Just as I have suspected! WashPost: Polls increasingly useless

[iconoclastic cat]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44697-2004Jun15.html
Voters Are Harder to Reach As Media Outlets Multiply
(snip)
Campaign pollsters trying to read public opinion face their own set of headaches. Cooperation with phone-based polls has been falling for years, driven by a number of factors: call-blocking technologies such as caller ID, concerns about telemarketing, the rising number of unlisted numbers and increased use of cell phones (federal rules prevent pollsters from calling anyone who has to pay for the call).

It is not unusual for pollsters to make seven or eight calls to reach just one willing survey participant, compared with response rates that were twice as high a decade ago, says Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers University political science professor who is president-elect of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. The problem figures to grow even more confounding as people take advantage of new federal rules that permit them to keep their home phone numbers if they switch to wireless service, he says.

Given that people who do not answer their phone or cannot be reached may hold very different opinions than those who do, pollsters worry that they are reaching increasingly less representative samples of the public, potentially skewing a poll's results, Zukin says.
(snip)
*****

Ha! I was wondering who would be the first to say it! I love Zogby, but even his Web polls don't show a real picture these days.

A bit of sunshine: I think this election will reaffirm the sanity of this country.

[redqueen]

1. What I don't get is

why it takes a 'major media outlet' saying something for most Americans to give it a second thought. It's frickin common sense that with Caller ID, more cell phones, etc., that the sampling would be unrepresentative.

But it's plainly obvious that most Americans ignore their own common sense and instead choose to believe whatever the media tells them. Let's hope more people read the BBV articles written by people that CARE about the issue, and not the 'nothing to see here' crap written by hacks like Seelye.

[mstrsplinter326]

2. TV Nation has some of the greatest polls ever conducted

Michael Moore's 2year TV show on Fox and NBC has polls like "31% of Perot voters believe if dolphins were really that smart they would find their way out of those nets"

Great stuff - check it out.

[iconoclastic cat]

3. I know, those crack me up.

That one was hilarious.

[jobycom]

4. This is another of those stories they run every two years

Here's what worries me. The Republicans have been on a rampage for the last two decades to convince everyone that polls are liberally biased, and worthless, just like the media. So now, if all the polls show Kerry leading by ten points in November, but Bush somehow wins, stories like these will help convince the public that the polls were wrong, not that someone rigged the election.

This WP article is a basic filler piece that the media runs every two years. It's part of that self-indulgent soul-searching routine they do for each election. "Were we fair? Did we have too much influence? Did the fact that we lied to campaign for the Republican and to smear the Democrat affect the outcome of the elections? Oh, we're sorry."

Pollsters, like everyone else, complain about the changing complexity of their jobs, and some second rate hack picks it up, turns it around, and claims that nothing is reliable anymore.

Polling techniques are constantly changing. They used to poll door to door, now they use phones. They'll figure out something. The important part is to make sure that you have a representative sample. The more common cell phones become, the less the exclusion of cell phones will affect polls, because they will be spread more equally over the entire sample of society, rather than over one or two demographics. Meanwhile, the polls may be a bit off, but taken overall, the polls still show rather well the basic trend of the nation.

It's just something pollsters have to adjust to.

I still remember HW Bush whining about "nutty pollsters" when he was losing. The losers always whine. Lately, that's been us.