Political Polls Become Less Reliable As We Head Into 2016 Presidential Election 292
HughPickens.com writes: Cliff Zukin writes in the NY Times that those paying close attention to the 2016 election should exercise caution as they read the polls — election polling is in near crisis as statisticians say polls are becoming less reliable. According to Zukin, 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. Today, a majority of people are difficult or impossible to reach on landline phones. One 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.
The second unsettling trend is rapidly declining response rates, reaching levels once considered unimaginable. In the late 1970s, pollsters considered an 80 percent response rate acceptable, but by 2014 the response rate has fallen to 8 percent. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven't figured out how to replace it," concludes Zukin. "In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we're off base. What this means for 2016 is anybody's guess."
To top it off, a perennial election polling problem, how to identify "likely voters," has become even thornier. Today, a majority of people are difficult or impossible to reach on landline phones. One 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.
The second unsettling trend is rapidly declining response rates, reaching levels once considered unimaginable. In the late 1970s, pollsters considered an 80 percent response rate acceptable, but by 2014 the response rate has fallen to 8 percent. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven't figured out how to replace it," concludes Zukin. "In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we're off base. What this means for 2016 is anybody's guess."
and yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Who wants to be Nate Silver will be able to make sense of the polls?
Still some interesting points, and yes we may reach a point where polls actually have no predictive value. But I doubt we've gone from "100% accurate if you know how to interpret them" to 0% in 4 years ;-)
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Who wants to be Nate Silver will be able to make sense of the polls?
Maybe Nate Silver?
He has a site fivethirtyeight.com/ [fivethirtyeight.com] that interprets poll results, and other numbers in the news
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I wonder if that has more to do with unfamiliarity with the UK electoral and polling environments. His past record has been pretty solid in the US, but he has a lot more experience with the US systems. If he improves over time (if 538 lasts ten years or more), that could be a reason for the poor showing. Or perhaps polling is already fundamentally broken in the UK.
And there's the possibility that he's just been extraordinarily lucky for the last few elections. :)
The recent UK general election polling (Score:3)
Just about everyone in the polling industry was significantly off-base in the recent UK elections. Literally no-one in the mainstream was calling the actual result in the run up to election day, as far as I know. The debate was all about who would be leading a coalition and how the electoral math would stack up to determine which parties would be likely to join. Even the party leaders changed their tune in the last days of the campaign to reflect an assumption that they wouldn't be governing alone and who t
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Who wants to be Nate Silver will be able to make sense of the polls?
Still some interesting points, and yes we may reach a point where polls actually have no predictive value. But I doubt we've gone from "100% accurate if you know how to interpret them" to 0% in 4 years ;-)
I found the article interesting - though I'm still "digesting" it and have yet to read up supporting material. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to point me at some sources about what the poll results gets used for - and, correct me if I'm wrong in "suspecting" that poll results don't reflect election results (in the USA). TIA.
I have a theory (Score:3)
Stats from the last congressional election:
o 14% approval rate -- that was a poll
o 94% re-election rate -- that was actual voters.
o In the same election, national turnout was 36.3%.
I think the advent of the net's new accessibility to information outside of the laundered and agitprop driven channels, the money-based reasoning of SCOTUS, the lobbyist factor, the obvious malfeasance of Fox news, MSNBC, the blatantly unconstitutional legislation coming out of congress... and so on... all combine to give a very
Re:and yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Nate Silver doesn't poll, he takes other people's polls and combines them.
Which upsets the real poll takers, Silver gets a lot of attention using other peoples' work.
If the real poll takers fail, so will the Nate's of the world.
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It's called culture, where people learn from other people and use the knowledge to create new and better works.
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What you're saying is that Silver can make sense of uneducated opinions, that's all polls are.
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Re:and yet (Score:4, Interesting)
What sauce do you think Christie would use on a baby?
Re:and yet (Score:4, Funny)
Mayonnaise.
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...and you expected...? (Score:3, Funny)
What do you expect. Figures don't lie, but liars can figure.
Outsource polling (Score:5, Funny)
One 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.
I know some people that the pollers could outsource to that have seemed to have found a very easy workaround to this problem.
