There’s a dirty little secret that we pollsters need to own up to: People don’t talk to us anymore, and it’s making polling less reliable. …
For a while, most polls conducted most of the time in most places seemed reasonably accurate, so we kept at it, claiming random sample surveys with low margins of error. Weighting became a Band-Aid for noncooperation. And polling still seemed better than hoisting a wet finger to the political winds. Then came the past two presidential elections, exposing deeper wounds.
I offer my own experience from Florida in the 2020 election to illustrate the problem. I conducted tracking polls in the weeks leading up to the presidential election. To complete 1,510 interviews over several weeks, we had to call 136,688 voters. CONTINUED
David Hill (Hill Research Consultants), Washington Post
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