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Trouble in Poll-Land

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We talk a considerable amount about polls on this blog, enough to devote a category to them.

But polling is getting harder, and the pollsters have done some belly flops in recent years, including the Kentucky Governor election and Brexit.  Ryan Knutson has this article in the WSJ on the challenges and responses.

The problem of the growing number of people who have only cellphones, no landline, and the legal prohibition on robocalling cell phones is well known.  Here is another problem I did not know about.

In 1997, 36% of households sampled agreed to participate in a poll, according to the Pew Research Center. Now it is 9%. This means thousands more calls must be made for a telephone survey to reach a sufficient sample.
Wow.  It's not just more calls.  How do we know the 9% who will talk to pollsters are representative of the 91% who will not?  Pollsters can match on demographics, but demographics are not everything.  Is it possible that willingness to take the poll correlates to views on the questions being asked, even after demographic adjustments are made?  That seems to me to be entirely plausible.

A variety of new polling methods are being used, but until they have a track record we won't know how valid they are.

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"But polling is getting harder"

-- Just ask Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta
how to have media lackies configure a proper poll [so that
democrats score higher than reality].

“I also want to get your Atlas folks to recommend oversamples
for our polling before we start in February.”

“so we can maximize what we get out of our media polling.”

[For Arizona] “Research, microtargeting & polling projects – Over-sample Hispanics… – Over-sample the Native American population”

[For Florida] “... oversamples, make sure that Tampa and Orlando are included first.

[For National] “General election benchmark, 800 sample, with potential over samples in key districts/regions – Benchmark polling in targeted races, with ethnic over samples as needed – Targeting tracking polls in key races, with ethnic over samples as needed”

~ wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/26551, wikileaks.org/podesta-emails//fileid/26551/7326, wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15442; themillenniumreport.com/2016/10/the-top-100-most-damaging-wikileaks/

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