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Political Polls Become Less Reliable As We Head Into 2016 Presidential Election
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."
... it means you wait until the votes are counted to declare a winner instead of when the press tells you who the winner is.
Post Citizens United we're going to get the best government that money can buy.
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.
".. 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.
-Styopa
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.
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.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
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.
Just imagine a world where instead of tailoring their message to what the people say they want to hear, they have to put out a message of what they really plan on doing and the people make their voting decisions based on that. We also need a much cheaper and easier method of recalling elected officials. Right now they really couldn't care less about offending the voters because they have a guaranteed job for the next several years, and by the time the next election rolls around most folks have forgotten what wrongs they've done. If a supermarket manager did something on the same relative scale of wrongness that some of these congresscritters do weekly, they'd be out of a job before the sun set. Congress needs to have the same immediate fear for their jobs. After all, can't kill them, can't staple bologna to their foreheads.
With the activists in CA using public data to get people fired for supporting Prop8, and the gay marriage supporters who drove Brendan Eich from his job at Mozilla (for having the same position on gay marriage in 2008 that both Obama and Hillary had) combined with the massive and well-publicized and bragged-about ability of left wing groups to vacuum-up and analyze data (Facebook, Google, the Obama campaign, etc), combined with the proven history leftists have for being hyper-vindictive to anybody who disagrees with them, have convinced a huge part of the population to refuse to answer pollsters. Unfortunately in politics there is a tendency for any bad behavior by one side to be adopted by the other side as "the next big thing" rather than something everybody should back away from, so there is no guarantee that with a future unforeseen political change some other group could go on a rampage and oppress their opponents based on data mining.
I have personally always refused to answer on two principles: privacy (my thoughts are my own and none of your business) and opposition to political manipulation (why help politicians figure out how better to lie to you?). I have more-recently however discovered that most of the people I know seem to have migrated to my position regarding pollsters. I know a family that used to be in the Nielson TV ratings system, and they have gotten out and no longer answer pollsters either after they started to feel like specimens under a microscope.
All this analysis of people used to be creepy, but in the post-Mozilla world it is no longer safe for anybody who rejects group-think.