"Hi, this is Rachel from polling services....."
Re:Outsource polling (Score:4)
What interests me, though, is the demographic shift this will tend to have on any number of results. Landline use skews older and older each year, nevermind peoples' habits with the phone. I usually don't even answer my mobile unless I recognize the caller - if it's important, they can leave a message and I'll call back.
what this means? (Score:5, Insightful)
... it means you wait until the votes are counted to declare a winner instead of when the press tells you who the winner is.
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... it means you wait until the votes are counted to declare a winner instead of when the press tells you who the winner is.
But then the "news" companies won't be able to predict the polls properly!!!
And how will the world go on if this happens?
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As if they could now. Flipping a coin has a better chance of yielding a sensible result.
It really doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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We had the same problem before. It just used to be only unions and other heavily democratic orginzations allowed to donate
Re:It really doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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They were allowed to contribute but those contributons were limited.
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Re:It really doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
What Citizens allows is unlimited, anonymous contributions by corporations under the legal fiction that they (as artificial persons) have MORE freedom of speech than natural persons.
(1) Contrary to popular belief (and bad media reporting), the majority ruling never even mentioned the concept of "corporate personhood." Also, corporations have been recognized as having various rights for at least 200 years in the U.S.
(2) The default concept of rights, as for example in the first amendment, applies not only to individuals but to collections of people. The first amendment actually explicitly mentions five rights: speech, religion, press, petition, and assembly. THREE of those rights already only refer to groups of people (religion -- which implies a group of believers, petition, and assembly), and "free press" clearly has applied to businesses since the time of the Constitution. "Free speech" is the ONLY right there which was artificially restricted to individuals, even though there is no such qualifier in the Constitution. (And, in fact, it was never restricted to individuals -- no one had ever claimed that corporations didn't have free speech rights before Citizens; there were just restrictions on that speech, as there are on all speech in various contexts.)
(3) Corporations are legal representatives of groups of people. As already mentioned, the first amendment explicit protects various rights for groups of people. And given that we're talking about money here, it's unclear how corporations have "more freedom of speech than natural persons" since money can either be spent by an individual, or that money can be invested in a corporation which then spends that money. Since "money = speech" in many electoral laws, how exactly do you claim that corporations are "double-dipping" on free speech? The money can only be spent by one entity, so if an individual gives money to a corporation to donate, that individual is ceding control of that money (="speech") and has less money to use for individual speech.
(4) The ruling overturned restrictions on corporate speech that were inconsistently applied before. Specifically, it mostly overturned a restriction that said certain types of corporations couldn't "speak" (e.g., run ads) within 60 days before an election. Meanwhile, "news organizations" were allowed to speak however they wanted to before elections, including editorializing, endorsing candidates, etc. Most "news organizations" are owned by giant corporations today, so Fox News (for example) got a free pass to say what it wanted to before an election, but the ACLU (as a corporate body, but not a "news" one) would be barred from running a public service announcement that pointed out one of the candidates wanted to overturn the Constitution. Thus, the system was already quite screwed up -- unless you believe in a world where Fox News can donate unlimited propaganda time and money, but non-profit organizations which just want to raise public interest aren't allowed to have free speech before an election.
(5) A couple technicalities here, but Citizens does NOT allow "unlimited, anonymous contributions" to anything. Corporations were (and ARE) still banned from contributing directly to political campaigns. What Citizens did was allow corporations to, say, run an ad or something on a political issue before an election, which previously was prohibited. It also asserted a general principle that "independent" corporate speech (i.e., speech that is NOT direct donations to a campaign) should not be restricted more than individual speech.
(6) A subsequent court case (SpeechNOW v. FEC [wikipedia.org]) is perhaps the one where you're thinking about "unlimited, anonymous contributions." Basically, the ruling in this latter case followed the idea set for in Citizens that contributions to INDEPENDENT entities (i.e., not political campaig
Re:It really doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It really doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
I guess you slept through that election if you think Romney outspent Obama.
It was pretty much a draw [adn.com], though Obama directly controlled more of his spending.
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The realistic choices for president were limited to those who could amass a large fortune in contributions. There's some democracy left in this country at the local level, but even those races are getting expensive unless you're in a small town.
