"If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.... Call screening is definitely part of the problem, but if you screen your calls almost 100 percent of the time, it might be a little less of one than you might think. About one-fifth of our dials still contact a human. But once we do reach a person, we’ve got a number of challenges. Is this the right human? (We talk only to people named on the file, so that we can use their information.) If it is the right person, will he or she participate? Probably not, unfortunately.... The main thing is we make sure that the sample of people we do reach is demographically and politically representative, and if not, we adjust it to match the known characteristics of the population. If we poll a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points, and our respondents wind up being registered Democrats by a four-point margin, we give a little less weight to the Democratic respondents. We make similar adjustments for race; age; education; how often people have voted; where they live; marital status; homeownership; and more."
Writes Nate Cohn in "Who in the World Is Still Answering Pollsters’ Phone Calls? Response rates suggest the 'death of telephone polling' is getting closer" (NYT).
How do they know "Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points" other than by relying on already unreliable polls?
The article doesn't really answer the question in the headline, which I read as saying what kind of weirdos are answering these polls and why do we care what they think?
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60 comments:
I answer polling calls. I suppose I get one about every four months.
The ghost of Alexander Solzhenitsyn smiles.
He explained that, but it was handwavium. They go by number of registered Democrats vs registered Republicans, with no thought if that number is accurate, or if it represents likely or certain voters. Polls are a real mess right now, and I expect them to stay that way.
I assume he's using party registration data, but he's speaking as if this is sufficient information to extrapolate something reliable. I'm registered as an Independent, yet I almost exclusively vote GOP. Would he know that?
That's a very big head telling Dorothy to bring back the witch's broom.
Political Polling and Climate Modeling....
Two areas of statistical science I have not seen have their much needed Come to Jesus moment where they recognize and rectify why they've been consistently off in one direction that has not been materializing.
The "response rate" decline to traditional political polling is an enormous issue. If you are a far lower response rate, then your historical models are broken because the people who ARE responding are doing so for a reason. You've got a compounded sampling bias issue. Whatcha doin bout that?
Finally some transparency about the fucked up numbers. BUT this still doesn't explain their penchant for slipping "all voter" responses into their analysis of "likely voters" and oversampling democrats. If registered Democrats are the only ones they can reach then just say "this is a poll about democrat opinion."
This is a tiny step toward rectifying the rampant dishonesty of current polling firms. I can't help but feel this is a little inoculation so that when current predictions are off by MORE than the 8% to 10% they were off last two times at least Nate can say he gave us a clue. He sees a giant red wave and is afraid to say so is what I hear.
Gee thanks Ann. I answer them and why not? I'm retired, all the time in the world.
The poor saps who do this work really appreciate it, and I get to see what the parties or candidates or PACs are up to.
The only personal things they ask is demographic info.
Sometimes I tell the truth, sometimes I answer all over the spectrum. It's fun!
People are so stuck up now.
How do they know "Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points" other than by relying on already unreliable polls?
The article says "registered" Democrats vs Republicans - but that only helps in states where voters still register by party. Here in Washington state, we have never registered by party which make polling very difficult.
We never answer any poll - chances are the answers are going into a political consultant's list, never to be destroyed and always at risk of being used against us (see political contribution lists) at some time by nefarious people. Government, progressives, teachers - it doesn't matter because there are nefarious people in every organization.
Polls predict election outcomes predict polls predict election outcomes predict polls.
There is no ground truth so data oligarchs with vested interests (Bloomberg, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.) are free to run wild.
CNN, MSNBC, NYT, and WP said it was true so it must be true. Oh, Bezos owns WP? Oh, Gates owns MSNBC?
Welcome to dystopia.
How do they know "Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points" other than by relying on already unreliable polls?
You started your quote one word too late. They are going by voter registration.
Of course this misses when people mentally switch parties but haven't yet changed their registration. It also depends on states properly maintaining their voter rolls.
I assume he means one party has more registrations than the other. The sample of respondents is supposed to be representative of actual voters. That's the only reason to care about the responses.
Who answers the phone from strangers anymore?
Try paying people for their time, you idiots. You want them to provide a service without compensation. Of course no one wants to.
The vast majority of legacy pollsters, on both sides, do not reflect the electorate. They serve their paymasters and deliver, publicly, only "results" that advance the narrative or needs of the paymaster.
