Why political polls are missing the mark

Anyone who likes to follow presidential races, will come across a plethora of polls on any given day. Media use them and most of us who are interested, find them fascinating. Well it has occurred to me over the past four or so years that the reliability of the polls continue to diminish because of one reason: Telecommunications. All of these polls are conducted through phone surveys. And there are two reasons within telecommunications why they are becoming less and less reliable.

First is the continued upswing of cell phone use. Many people no longer keep a phone in their house and use their cell phones exclusively. If you haven't noticed, you don't get survey or poll calls on the mobile phone. (And thank goodness for that! You think a cell phone ringing in the middle of a meeting is bad now! Imagine what it would be like if you started receiving calls from every telemarketer on your cell phone!). Anyhow, pollsters are stuck calling land lines. This of course skews their demographics quite a bit because any age group or type of person who typically only uses a cell phone will not be asked their political preferences.

Second Caller ID. Let's be honest here. Who doesn't screen their calls these days? I have found myself not picking up when neighbors in my cul de sac call (and they can see my cars)! So what are the chances I'd pick up for people I don't know? It's hard to figure out how much that skews results, but I'm sure it does quite a bit. Of course, those polling are not going to talk about how much less effective their polls have become, but I'm sure it's more than they wish.

Of course there are other reasons polls become less accurate. Too small of a sample is of course the most common. But also consider those who are unfortunate enough to be on the phone with a pollster and frustrated that they interrupted dinner. They might choose to lie just to skew the results. Kids may answer the phone or households might be split on how to answer the questions. All of these effect the results, but I think the most obvious and least spoken about are the ways in which we have changed the way we use our phones. I'm sure there's a much better article on this somewhere else with actual statistics and everything, but in case that's not true. You read it here first!