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FORWARD THINKING
Cell phones pose a growing challenge to pollsters. Federal law prohibits the use of automated dialing-key to efficient telephone polling-to call cell phones. This means young and minority voters, who are most likely to use cell phones instead of landlines, may be under-represented. In the past, cell-only voters' political views have been similar to those of their landline-using counterparts, minimizing the problem. Will the same hold true this year? Stay tuned.Internet polls may eclipse telephone polls as cell phones, answering machines, caller ID, and resistance to phone solicitations make it harder to find willing participants. Online poll takers tend to be self-selecting (only those interested in the topic participate) and skew toward the young, the wealthy, and the better educated. But with complex weighting methods and other steps, pollsters are refining online surveys to make them more scientific and reliable.
Snail mail is poised for a comeback. The U.S. Postal Service has 99 percent of residential addresses on file-a near-perfect sampling pool. Will future pollsters combine street addresses with phones and the Internet to tap the advantages of each? "It's amazing," says Paul Lavrakas, former chief methodologist at Nielsen Media Research. "We're going back to the dark ages, to where we rely on street addresses to make sure polls are representative."
THE BACK-AND-FORTH
"There's a bonanza of polling information available to anyone with a computer [on sites like pollster.com and realclearpolitics.com]. You can be your own pollster." --Lawrence Jacobs, political science professor, University of Minnesota
"The more we rely on polls, and the more the media distort them, the more you have to worry about their impact on decision making in our democracy." --Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute
"When done well and seriously, polls are a way of allowing the public to speak collectively and for their concerns to be put into the political debate." --Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow, governance studies, Brookings Institution
"A public opinion poll is no substitute for thought." --Warren Buffett, chairman, Berkshire Hathaway, Inc.
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