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Have you ever participated in one of these polls? I haven't. None of my friends have. Who are they polling?
Lots of people. I have. The linked AP article says they polled 1165 people, which seems small compared to the 332 million, but the math checks out for a 95% confidence level and a 3% margin of error.
The thing is that they can be 95% sure they are within 3% of what they’d get if they polled everyone. But that’s it. The way people answer polls doesn’t always translate to the way they vote or do anything else.
How did they do it? Phone? Email?
If you're interested in their methodology, they're named at the bottom of the linked AP article, and they have a page that answers that exact question.
"The poll of 1,165 adults was conducted Aug. 10-14 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points."
So it doesn't say how. I have this idea that they call people. I also have this idea that no one in certain age groups and demographics answers their phone, so are underrepresented.
And if you Google their name, they have a page that gives a summary of how they conduct their polls.
I'm not American, but my wife used to be in these pills here. I think it started with like music polls, have you hear this song in the last week in the radio etc. Later on it was TV, product placement in supermarkets, news events, local, state and federal elections.
Half the time she admitted she had nfi what they were talking about so just made shit up so the call ended quickly and she got whatever payment/reward they were giving out.
There have definitely been periods when polls were quite skewed because they were conducted by phone and they over-represented people with landlines. I guess because it’s harder to get a “phone book” of cell numbers. This skewed actual outcomes of the polls.
I think they still have similar issues. They probably underrepresent people who change phones often or just don’t use the telephone to communicate. Sometimes they’re conducted online and recruited over email. There are all different ways that that can skew more to one type of person.
And when they say they have such and such a confidence interval, that does not mean they are that confident they’ve controlled for all the biases. It’s just simple statistics math about sample sizes.
I think we have seen very clearly in recent presidential elections how unreliable polls are. Not only do people answer them differently than they fill out ballots, there just isn’t a perfect way to be sure you’re polling people who will actually vote.