This has been foreseen for a while, but changes in technology might finally doom the traditional use of phones to measure public opinion. They're just getting things wrong too often.
- Click here for the article.
- Click here for the article.
It's a problem all over. England, Greece and Israel all held elections this year with outcomes that turned out to be a surprise -- if you had believed the polls. Pollsters in Canada, however, did better last month.
The list of problems is long. Fewer and fewer people have landlines. Buying lists of cellphone numbers, which are harder to target by geographic area, is more expensive for pollsters. Getting people to answer the phone and stay on the line to answer questions is increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, pollsters haven't yet figured out how best to reliably gauge opinion through online surveys.
"People don't want to talk because they don't know who's going to use that information," said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida. "You almost have to be partisan to get business, and to keep business, you have to favor one party."
There's added scrutiny for pollsters in general, with more criticism coming from social media and election forecasters whenever they get things wrong. Increasingly, pollsters are nervous when their own numbers appear to be at variance with what their peers are showing.
"Pollsters seem to be increasingly engaging in something called poll herding: a tendency to either re-weight an outlying poll to fall in line witih other pollsters, or to fail to publish outlying polls altogether," elections analyst Sean Trende wrote in Politico. "In 2014 alone we saw evidence that PPP, Rasmussen Reports, Gravis Marketing and Hampton University all refused to release polls."
