dumb question: are polls still done via phone?

[xir]

was reading a piece on 538 about how Nevada is hard to poll since a lot of people work night shifts when the calls come in.
I tought the 2016 polls were bad because they relied on phone calls and there was a big effort to correct it for 2020.

are phone polls still the de facto way?

 

[SteveWinwood]

The State Of The Polls, 2019

Polls just had one of their best election cycles, ever -- but challenges abound in the industry

fivethirtyeight.com

they're still the most accurate and they're going more to cell phones and less to landlines

that article can probably answer most of your questions about it

 

[BAD]

Phone is the most reliable. Mail polls may never come back and online polls are almost total trash because a verified online registry is really hard to cultivate and monitor.

 

[Horns]

The primary reason for phone polls is because of random digit dialing and speediness of results. In other words, let's call a bunch of phone numbers from Nevada to confirm they still reside there in order to survey them. This approach allows for random sampling, which gives you the reliable results. Political polling is also exempt from TCPA laws so they can use computers to randomly dial and speed up the process. With the phone method you can produce statistically reliable results in a short period of time too. Some of them are done in less than a week.

You cannot randomly sample people via email in the same way. There is no reliable source of an email frame to start with. Plus, web surveys are notoriously biased against older respondents (i.e. 60+ don't use the web as much). Paper surveys take weeks to send out and receive via post office then you need more time to scan and clean results. Source: I work in a related field and done this work.

 

[xir]

well the cell phone stuff is great news, and i get all the complaints for other formats, i heard those in 2016, just thought maybe someone would have a breakthnrough.
assuming do not call lists effect this sort of thing, with pollsters being more legit than most robocalls

 

[LukeOP]

They should text. I don't answer spam calls in my phone.