Posted on 09/26/2008 3:41:54 AM PDT by Zakeet
With only six weeks left before Election Day, it's open season for polling. Eager pollsters are dialing away, trying to get people on the line who will tell them which candidate they are likely to vote for. But what about the people who don't answer their phones? Or those who say "no thanks"--or worse--and hang up? Is there a certain type of person likely to refuse the probing calls? And does that affect polling numbers?
In a January op-ed in The New York Times, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, warned that the disparity between polls and the outcome in the New Hampshire Democratic primary--Clinton beat Obama despite polls showing him with an advantageous margin--could have been due, in part, to the fact that less affluent whites are more likely to hang up on pollsters. "These whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews," Kohut wrote.
So with the media now reviving questions about how race affects voters' decision-making, should we be worried that polling numbers under-represent racists (or anyone else, for that matter)? Several pollsters I spoke to this week said there isn't a notable disparity between the types of people who answer questions and those who do not. John Zogby, president and CEO of Zogby International, told me that over the past few decades, there has been a "democratization of refusals" and that there is a 95-percent confidence rate in polls' accuracy. ... Charles Franklin, co-founder of Pollster.com, said there isn't a notable partisan divide between people who agree to polls and those who refuse. "If every Republican hung up and every Democrat did an interview, the profession would be in a crisis," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.tnr.com ...
*Scientific Wild-Assed Guess
Interesting comment at the end of the article: Just an anecdotal observation, but the people I know who are partisan (either Dems or Republicans) are much more likely to talk to pollsters than the independents, who aren't that interested in discussing their views. There are so many more independents today than even a few election cycles ago, so I wonder if they are part of the problem in getting good response rates.
If there is not a name or I do not recognize the number on caller ID, I do not answer the phone.
I won’t answer either unless I know the number.
Interesting. Thanks for posting this.
OK, I'll bite. What do "racially conservative" and "racial conservatism" mean?
The comment “should we be worried” leaves me wondering what the worry is about. That they aren’t getting it right, or that the One is gonna get his butt handed to himself. LOL I think it is the latter.
many folks, with caller id, don’t waste their time with polls, a lot of working folks don’t give a rap.. polls are for media junkies...like 3 small minnows in the Mississippi River feeling REAL important about themselves for being bait..
many folks, with caller id, don’t waste their time with polls, a lot of working folks don’t give a rap.. polls are for media junkies...like 3 small minnows in the Mississippi River feeling REAL important about themselves for being bait..
many folks, with caller id, don’t waste their time with polls, a lot of working folks don’t give a rap.. polls are for media junkies...like 3 small minnows in the Mississippi River feeling REAL important about themselves for being bait..
many folks, with caller id, don’t waste their time with polls, a lot of working folks don’t give a rap.. polls are for media junkies...like 3 small minnows in the Mississippi River feeling REAL important about themselves for being bait..
uh, so people who hang up are “racists”?
I keep going back to states like NH during the Dem primary. Obama overpolled BIGTIME, and Hillary won. I think that’s what the pollsters are afraid of.
Need to work on that stutter mate.
;-)
geeeze it posted 3 times...a glitch somewhere,,, oops,phone ringing, gots to go to take a poll .
I have not been polled, but I have often thought I would just tell them that I’d vote for Obama. I am sick of the pollsters influencing the elections. Lets make them a big joke.
these people should be the hanging chads in the poll numbers
... the country will likely vote for “a comfortable old shoe”, that being Republican Sen. John McCain.
Apparently there is a landslide sized shit load of of bitter religious gun clinging racists out there.
What about the people that hung up the phone during the Bush - Kerry election..Did black people hang up?
I actually had a pollster object when I refused to participate, and try to persuade me to respond.
"You'll just publish what you want, anyway. Never call again."
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