Then why do the same polls show John McCain up in the 40’s?

What a moron.

Posted by Jackson Landers on 24 October 02008 @ 11am

Because of McCain’s broad appeal among moderates and independent voters. You see, if you throw McCain’s Conservative supporters in there (you know, the one’s who aren’t at home to answer the long polls), he’s pulling easily 60-70%. Don’t buy into the polls, ya know…

Posted by Jason on 24 October 02008 @ 11am

Polls are just a fancy way of predictin’ what’s gonna happen at some point in the future time. The only poll that matters is the North Pole- and it is meltin’.

Sorry, it’s funnier in person. Yet, I could not resist. It’s going to be sad to lay aside a damn good (she said, humbly) Palin accent, but I think I’ll have to manage, doncha know?

Posted by Genevieve on 24 October 02008 @ 1pm

I was making survey calls at the McCain/CCRC headquarters the other day and have to agree with Leggitt…Republicans do like to hang up on you, heck I probably would hang up on me….yes, I definitely would hang up on me polling myself (wow that got a little existential)…BTW why no love for the contemporary conservative on your blog list? :)

Posted by Jody Wilcox on 24 October 02008 @ 3pm

I used to do political surveys by phone, from 2001 to 2003. Almost everyone hangs up on you. 50% do so immediately, 49.5% of them wait for you to read the required intro paragraph and say “I’m not interested” with varying degrees of politeness. If you’re not a complete and total idiot (which many of the people I worked with, sadly, were) you could get about 1 out of every 200 people to complete a survey. This is only out of the people who actually ANSWER the phone — answering machines, busy signals, disconnected numbers, and endless ringing made up about 80-90% of all calls. For every workday, most pollers got about 1 or 2 responses. On a good day, I could do 5 to 7.

Here’s what polling will teach you: the only people who answer political surveys by phone fall into one of several categories:
1) very old people who are bored and have nothing better to do
2) very stupid people who don’t understand that they’re not legally required to take the survey / cannot distinguish answering the survey from actually voting
3) fringe political lunatics who have been waiting at home all day for someone to call them so they can rant about their insane political beliefs.

and, on rare occasions:

4) a sane person who sighed heavily and then resigned themselves to answering the questions out of a vague sense of duty. these people were usually either watching TV simultaneously, or extremely stoned (sometimes both). these people were the easiest and nicest ones to talk to, although they tended to say the least. these were also the only people who were able to accurate guess which party was conducting the survey, which I was never able to confirm or deny although it was fairly obvious. (amazingly, the lunatics in category 3 would always guess wrong and be SURE of the answer.)

I’m willing to conceed that polls can be fairly accurate; you get a certain distribution of male and female respondants from each area, and you’ll get something surprisingly close to accurate.

but IN NO WAY do the people answering the surveys accurately represent the American population. This job used to make me really depressed about how much of an idiot everyone was until I realized that everyone I spoke to belonged to one of the categories above. The vast majority of sane, intelligent people hung up on me immediately; which is precisely what I would have done, in their place.

By my purely anecdotal experience, the respondants tended to skew old, illiterate, and crazy at an ALARMING rate. They were also VERY conservative. Even when we were polling only “likely voters” who planned to vote Democratic (which was often), the vast majority of respondants I spoke to approved of President Bush and thought abortion should be illegal under any circumstances. (I had no idea that support for women’s rights was so HIGH until I looked it up elsewhere. The US is something like 60% pro-choice… not so the people I talked to.)

I also discovered that basically any person anywhere will always without fail tell you that the country is “headed in the wrong direction.” (the other option was “on the right track,” and a very clever few were even able to point out the mixed metaphor there; as in: “couldn’t we be on the right track, heading in the wrong direction?” these were NOT well-worded surveys.)

Posted by James on 24 October 02008 @ 4pm

I spent a little time many years ago with push-pollster Cooper & Secrest, and James describes the shameful calling experience quite well. These days, I have so much pity for the poor saps who do that job, that I always treat them respectfully, and answer their poll. But the vast majority of people are either rude or simply hang up.

And with the increasing use of cell phone, and corresponding decline of land lines, it’s no wonder that traditional polls have beomce less and less reliable.

Posted by I.Publius on 26 October 02008 @ 8am