Genuinely this has always made my question the validity of phone polls. You’re automatically selecting for a specific group, people who will pick up random phone calls, and I’m not convinced that group is representative of the larger population.
I knew it was bad but I had no idea it was this bad. If ~99 out of 100 people are refusing to talk to pollsters on the phone - this form of polling seems very questionable at best. Yet phone-based polling is common, the entire American pundit industry uses polling as an all-purpose tool to explain politics, and polling is a malignant force on everything.
That's why they still do it. It's great as propaganda bc the people most likely to answer are the people who are most likely to be well off enough to not have to worry about bill collectors. A lot of modern polling outfits are less interested in figuring out what people think and more interested in generating data that backs up the policies of whoever is paying them. It's the same reason a lot of them use biased language for the polling questions.
I answered one one time and they thought I was my father. So I did everything I could to basically say I was a communist but they don't allow that in the Spectrum it's only "extremely liberal" or "extremely conservative" when it comes to their questions about your views on topics
"I'm a Moderate"... "Mao had some good points, and Trotsky was OK but his current followers are annoying. Stalin was good but shouldn't have stopped at Berlin. I respect Anarchists as comrades. So yeah, I think we should all get along and kill landlords together ❤"
Less than 1pct apparently. I answer every personally, I almost never get spam calls on the number that I have gotten polls on. Several now, I think I may be over-represented lol. Monmouth and at least one other whose name I remembered in the GOP primary.
Not only is it crazy to answer a phone, but these questionnaires are fucking looong. Even if you're enough of a weirdo to start one of these calls, you'd have to be completely deranged to actually sit through one.
I have made calls for different reasons including political calls, and still make non-political calls for work from a number people won't recognize or is blocked, and many young people answer their phone.
Not everyone is afraid of talking on the phone for two minutes.
I have my phone set to send any phone number that I haven't called or put into contacts directly to voicemail. It's not about being afraid to talk on the phone, but rather the proportion of useful interactions to annoying ones. 98% of the time, a call from an unknown number is going to be a scam or spam (or both!). Picking up the phone every time it rings is just a huge annoying waste of time, and anyone who is genuinely trying to get ahold of me will leave a message so I can call back.
My mom answers every call she gets and she actively gives away personal information while explaining that she doesn’t want to engage with the caller. It’s maddening. She’s just too polite.
Usually, I hang up if they don't say hello in the first 3 seconds because that's a robo call. But recently I literally had to yell over this bastard that called me because he wouldn't shut up long enough for me to say don't call again.
I've actually answered one of these polls once because I was expecting a phone call from an unknown number sometime that week. Otherwise, I never answer random calls.
I signed up for YouGov once on a whim, felt like it might be nice to get some sort of payoff from answering questions. Ended up not doing any questionnaires because not only did getting profiled feel weird, I realized it was a fraction of the earnings from an hourly wage.
The paradox of polling is that you can never afford to do it well. Maybe it's worthwhile to the participant to collect the opinions of people that make less than $10 a day, but those people's opinions are not valued by capital. For anyone whose opinion is consequential, polling would have to pay them for their time, and this would be probibitively expensive. This is the same reason why jury duty is mandatory.
Boomers love answering the phone no matter how many times in a row it's a robocall
I literally do not pick up the phone if i dont recognize the number and sometimes i dont even if i do
Yep and if they didn't leave a message I guess it wasn't important 🤷🏿♂️
Yeah, it's only going to be confused old ladies answering the phone, so not exactly an accurate metric for the entire population
Genuinely this has always made my question the validity of phone polls. You’re automatically selecting for a specific group, people who will pick up random phone calls, and I’m not convinced that group is representative of the larger population.
I knew it was bad but I had no idea it was this bad. If ~99 out of 100 people are refusing to talk to pollsters on the phone - this form of polling seems very questionable at best. Yet phone-based polling is common, the entire American pundit industry uses polling as an all-purpose tool to explain politics, and polling is a malignant force on everything.
That's why they still do it. It's great as propaganda bc the people most likely to answer are the people who are most likely to be well off enough to not have to worry about bill collectors. A lot of modern polling outfits are less interested in figuring out what people think and more interested in generating data that backs up the policies of whoever is paying them. It's the same reason a lot of them use biased language for the polling questions.
I answered one one time and they thought I was my father. So I did everything I could to basically say I was a communist but they don't allow that in the Spectrum it's only "extremely liberal" or "extremely conservative" when it comes to their questions about your views on topics
"I'm a Moderate"... "Mao had some good points, and Trotsky was OK but his current followers are annoying. Stalin was good but shouldn't have stopped at Berlin. I respect Anarchists as comrades. So yeah, I think we should all get along and kill landlords together ❤"
Less than 1pct apparently. I answer every personally, I almost never get spam calls on the number that I have gotten polls on. Several now, I think I may be over-represented lol. Monmouth and at least one other whose name I remembered in the GOP primary.
The quoted text says 127,000 calls to 93,000 voters. That's a 73% hit rate!
No, they only got 1,059 responses, a hit rate of 1.1%. There were 93,000 people that they called, some of whom were phoned more than once.
... so I somehow only read the part after the [...] and totally missed that 🫠
They spoke with about a thousand people, which means of those 93,000 some were double or triple calls.
Not only is it crazy to answer a phone, but these questionnaires are fucking looong. Even if you're enough of a weirdo to start one of these calls, you'd have to be completely deranged to actually sit through one.
This is such a reddit moment on Hexbear.
I have made calls for different reasons including political calls, and still make non-political calls for work from a number people won't recognize or is blocked, and many young people answer their phone.
Not everyone is afraid of talking on the phone for two minutes.
I have my phone set to send any phone number that I haven't called or put into contacts directly to voicemail. It's not about being afraid to talk on the phone, but rather the proportion of useful interactions to annoying ones. 98% of the time, a call from an unknown number is going to be a scam or spam (or both!). Picking up the phone every time it rings is just a huge annoying waste of time, and anyone who is genuinely trying to get ahold of me will leave a message so I can call back.
But it's an insane selective bias right off the bat.
Not my fault that people want actual humans to answer and not 1% of the calls being a confused boomer looking to chat for a while
I answer the phone so seldomly now I'm really starting to wonder why I keep paying for service
My mom answers every call she gets and she actively gives away personal information while explaining that she doesn’t want to engage with the caller. It’s maddening. She’s just too polite.
Boomers
Usually, I hang up if they don't say hello in the first 3 seconds because that's a robo call. But recently I literally had to yell over this bastard that called me because he wouldn't shut up long enough for me to say don't call again.
(it was an obvious Medicare renewal scam)
I've actually answered one of these polls once because I was expecting a phone call from an unknown number sometime that week. Otherwise, I never answer random calls.
I signed up for YouGov once on a whim, felt like it might be nice to get some sort of payoff from answering questions. Ended up not doing any questionnaires because not only did getting profiled feel weird, I realized it was a fraction of the earnings from an hourly wage.
The paradox of polling is that you can never afford to do it well. Maybe it's worthwhile to the participant to collect the opinions of people that make less than $10 a day, but those people's opinions are not valued by capital. For anyone whose opinion is consequential, polling would have to pay them for their time, and this would be probibitively expensive. This is the same reason why jury duty is mandatory.
I moved but kept my old phone number. I know I can ignore any call with my hometown's area code because anybody from there is already in my contacts.