The New Soviet Democraticals have legions of these types of "pollsters" within the democratical ranks but also across the entirety of our corrupted academic, media and "news" organizations. There are no "conservative" media polling outfits as even Fox news polling team has been run by a democratical for years and only employed suckup nevertrumpers like Chris Stirewalt who can't find any work now that he has been exposed as a complete pro-dem hack like Chris Wallace.
On the republican side, its the same basic story. There's just alot fewer players in the game but they are used the same way in general due to the corruption of the DC establishment republicans.
If McConnell wants to pull funding from more Trumpy candidates or candidates that refuse to use the "recommended" establishment polling and political consulting firms (yes, that's the grift "price" unfunded primary winners have to pay to get the national funding which is why self-funders have an advantage in messaging), McConnell's hacks will call in an established firm like a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates or similar and that firm will generate a "poll" that shows the republican candidate who refuses to play ball way behind.
Voila! Funding pulled to put in "more competitive" races where McConnells has secured commitments to support him personally and for establishment firms to be used (which is disastrous in terms of communciations: see Scott Walker, 2016 republican primary).
This was happening all across the 2022 US Senate race landscape which is what led to Rick Scott, who is the head of the NRSC and has blown 10's of millions on establishment firm grifters, having a public spat with McConnell over all the wasted opportunities that were going to make Scott look really bad when R's lost lots of close Senate races. The 2022 Senatorial landscape is looking much better for republicans now simply because of the national pro-republican environment that exists. Perhaps an R+1 to R+4 national voting trend for 2022? We'll soon see.
McConnell was stiffing Oz in PA, Masters in AZ, Walker in GA, Laxalt in NV, Tshibaka in AK, Budd in NC, even to some extent sitting Senators like Johnson in WI. All because they were Trump endorsed. McConnell used his BS "polling" firms to justify his decisions to cut off so many of these candidates from extra funding all the while McConnell was kicking cash to Murkowski AND spending to trash the actual nominated republican Sen candidate Tshibaka!
This reached a head some weeks back and McConnell finally had to relent and begin supporting these candidates who showed quite surprising strength across the board and now are either ahead or even in all these places. This is why a bunch of establishment types FINALLY showed up in a few of these states to publicly support the Rep candidates, such as Masters in AZ.
Just think what the situation might have been like if McConnell hadn't happily decided being in the permanent minority was a great thing.
McConnell's national favorability rating is about 7% now as the republican base will not allow itself to be fooled again by these loser morons who only want to help manage the decline of the US while becoming personally wealthy so he had to adjust what he was doing and, reluctantly, has released additional funds as well as provided the thumbs up to major donors to fund these candidates, which has helped accelerated the republican polling surge.
Why would any Republican talk to a pollster?
"How do they know "Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points" other than by relying on already unreliable polls?"
I assume because he says "registered" they know because those are hard numbers?
People should keep in mind that there's not just one kind of poll.
There are many kinds of polls.
Some polls attempt to gauge public opinion.
Some polls attempt to move public opinion in one direction or another.
Some polls are purely political and the outcome is decided before the poll is even taken. Politicians know that people have an innate desire to "be on the winning team" so they'll hire pollsters to show that they're winning even when they know they aren't.
There's no laws against fake polling. Some polls have been 100% faked ... in that they never actually called anybody. They knew the outcome they needed, so they just faked the data. How do you even know that anybody is being called? Have you ever been called? No, you haven't.
When's the last time you "fact-checked" a poll to ensure that people were really called, and that the pollster wasn't just faking their data? The answer is you've NEVER done that. Nobody has. You just believe what you read. They know that. So why would they bother with the expense of calling people who aren't answering their phones anyway?
Any time anybody says the word "polls show" to you they're manipulating you.
Opinion polls. Gotta keep making dog food to keep the dog food supply going. The “news” media CFO demands it. Serve up more dog food. An opinion poll is the best kind of dog food “news” to make and serve up, no one can ever know if it’s completely and absolutely wrong.
I couldnt read the article, but from my experience (and I do answer my phone, mostly) it is now impossible to sort the chaff from the grain. Too many robocalls, which I hang up on as soon as I find out, and too many push polls, which also tend to be robocalls
I would like pollsters to get accurate data from a lot of real people and report them accurately, but I wont put up with the phone shenanigans. Self-selection destroys randomness, snail mail wiil get shitcanned, door to door would be impossible. This is my suggestion:
I'd like to see online ranked choice voting on a regular basis for issues of the day. Your voter ID would serve as a gatekeeper as long as it was only used for that purpose. It could be done on a monthly basis, maybe with a raffle. A consortium of polling firms would finance it.
Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points
That one's actually fairly easy to factually determine --- voter registration by party on the state's voter rolls.
For example, in my home state of MD, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 last time I looked.
Speaking of boomers*, I see Nate's still sporting that early Lennon look.
*John wasn't a boomer either.
why do we care what they think?
Those of us who are rational and sane don't.
Why not just park polling folk in front of malls, libraries, churches, sports venues, 7/11s, etc. and just ask one question: Who you voting for? I think you get ahold feel for what’s out there.
Not to mention that in this day and age, nothing is really private, and there are consequences for giving the wrong answer. I don't need the FBI at my door, thank you.
How do they know "Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points" other than by relying on already unreliable polls?
Well, the quote implies they are using voter registration data but I see no reason to assume that it is entirely reliable, either. The flipside of the example being that if they think they are undersampling Democrats based on the data then they are going to overweight them.
The more fundamental problem is that no amount of mathematical wizardry can compensate for people who don't answer the poll being fundamentally different from the people who do. It doesn't matter how you weight the GOP respondents if the only ones who will answer your questions are ones who are most likely to vote for a Democrat.
How do they know "Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points" other than by relying on already unreliable polls?
In states that make voters register with a party affiliation, they can get the honest-to-god data from the elections commission. (In Wisconsin, you don't have that.)
Derrida goes into the difference between public opinion and votes. Roughly that you don't consent to your expressed opinion but you do to your vote. One involves a decision and one does not.
We need to start a movement to fubar political polling.
Simply get people to participate but give wrong answers. Like Brandon? Claim to be a MAGAista. And so on.
Make polls so unreliable as to be useless.
Politicians use polls to lie to us. They find out what we want then promise it with no intention of delivering. They lie to us and we have no obligation to be truth with them
John stop fascism vote republican Henry
It's hard to believe the Dems will be rewarded for recent events by being allowed to hold the Senate. If this happens, I guess the polls have some accuracy. But if there is a big Republican tide that is something of a secret to pollsters, money and attention is being wasted on polls.
I planned and organized a phone poll for a telecom company once. We were talking to IT professionals from various large companies, whose job was to talk to people like us. We got around 15% response rate, and everyone thought that was great.
Polls don't work that well. You do it because you must have some data, but you cannot trust the numbers.
Some years back, Wretchard of the Belmont Club spoke of "weighted money". That was money donated to republican campaigns by people who knew there was a non-zero chance of being penalized in one way or another for doing so. IOW, the motivation behind the money was greater than that behind dem donations. Hence, "weighted".
"I answer them and why not? I'm retired, all the time in the world."
Because it puts you on a list and they never leave you alone after that. Main reason I never contribute $ to candidates.
We finally gave up our land line. I was tired of receiving, and paying for, unsolicited calls.
I very rarely answer polling calls. Not only do I get them by phone, but almost anything I do results in an email asking for a few minutes of my time (health care provider, amazon deliveries -- which I always respond to for the driver's sake, car repairs).
Besides, the few polling calls that I did respond to were almost always push polls. Since Pennsylvania's government has been ineffectual in stopping telemarketers, we get 4-6 calls a day from them, too.
Screw them all.
"For example, in my home state of MD, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 last time I looked."
Do the democrats actually win at the polls by those numbers? If not, it calls into question the pollster's methods.
I choose my pollsters almost as carefully as I choose my news sources. Because most of them are completely full of sh*t, and their real job is to subliminally push their subjects into voting Democrat.
Richard Baris (@PeoplesPundit)and less than a handful of others have some integrity to their process, and demonstrate it.
My 90 year old, Bleeding Heart Liberal mother, answers EVERY Poll call.
She feels "it's her duty, so that they get accurate results"
So, she does 3 or 4 polls.. a week
Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points
YoungHegelian: "That one's actually fairly easy to factually determine --- voter registration by party on the state's voter rolls.
For example, in my home state of MD, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 last time I looked."
It's also important to add in, for the democraticals, the number of people who are buried in the state. Those "voters" tend to vote heavily for the democraticals.
Carol said...
The only personal things they ask is demographic info.
Umm, Carol? They Already know:
Your Name
Your Phone Number (Thus; your billing address)
They Already KNOW All your personal data.
If I answer the phone and take the poll, I lie to fuck them over.