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Spending doesn't win elections, unless I missed President Romney somehow.
Dear Anonymous Coward, do you have a source for that (reliable. Here in Oz we have the Electoral Commission (parties are required to record their electoral spending and get it back on a "how many votes did you get" basis). According to the AEC - electoral spending does relate to votes garnered in an election.
Re:It really doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
I have two sources for that. Neither side in this argument-trope is actually "lying" there are two very valid ways to count it:
In direct spending Obama actually outspends Romney: http://elections.nytimes.com/2... [nytimes.com]
But the metric you'll often hear is that Romney's "dark money superPACs outspent Obama 2:1" https://www.opensecrets.org/ou... [opensecrets.org]
In any way I do the math, Romney had no more than a 20% total money footprint advantage. That wasn't enough to overcome his party's handicap. In that cycle he could not simultaneously please the grassroots TeaPartiers and his Wall Street pals and alienating either would have lost him the election quite assuredly. I don't intend to comment on whether he would have made a good president only that as a gamer, the one he was playing does not look winnable.
Re:It really doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
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So, you're saying the media backed Bush both times? That's so weird, I'd heard rumors they had a liberal bias.
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Where? On FOX?
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Don't be silly. The media is only biased and corrupt when it DOESN'T agree with conservative talking points.
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And where do you find any evidence that Bush was not a liberal? Are you still fooled by the label someone tacks next to their name of R and D? Look at the spending, policies, and actions.. he was as liberal as Obama. He just played a good idiot and an overwhelming majority of people believe that schtick too...
The run ups are all about creating characters and picking the one who will best fool the public. It's amazing that so many people believe bullshit so blindly.
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Well, he did outspend every president prior to him combined, so that would be in line with such a bias.
Too many robocalls is why... (Score:5, Insightful)
One reason why polling companies can't get usable info is that end users tend to be constantly barraged by robocalls, be it the GE security system, "polls" which actually turn out to be scammy sales pitches, or many other types of scams.
Because of this, people either use apps like Mr. Number which autoblocks, or just ignore any number not on their contacts list and area code. If someone does answer and gets a "hi, this is not a sales call", the "end" button on the phone gets pressed by instinct, just like one's hand draws back if they touch a hot pan.
Re:Too many robocalls is why... (Score:5, Informative)
This. Maybe a decade ago I answered a few actual polls, and felt taken advantage of. The questions went on and on. Then I got some sales "polls" and quickly decided to never answer that crap again. I've also gotten so many calls where all I get is a few seconds of silence and then *click*. I've gotten to the point where I have to call back some folks I too reflexively hung up on who were legit.
On the whole I wish I had killed the land-line a while ago.
They need to be more upfront about the length (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been burned by interminable pools too. I'd be a lot more willing to answer polls if the people on the phone started with something like, "Hello. We're doing a political poll that has X questions and will take about Y minutes. Are you interested?" Y would be 3-4 minutes tops. I'd answer that type of poll.
And then there are "push polls"... (Score:3)
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I suspect that another reason, particularly when you're talking mobile, is that people who answer phones are far less likely to be sitting in a nice, comfortable chair in their living room ready to play 20 questions with whoever calls. If my parents call while I'm out walking the dog or something, I'll chat for a few minutes. If a pollster calls, they're out-of-luck.
The business model of poll
what EVER could we do? (Score:5, Insightful)
".. the response rate has fallen to 8 percent. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven't figured out how to replace it..."
Here's a crazy idea: let's have everyone vote, and then see what the results are before we report on it?
Or even weirder: instead of micromanaging a candidate's positions based on what they think the public wants to hear, have the candidate state what they actually think, and let the public judge them (shock!) on their actual beliefs? Do they even remember what they think themselves still?
I know, I'm so old-fashioned.
Re:what EVER could we do? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You know, political parties have the campaigning down pat. They don't rely on public polls for their information and policy positions. They have, through decades of research and analysis, figured
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Or even weirder: instead of micromanaging a candidate's positions based on what they think the public wants to hear, have the candidate state what they actually think, and let the public judge them (shock!) on their actual beliefs?
