Regarding the "scientific polls"

[Uncle Joe]

OVER the past two years, election polling has had some spectacular disasters. Several organizations tracking the 2014 midterm elections did not catch the Republican wave that led to strong majorities in both houses; polls in Israel badly underestimated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strength, and pollsters in Britain predicted a close election only to see the Conservatives win easily. What’s going on here? How much can we trust the polls as we head toward the 2016 elections?

Election polling is in near crisis, and we pollsters know. Two trends are driving the increasing unreliability of election and other polling in the United States: the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys. Coupled, they have made high-quality research much more expensive to do, so there is less of it. This has opened the door for less scientifically based, less well-tested techniques. To top it off, a perennial election polling problem, how to identify “likely voters,” has become even thornier.

In terms of speed, the growth of cellphones is like few innovations in our history. About 10 years ago, opinion researchers began taking seriously the threat that the advent of cellphones posed to our established practice of polling people by calling landline phone numbers generated at random. At that time, the National Health Interview Survey, a high-quality government survey conducted through in-home interviews, estimated that about 6 percent of the public used only cellphones. The N.H.I.S. estimate for the first half of 2014 found that this had grown to 43 percent, with another 17 percent “mostly” using cellphones. In other words, a landline-only sample conducted for the 2014 elections would miss about three-fifths of the American public, almost three times as many as it would have missed in 2008.

Since cellphones generally have separate exchanges from landlines, statisticians have solved the problem of finding them for our samples by using what we call “dual sampling frames” — separate random samples of cell and landline exchanges. The problem is that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers, in which calls are passed to live interviewers only after a person picks up the phone. To complete a 1,000-person survey, it’s not unusual to have to dial more than 20,000 random numbers, most of which do not go to actual working telephone numbers. Dialing manually for cellphones takes a great deal of paid interviewer time, and pollsters also compensate cellphone respondents with as much as $10 for their lost minutes.

(snip)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/whats-the-matter-with-polling.html?_r=0

Don't put too much credence in the polls one way or the other as they have become less reliable by a long shot, it's all about the turn out.

[BlueMTexpat]

1. There's an excellent article on FiveThirtyEight

about the 2016 Election polls. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/harrys-guide-to-2016-election-polls/

[Uncle Joe]

3. That is a good article but it doesn't address the two major problems in the OP

The rapid growth of cell phones and the shrinking response rate.

There also seems to be a difference of opinion as to who the best pollster in a dysfunctional industry is.

[BlueMTexpat]

6. Here's another FiveThirtyEight article that

addresses dilemmas of the pollsters themselves. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-pollsters-say-their-reputations-have-worsened/

In any event, most of us realize that while polls may help to make us feel better (or not) about the perception of our preferred candidate's performance, the only poll that counts is what happens on caucus or primary day. Thank heavens we do not have much longer to wait.

[Uncle Joe]

7. That's an fascinating article as well, apparently pollsters also think the media has issues.

That was one of a few dozen questions we posed to 76 of the most prolific and prominent political pollsters.1 And we found that the people who are measuring and shaping public perception of the election — as well as Donald Trump’s Twitter account — are feeling much more positive about the work they do than they think everyone else does. (You can find the questionnaire in this PDF, all the responses on GitHub, and a list of the pollsters who responded in the footnotes.2)

Using a classic tactic in politics, many pollsters blamed the media. There were three strands to their criticism. The first is that the media make too much of bad moments for the industry, when its polls miss election results badly. (We’ve covered those moments in last year’s midterms, as well as in Israel, the U.K., Greece and Kentucky.) The second is that media organizations that aggregate polls combine the bad with the good, tarnishing all for the sins of a few. (Four pollsters said aggregators are doing badly or very badly at filtering out polls from bad polling organizations, four said they were doing OK and four said they were doing well.) And the third is that uncritical media reports of outlandish claims — such as Ben Carson’s that Egypt’s pyramids were used to store grain — leads many Americans to believe outlandish things, which pollsters are blamed for quantifying.

The pollsters acknowledge that the media shapes public perception and fivethirtyeight sluffs if off as politics.

[NurseJackie]

4. Great article!

The call for people to "ignore" or "be suspicious about" scientific polls suggests to me a certain level of uncertainty. This, in conjunction with bumper-sticker counting, indicate nervousness among Bernie's followers.

Polls, especially the historically accurate ones can be disheartening for the candidate who's struggling. The outliers make things fun and exciting, but when trend-lines are taken as a whole, and the outliers are smoothed-out, it's easy to see where things are headed.

I get it though. Even when it's obvious that a candidate is having trouble, and has stagnated... the most active supporters do not want that candidate's average-Joe supporters to simply "give up". But it's interesting for me to see that Bernie's most active supporters are beginning to show interpretable signs that their candidate isn't looking very likely to be the nominee.

[Uncle Joe]

5. No one has mentioned Bernie until your post and I never said ignore.

"I said don't put too much credence in the polls one way or the other" and recent history supports the author's take on polls.

I'm curious did you read the entire article?

[Ferd Berfel]

2. K & R

[WillyT]

8. HUGE K & R !!! - THANK YOU !!!

[Uncle Joe]

11. A fivethirtyeight link upthread said "live polling" was best we had a couple of those during

the first debate as to who they thought won.

I haven't seen the corporate media use focus groups at any of the debates since then, perhaps they didn't like the answer?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. There are no facts, only interpretations. Friedrich Nietzsche

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Mark Twain

[Scuba]

12. Many (most?) polls are designed to influence opinion, not measure it.