With cheap and fast automated surveys being dumped onto the election landscape in Louisiana, says Jeremy Alford, pollsters and consultants are taking stock and wondering what’s next. “Fewer voters than ever are willing to participate in polls, more people are moving toward cell phone use only and conflicting statistics have become the norm,” writes Alford in his latest column. “Reporters and editors, meanwhile, are fretting over what kind of numbers should be published for general consumption—and, more importantly, how they should be presented. Who paid for the poll, any connections between the pollsters and the candidates or issues they’re polling, methodology and the wording of the surveys are just a few of the details that all too often go overlooked.”
Alford says all of these uncertainties and questions are forming up against the backdrop of a long-festering dustup.
“On one side are traditional pollsters, who rely largely on surveys with live callers,” he writes. “On the other side are those new to the scene who only produce robopolls, which are automated with recorded voices and touch-tone responses.”
Alford says there is an important trust factor at play here, especially when you consider how much polls can influence voter preferences, media coverage and fundraising. While there’s probably no stopping the invasion of cheap polls into the Louisiana election conversation at this point, Alford suggests we can all do a better job of interpreting them and weeding out the bad players.
“It’s important to understand that methodology and sampling are at the core of this developing debate. Automated polls are prohibited from calling cell phone users and there’s no way to tell who is on the calls, since the poll participants only have to push buttons to take part,” he writes. “There may be some of the latter with live polling as well, but real voices carrying a real dialogue help lessen the margins.”
The rising use of cell phones poses a serious challenge, however, he says. A decade ago just 6% of the U.S. population used cell phones only. Today, according to the National Health Interview Survey, that figure is closer to 43%, with an additional 17% mostly using cell phones. “So any poll relying solely on cell phone users is cutting off a very large segment of the voting public, and the same goes for landline-only surveys,” Alford says. “Additionally, voters are less likely to participate in a poll than ever before.”
Jeremy Alford publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter, or on Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
