Catching up on reading and emails from the past three weeks, I came across a link to an interesting article by Mystery Pollster:
Is Polling As We Know It Doomed?
excerpt:
… To conclude his (Jay Leve, editor and founder of SurveyUSA) talk, Leve summed up the problem. All phone polling, he said, depends on a set of assumptions:
You’re at home; you have a [home] phone; your phone has a hard-coded area code and exchange which means I know where you are; … you’re waiting for your phone to ring; when it rings you’ll answer it; it’s OK for me to interrupt you; you’re happy to talk to me; whatever you’re doing is less important than talking to me; and I won’t take no for an answer — I’m going to keep calling back until you talk to me.
The current reality, he said, is often much different:
In fact, you don’t have a home phone; your number can ring anywhere in the world; you’re not waiting for your phone to ring; nobody calls you on the phone anyway they text you or IM you; when your phone rings you don’t answer it — your time is precious, you have competing interests, you resent calls from strangers, you’re on one or more do-not-call lists, and 20 minutes [the length of many pollsters’ interviews] is an eternity.
All of this brought Leve to a somewhat stunning bottom line: “If you look at where we are here in 2009,” for phone polling, he said, “it’s over… this is the end. Something else has got to come along.”
Also mentioned is the amazing (to me anyway) factoid that OVER 40% of 18 to 24 year olds have no landline telephone service, a near tripling in four years.
(And anecdotally, at the other end of the spectrum, an elderly (80+ years) relative of mine is preparing to port her phone number over to cell phone, cancel the landline and go cell only (to cut costs). So this is not merely a youth trend.)
Of course, they weight the samples as best they can, but at some point the errors introduced have got to become too significant.
So after 2012, what will politians and campaign managers do with increasingly unreliable polling?
And what will us political junkies do? Will every single diary quoting a polling result get a comment to the effect that the numbers are unreliable garbage?
We sure live in interesting times.
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Until they start losing accuracy and there aren’t signs of that yet.
but it could be good for the political process, in the sense that the only polling that will really count will be the actual polling (I was going to say on Election Day, but that doesn’t count early voting or absentee ballots).
and I know lots of other people my age who also don’t. However, I think we’ll need to start seeing systemic polling failures before we can be sure that this is true. The 2008 poll was generally very good, as was most of the (non-Zogby) 2004 polling.