Have you ever been asked to participate in a political poll? Do you know of anyone who has?

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    5 months ago

    Nope, and no one that I know ever has been. Which is why I don’t trust “the polls” to accurately reflect America. Not saying that you have to be called up to be a part of it - but no one I know has been. So if that’s the case, then they’re not getting a wide demographic.

    Alternate is that they show up as spam and are ignored - which again means they are heavily skewed. It means that the portion of the population who is more likely to answer a spam call is more likely to vote for X candidate. Doesn’t seem like a fair poll to me.

    • radix@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      That was a big talking point a few years ago. Polling companies stubbornly held on to calling landlines for too long, but the only people who had landlines were not representative of the voting population.

      They try to correct for things like age, income, race, etc, by weighting the answers to match the wider population, but it’s hard to correct for things like “stubbornly old-fashioned regardless of physical age.”

    • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      I’ve been saying this about the polls for ages. Anyone even slightly left leaning is more likely to be slightly more tech savvy and more prone to not bother wasting their time with polls because of it.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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        5 months ago

        Even if they called people with cell phones (and not just landlines) that would still weed out 90+% of voters < 50. Who answers unknown numbers anymore?