I think pollsters are just beating a dead horse in continuing to try to measure public opinion this way. In the very old days, politicos and newspapermen would try to get an idea of who was winning or losing by talking to taxicab drivers and the like. I'd favor a return to this kind of a model. If I were going into the public opinion business, I'd hire some Vegas line-setters -- people accustomed to coldly analyzing teams and matchups impartially -- and have them handicap political races based on a number of different kinds of data, including published polls, predictions markets, economic factors that have been shown to have predictive value, lawn signs, changes in party registration, etc., and by developing a network of people from various walks of life who can give their sense of how the candidates are faring among different groups. IOW, approach it the way a good intelligence agency would do it.
I might take a polling call except almost every call from someone not in my contacts is a telemarketer or a scam, so if I get a call from someone not in my contacts, I don't answer it unless I have some reason to expect such a call.
So they might do better if the government did a better job of rooting out people who use my phone as their sales tool or are just thieves.
We are lucky that here in Wisconsin we do not register as one party or another. I think that process should be banned outright. The only time you have to it’s for people in one party is during primaries and I think that’s stupid, too! On every election you should just be able to vote for whoever you want regardless of party. I may like a certain congressional critter if one party and a governor of a different party. In Wisconsin you can’t do that during primaries. Ridiculous.
You shouldn’t have to declare a party at any time. Just register and vote.
In Wisconsin you can’t do that during primaries.
Open primaries in my state have produced a single party government and federal representation.
In polling today, the assumptions are often the deciding factor, not actual variation in the polling answers. That's why they are so easy to manipulate by the pollster, when that is desired.
Now, if you average a LOT of polls, like Real Clear Politics does, then you can start to get a decent feel for what's going on.
This is true for lots of so-called "scientific" studies as well, these days. They're more reliant on assumptions built into the model than on actual variation in underlying realities.
Also, I agree with the earlier comments. If you have political aspirations, you're a fool to answer almost any survey questions at all. The only safe assumption is that your answers, personally tied to your ID, are being stored in a vast collection of databases, to be unearthed if it's ever needed to keep you in line.
Aggie: "I choose my pollsters almost as carefully as I choose my news sources. Because most of them are completely full of sh*t, and their real job is to subliminally push their subjects into voting Democrat.
Richard Baris (@PeoplesPundit)and less than a handful of others have some integrity to their process, and demonstrate it."
Rich Baris (Big Data) and Robert Cahaly (Trafalgar) who have only recently (last several years) gotten the credit they have deserved for a long time.
The only pollster I trust is Trafalgar. Because they have actually been getting things right.
One of the things they do is ask people "who do you think your neighbors will vote for / support?" This is in an attempt to get around people being not wiling to tell the truth how they will be voting.
But beyond that, unless people are required to register their Party, or unless they have data saying what Party's primary the people voted in (and many States don't have that information to give), they have no idea whether or not people are lying about their Party.
See "Life Long Republican Chuck"
But the bottom line is that most of the "posters" don't want to get the correct result, they want to get the result that will push their partisan narrative.
And the problem isn't D+2 vs D+4, it's a D+2 State where the respondents are D+20
M Jordan said...
Why not just park polling folk in front of malls, libraries, churches, sports venues, 7/11s, etc. and just ask one question: Who you voting for? I think you get ahold feel for what’s out there.
They used to do that. It was called "Exit Polls"
And their results were heavily weighted to the Democrats
Lloyd W. Robertson said...
It's hard to believe the Dems will be rewarded for recent events by being allowed to hold the Senate. If this happens, I guess the polls have some accuracy. But if there is a big Republican tide that is something of a secret to pollsters, money and attention is being wasted on polls.
If the purpose of the polls was to accurately report on voter sentiment, then the money would indeed be wasted.
But since the actual intent is to push the narrative that "the Democrats are doing great, you should vote for them too!", the money will only be known to be wasted when we get the election results, and see their candidates defeated.
I saw a recent poll released that was of "adults".
Not registered voters, not "likely voters", Adults.
It had pretty good results for the Democrats
because that's what the polsters (CNN, IIRC) wanted
paminwi said...
We are lucky that here in Wisconsin we do not register as one party or another. I think that process should be banned outright. The only time you have to it’s for people in one party is during primaries and I think that’s stupid, too! On every election you should just be able to vote for whoever you want regardless of party.
Bzzt, wrong
There is a Republican candidate. That person represents the Republican Party.
If you are not part of the Republican Party, then you should have NO say in who that candidate is.