Not really workable. I have political positions which, while sound, can't be pressed until a campaign to inform the public has succeeded. Consent of the governed is more important than agreement with the governed. As such, actual campaigns must follow what the public wants, emphasizing those parts of my position, and modifying what the public believes by providing information campaigns.
Thanks for the reminder (Score:2)
I need to wrap up that FreePBX raspberry Pi project I started so I can take better control of my landline.
Communication Methods and a True Poll (Score:3)
Perhaps ask people go to a place and let their preference be known. Let's call the place a "polling place" and let's call their preference, say, a "vote". We can get rid of the term "poll" and use some new fancy term like "election".
But, polling really does need to change with people's communication preferences. ID verification was ALWAYS a problem on phones. I think that knocking on doors, trusted e-mail, text messages, and other alternatives exist. Harder to do, but oh well. If you want good data, its ALWAYS really hard to do. Good data is very difficult to come across. All data is wrong, but sometimes it tells you something interesting... (something like that...)
The talking heads and candidates care who is "leading in the polls". I don't. I choose my candidate based on what is best for ME and then I ALWAYS vote. I ALWAYS lie to pollsters. Or do I?
Misleading Summary (Score:5, Informative)
The summary tries to blame this on the FCC for "interpreting" the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to apply to survey calls to cell phones. The law itself (47 USC 227), not some rogue FCC interpretation, says no auto-dialed or prerecorded calls to cell phones without express consent. Period. No exceptions for "surveys." No exceptions for "get out the vote" political calls either.
Re: (Score:2)
Hackability (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that the major change in campaigning strategy over the last 15 years has centered around using statistical techniques to hack an election, this probably is not a bad thing at all. It means that defining a wedge issue and engineering the entire political discourse toward that wedge might have some uncertainty. Maybe the candidates can talk about things that they actually believe.
Re:Hackability (Score:5, Funny)
"Maybe the candidates can talk about things that they actually believe."
Blasphemer! Heretic! Shun him! Shun him!
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Maybe the candidates can talk about things that they actually believe...will get them into office but not actually do once there
if you want to steal an election (Score:5, Interesting)
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Marketing and Push Polls - poisoning the well? (Score:3)
I have to wonder how much of this has to do with 'push polling'. I have a zero tolerance for this practice and I will shut down a survey call in a heartbeat if it appears to be headed in that direction. I have probably ended some legitimate calls because of this.
Add to that the following:
I certainly don't have to wonder why people are so skeptical of surveys.
Coverage must change then (Score:4, Funny)
No reliable polling data? The horrors!
Instead of focusing on the horse race (who's ahead? who's falling behind?), do you think the media will discuss what candidates actually say and do, maybe even compare and contrast their stump speeches with their actual record and/or accomplishments?
That would truly be "we inform, you decide."
Not just a US problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Only the exit-poll conducted on the day of the election itself got relatively close to the actual result (and even that under-estimated the scale of the eventual Conservative victory).
There's a major industry post-mortem in progress at the moment, which is scrutinising various aspects of previous methodological orthodoxy. UKpollingreport has a fairly good write-up of the state of play here [ukpollingreport.co.uk].
There's been a fair degree of political acrimony about the inaccuracy of the pre-election polling. In particular, there have been questions raised about whether inaccurate polling caused the parties or the voters to change their behaviours in a way that accurate polling (or no polling) wouldn't have. There are also some calls for the UK to follow the example of some continental European countries and ban the publication of opinion polls in the 2-3 week period before an election.
One other point worth noting is that there was one particular data-analytics organisation (sorry, can't find the link right now) which looked at the raw data from the opinion polls and made a call a few days before the election which predicted the outcome fairly accurately.
Nate Silver called it badly wrong, in this instance.
Shy Tories (Score:2)
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I also heard that one late poll wasn't published by the pollsters because it was so far different from the average or consensus picture
Yup, that's a known issue with pollsters. As the election date closes, they start to "tweak" their results to say the same thing as everyone else. They might let an anomalous-looking result slide in the middle of the campaign, because there's its a graph you care about, not the individual data points. But people treat that final data point very differently. Nobody wants to be the pollster who screwed up the election prediction the worst.
