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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.
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
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.
first you must discredit the polls.
I guess you slept through that election if you think Romney outspent Obama.
"Maybe the candidates can talk about things that they actually believe."
Blasphemer! Heretic! Shun him! Shun him!
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
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.
What utter nonsense. You're saying that wealthy Republicans weren't allowed to contribute before Citizens? Or that organizational contributions in general weren't restricted/limited? In a word, bullshit. 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. If the difference between that and what we had before escapes you, then I suggest you invest in a 7th-grade civics class.
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.
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.
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) 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