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.
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 ❤”
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.
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.
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 ❤”
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.