This makes detection of large late surges kind of challenging, as seen
Good. (Score:2)
Maybe now we'll see an election where we don't actually know who has won until the voting is complete.
All of this polling has created a self-fulfilling prophecy where sketchy polls predict a winner, undecided people vote for that winner to make their vote "count," and others for or against the the projected winner don't bother to vote. Meanwhile, political candidates don't really bother to take a stand on issues unless they have verified via polling that XX% of their constituents support their position.
Let
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"Dewey Defeats Truman"
We are just on the other side of that equation now. Landlines have become rare enough again that they skew results.
Maybe it's none of their business?? (Score:2)
Coincidence? (Score:2)
Politicians are becoming less and less reliable heading into the 2016 election, too. We should do a study.
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A poll of polls?
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A poll of polls?
No, we should "pole" the politicians. As in, beat them with a heavy metal pole, and then hoist them up on one.
Nate Silver seems to have figured it out. (Score:2)
What does he do that's different from what everyone else does?
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He analyzes polls based on in-house bias, then he weights them when he does his meta-analysis.
Nate Silver isn't a pollster. He aggregates polls and comes up with probable outcomes based on his model.
I remember media reports about how polling was becoming less reliable back in 2008 and 2012. But as long as they are unreliable in a reliable way, people like Nate Silver seem to be able to deal.
And I don't care! (Score:2)
Also, I'm not going to vote and I don't believe in democracy any more. :)
no more Dewey Defeats Truman? (Score:3)
Sounds like the plan is working (Score:2)
high-quality research much more expensive to do, so there is less of it
Good. Fewer polls means fewer people trying to intrude on my time. I don't know why pollsters think they have a right to rudely cold-call people and take up their time - without giving anything back. But it does seem that more and more people are becoming resistant to their interruptions.
If fewer polls means less punditry and less time talking about inconsequential "what-ifs" on TV in the seemingly years long run up to elections, then that can only be a good thing for viewers and all us ordinary people. S
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I don't know why pollsters think they have a right to rudely cold-call people and take up their time - without giving anything back.
Technically they're giving back information that's going to be in the news tomorrow or next week.
Indeed. I recently filled out a survey, but they're giving away a $500 gift card to those who respond. Personally, I'd have preferred $5. I'm not much of a gambler1
Offer about $15/hour for your survey (So a 20 minute survey would be $5), and response rates should rise.
Polls are an optional accessory to an election (Score:2)
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I lived in a very conservative state and in terms of local or regional elections it could be guaranteed who would win. In those cases I voted communist just to see if my votes were tallied in the next day's canvassing results in the local news. "Yup we got commies out there!"
This could be VERY GOOD for democracy (Score:2)
Facebook "likes" (Score:2)
Now polling comes down to who has the most followers on Twitter and who's Facebook page gets the most "likes".
I call bullshit (Score:2)
. Today, a majority of people are difficult or impossible to reach on landline phones. One 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.
Landline phones? Come on this isn't the 1960s. I would have expected the same to include "party line" in the same sentence.
The 1991 CPA doesn't stop every fucking political action committee from spamming your with calls to vote for some idiot; a nuisance that was allowed explicitly by the act.
Just conduct your survey on twitter or facebook and pay the devil his due.
There have long been issues with polling (Score:2)
Let's start out with how they choose what exchanges to poll. Until I moved into a specific neighborhood in a city I used to live in, I'd *NEVER* been called, which told me that "likely voters" mean "don't call any exchange where it's heavily black or 'ethnic'".
Second, I have *real* trouble with the idea that 1k or 2k people will give an accurate view of how half a million folks are going to vote; rather, that kills excellent candidates who don't have big money backers from getting to be voted on.
Finally, th
Election fatigue (Score:2)
Perhaps if politicians actually waited until 2016 to start campaigning for 2016, we wouldn't already be sick and tired of the election and might be willing to answer questions about it. Instead, if we think of President Obama's term as a year they've started showering us with ads for Christmas and it's only late July or early August. Frankly I feel like awarding each of the candidates a load of coal or perhaps reindeer dung in their stockings.
