Even the 47% slackers can't be bothered to respond to polls!
Dirty little secret of all pollsters. Sensible people can’t be bothered to be interrogated by strangers on the phone.
And that is why the polls are now rubbish: with response rates that low, the conclusions are unstable and liable to be biased (though you can't tell how) due to some systematic cause for non-response. You can't publish a paper based on a survey in any reputable journal in the social or behavioral sciences with a response rate of under 30%.
Of course, it may be that 35K represents the number of digit strings dialed, and that a lot of them were not phone numbers assigned to any users, in which case we don't really know anything about the response rate other than that it was greater than the 3.2% it would have been had all the numbers dialed been valid phone numbers.
That’s a 3% participation rate. Most pollsters are currently running at about 9% for a live poll, so an automated poll at 3% doesn’t seem too terribly out of wack.