Pollsters Scramble as Fewer People Take Their Phone Calls

Pollsters Scramble as Fewer People Take Their Phone Calls
"...a spate of ideas bubbling up for new ways to sample public opinion. 
The alternatives are coming because the traditional method—randomly calling phone numbers again and again until someone answers—has grown far more labor intensive and costly in recent years.

One idea is to push surveys on people who mistype the name of a website. 

Polling companies are assembling large, standing panels to survey online. 

For certain websites, Google is asking internet users to answer surveys before they can get access. 

Others monitor Twitter posts to gauge public sentiment.

The new survey approaches give some in the industry pause because they make it harder to tell good research from bad. 

In ways pollsters don’t fully understand, the various methods seem to produce different results. 

...The difficulty of predicting voter turnout was a large part of many recent polling blunders, including surveys earlier this year showing Mrs. Clinton ahead in a Michigan primary she badly lost. 

...To record the opinion of one young Hispanic male took them 300 phone calls, while only 10 were needed to reach a woman over 65.

If that continues, “we no longer have a viable political business,” he recalls thinking..."

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