Lost any respect for polls (Score:2)
When they started to be used instead as a way to push a political agenda. ie. An agenda wearing a poll's clothing. This is true often enough that I no longer participate in any polls.
I will lie to phone polls (Score:4, Funny)
Political polls are exempt from do-not-call lists and every Sept-early November my phone rings several times each evening. I can ask to not be called and I will continue to get called over and over.
This year I've decided if I can't make phone polls stop calling I will actively work against them by lying my ass off. I'll tell them I'm voting for Darth Vader because he's honest about where he stands on social issues and foreign policy. The most important issue in this election season is freeing minds from the Matrix.
It also never hurts to answer every question with "Hodor"
Let's keep this simple (Score:2)
Most of the political poll calls I get, and I get them regularly, are focused on the 2016 Presidential election.
The primaries are still 7-10 months away. I am uninterested. I hang up.
Call me in November, when campaigning should be heating up. It's MUCH too early.
And yes, I know this is driven by the candidates, money, and the media. Those points don't make me more eager to participate so early.
Not true, they're just trying to build tension (Score:2)
I've been reading this type of story for years, and then the election unfolds just as the polls predicted.
My guess is that the sellers of newspapers etc. are just trying to convince people that this is an exciting topic, so they publish these anti-poll theories and a few suggested explanations that they reckon are credible.
Other indicators of voting preference? (Score:2)
And also, (Score:2)
Let's not forget people are SICK AND TIRED of sales and poll-calls.
Some of us purpposefully LIE to you people and waste your time when we have the time to do so.
Make the calls a waste of the callers' time and money and that will help get the point across.
The beauty of this is (Score:3)
Well what do they expect (Score:3)
I got a call last Saturday morning from an "unknown caller" at 8:30am (which woke me up). I ignored it. Again at 9:30, again at 10:30. Finally I was near enough the phone (actually, Google Voice on an iPad Mini) to pick up. I asked who it was and got a personal name, then I asked who they were calling from and then they admitted it was "ANZ Research" or something that sounds like that. They said they were calling to get opinions on various political topics.
There's no way in hell I'm going to give survey answers to someone who's dumb enough to call before noon on the weekend. Google Voice lets me block numbers, which I suspect is why they disabled Caller ID, so they could sneak through. I refused to even confirm my name, and told them to take my number off their list and never call again.
I figured it was probably a push poll anyway.
Rational: Polls are used against you. (Score:3)
This decline in polls is VERY welcome. In fact, it's about the only way democracy will have a chance going forward.
The old style poll was democratic in nature: Do you believe in god? What car do you like? Why do you buy that brand of TV?
This was used without excess interpretation, and made available. Pollsters were sure to get a decent response rate, they were sure to get data that was statistically relevant, etc.
This gave polls a magic power: people believed they were true.
Where power goes, corruption follows.
Modern polls:
1)- Hardly ever list their rate of response.
This little trick allows the pollster to get what he wants his poll to say. It also can make for wildly sensational polls in general.
2)- Often is a form of advertisement or political mindfuck.
Ex: Are you Christian? Who will you be voting for in the next election?
Asking the questions in this order makes you more likely to vote for a candidate you perceive as more in line with the FIRST question. So if the first question is about God, you will be (statistically) more likely to actually vote, and more likely to vote for a Republican. No, no, you say, Reasons. First, you are quite possibly incorrect. Second, even if you are correct in saying that this can't possibly effect YOU, just pretend that it DOES effect everyone else, including those you know and love. They wouldn't do it if it did not literally make votes out of nothing.
3)- Way too meta, fuck that noise.
Current polls are often done with a bunch of other questions whose actual goals are to assess the level of corporate threat from different demographics and locations. You could think you are answering questions about kitchen cleaning products, but in reality many of the questions are just there as smoke screen (and no one cares about the thought or time you spend on them), and the "real" questions are to determine the level of political savy of a certain area, the likelihood of a future lawsuit, etc.
4)- Clearly not a civil service.
