| the REASON that all of the Democrats, as well as all of the press, missed the call on the elections this year is because NONE of them are listening to the man on the street.
The good pollsters try to correct for this by making sure they get, say, as large a percentage of Republicans as exist in the voting population, but there is still no guarantee that the ones they finally collect are representative of that area's Republicans as a whole. The consequence of this is that polls are becoming ever-more inaccurate, due to sampling deficiencies. I'm not talking here about the media's push polls that they publish as part of their cheerleading for the Democrats; I mean the paid-for private polls that the parties are relying on to allocate resources. Those are bad, and they are getting worse. The vaunted Zogby had the Minnesota Senate race upside-down. Either 10% of the electorate blatantly lied when his pollsters called, or these are people that his sampling technique totally missed. They are in that self-selected group of people who do not take calls from pollsters, or who hang up when a pollster calls. And there are enough of them to swing races from D to R and vice versa. (I suspect that these "won't be polled" types are mostly Republicans, though, because that's where the surprises came.) |
There is something else, though. Not all of these people are idiots. As others have pointed out, polling is becoming something of a crap shoot, because of all the ways people have now of ducking out on incoming phone calls. And when all else fails, people are just plain hanging up. This behavior is self-selected, which means that a self-selected group is taking itself out of the group being polled. That leaves a self-selected sample of people who are willing to take calls from pollsters. There is no guarantee that what the pollsters are left with is a representative sample.