People should be required to register by Party, and no one should be allowed to register, or change their Party registration, within 6 weeks of any election.
If you didn't care enough to do it by then, then you don't actually care about the election. And that means your'e highly unlikely to have put any effort to become an informed voter.
In which case, society wins by you not voting
Kate,
I'm registered as an Independent, yet I almost exclusively vote GOP.
Yup, me too. I registered as a (D) when I was first eligible to vote, and switched to (I) some years thereafter, when it became clear to me that I was rather unlikely to vote (D) in most cases. I've been that way for over three decades now. But I have never registered (R).
I have a feeling that there are rather a lot of us, some in unexpected places. As a student at UC/Berkeley, undergraduate and graduate, I learned quickly that not talking politics at all was the easiest means of being left alone.
"If you are not part of the Republican Party, then you should have NO say in who that candidate is."
Then the republican party can fucking well pay for it.
Original Mike said...
"If you are not part of the Republican Party, then you should have NO say in who that candidate is."
Then the republican party can fucking well pay for it.
Really? And the Libertarian Party can pay for theirs? And the Democrats pay for theirs?
Are you stupid, or just thoughtless? because now you've created yet another barrier to entry for smaller political parties.
A partisan Primary system is open to any Party that wants to play. If you dont' want to be part of a Party, that's your choice. But as most people generally do, it's their choice to set up that system and have the gov't pay for it.
Just like any and every other democratic decision
People don't like to answer unsolicited phone calls because they think the callers are scammers.
When it comes to politics, they know the callers are scammers.
The only real problem with registering as an Independent arises depending on your State of residence. If you can't vote in the primaries, then you are in effect locked out of the system. The primaries are where the course of our government is decided - when candidates are selected. The elections are won - or often lost - in the shenanigans that take place during primary season. That's really where one has to get involved if you want to participate.
"Really? And the Libertarian Party can pay for theirs? And the Democrats pay for theirs?
We can pay for the libertarians and all the small fry, for all the good it will do. The democrats and republicans think they own our votes. It's a shame, but in point of fact they're correct. The least they can do is pay for their own damn crooked elections.
"A partisan Primary system is open to any Party that wants to play. If you dont' want to be part of a Party, that's your choice. But as most people generally do, it's their choice to set up that system and have the gov't pay for it."
Fine. In Wisconsin it was our choice to set up the system as an open primary. Don't like that? Suck on it.
"Are you stupid, or just thoughtless? "
Depends on the day.
Why have political polls? The candidates of course want them as a way to hone their pitch, but why does anyone else care?
Aggie,
Yes, I know that. As an Independent I am locked out of primaries. Not that it makes much difference in a Blue state.
Original Mike said...
Me: "Really? And the Libertarian Party can pay for theirs? And the Democrats pay for theirs?
We can pay for the libertarians and all the small fry, for all the good it will do. The democrats and republicans think they own our votes. It's a shame, but in point of fact they're correct. The least they can do is pay for their own damn crooked elections.
Really? What's "crocked" about an honest election?
The Republicans are picking the Republican candidate. Now, please explain what right you, a self-professed non-Republican, should have the right and power to decide who represents the Republicans?
You have to right and power to vote in the general election, where the people of a political unit pick who represents them.
The only think keeping you out of the republican or Democrat Parties is your own choice.
You have the right to make that choice. But you need to stop whining about paying the cost of you choice, which is you don't get to have input into the decisions made by the group you won't join.
And there is essentially NO cost difference between holding a Primary for the Libertarians, and holding it for everyone. Thepolls have to be open for the same number of hours no matter how many voters come in.
So if your'e going to pay for one, there's no sane justification for not paying for all
"The Republicans are picking the Republican candidate. Now, please explain what right you, a self-professed non-Republican"
Where'd you get that from?
, should have the right and power to decide who represents the Republicans?"
Where do I get that right? The laws of Wisconsin give me that right. Let me quote you:
"it's [the people's] choice to set up that system and have the gov't pay for it.
Just like any and every other democratic decision."
The people of Wisconsin have set up an open primary system. Sorry you don't like it.
Original Mike said...
"The Republicans are picking the Republican candidate. Now, please explain what right you, a self-professed non-Republican"
Where'd you get that from?
From you whining about the idea of only Republicans getting to decide who the Republican candidates are
The people of Wisconsin have set up an open primary system. Sorry you don't like it
And they're wrong to do so
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