Polls used to be perceived something like a civil service- the companies, who have a responsibility to make the world a better place (this was not so long ago a thing- before the court decision saying that corporations had to act to maximize profits for shareholders), would get information on how to trade off reliability, quality, and cost, to make your life better. The politicians, always interested in Democracy, would figure out how to better represent people. The scientists, always interested in metrics, would figure out what you wanted and research in that direction. I don't know how true this actually was, but that was the PERCEPTION. Even if you don't keep up with all the psych tricks that any profitable or powerfocussed entity is employing, everyone sort of knows that no one is taking their opinions and making a better world for everyone- they are figuring out where you aren't looking so they can slash the pound of flesh with less of a fight.
This used to be a census. Now, it's intel.
Pollsters can fuck right off. With some exceptions- actual science still needs polls, and that's sad for them, but they are a rounding error in the giant race to "solve the democracy problem" that companies face (they don't like you voting elsewhere with your dollars) and that politicians face (they don't like that elections are not safe and determined in their favor).
It is rational to avoid polls, unless you are in possession of expert knowledge of the poll taker's integrity- never the case.
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*Seriously, if he gets on the ballot he'll get my vote just so we can end the GOP once and for all by giving them four years to truly destroy the country.
I with you on that Cruz vote. We're limping along now is a zombie state of semi-functional corruption. Things have to get worse before they can get truly better, and who better to do that than the GOP?
Re:Oh no... you mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Demise of polling could be the best thing that ever happened to US Politics.
It would remove an essential tool from the typical two faced campaign tool chests. You can't just say what people want to hear when you have no idea what that is.
There will be negative effects too (Score:3)
I agree that there could be positive effects if polling became useless, but there could also be negative effects. It's not clear to me which effects will be stronger. My guess is that it'll be a wash.
Two possible examples:
-I think that politicians have a good idea of what their base wants even without detailed polls. If politicians have no idea what the rest of the electorate wants, maybe politicians will pander even more to their base because it's a known quantity.
-When there's real hysteria, politicians d
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Pandering to the base tends to alienate the rest of the electorate, often to the point of discouraging them from voting. They think, what's the point in voting when the person likely to win is going to ignore you and the rest don't have a chance anyway? Sure, you get the base from the other side voting, but a lot of people who don't vote are in the middle and feel like they're largely ignored anyway.
Re:Oh no... you mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
In British Columbia, the media is not allowed to report poll results within 30 days prior to an election. Politicians can have a poll done, but they can't reveal the findings. I'm sure that that two-edged sword, the U.S. Bill of Rights, would never permit such a "free-speech" restriction in the U.S.
As far as I'm concerned, polling is a tool used to sway voters and manipulate voter turnout. Imagine my disgust way back in 1980 when driving to the voting 1/2 hour before opening time to hear over the radio that NBC had declared "Raygun" the next president of the U.S. Many of my (then) young friends told me that they hadn't even bothered voting because they didn't think that their vote would count given the polling numbers that were flooding the media.
Re:Oh no... you mean... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) your friends are idiots if they let their intentions change due to what some poll says.
2) This ain't a new phenomenon, at all
3) A poll result does not necessarily mean that it matches the election result. See also "Dewey Defeats Truman"
3) Reagan won by a frickin' landslide in both elections, so it's not as if the media outlet had jumped any guns.
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I hate push polling. "what would you feel once you learned that Obama ate babies to keep his hair color?" "what would you feel once you found out that Bush is actually a lizard person".
Re:Oh no... you mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
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How about they only contact people who want to be contacted? My time is valuable, and I don't have time to waste on polls that are actually advertising or polls that intentionally mislead people into thinking it's for one candidate when they're actually pushing for another candidate with misleading questions. Not only that, but it's insanely hypocritical for the do-not-call legislation to exempt these types of calls.
How about a full disclosure law where candidates have to register all the polling outfits
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... says an anonymous poster. Oh, the irony.
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This is not fully true, there are some differences in which lobbyists are buying which party, and we have some choice in which lobbyists we find least offensive based on what ever we think is most important but in general the actual choice is small.
On social issues, the parties tend to be wildly apart, but that's by design. If we can get people all worked up over silly issues with low incidence of impacting us individually, the people will not notice the real issues which screw the majority of us regularly.