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I just hung up on a survey.
It claimed to be a political survey, from Anderson Williams Research. It was a robo-call, starting with, “First, am I speaking to -------.”
If it had been from a survey company whose name I recognized, I would have continued, but odds are it was a “push poll”. We have some hot races for local offices in San Antonio right now, and in my experience I’m much more likely to get a call from a push poll designed to tar some candidate than from a legitimate pollster.
If enough people start doing what I just did, it will become difficult or impossible to get a representative sample and do a good poll. I don’t particularly want that, but the legitimate polling companies should be terrified by the idea. What I’d like is a list of legitimate polling companies, that do polls without trying to rig the outcome and without trying to pass off attempts to change people’s opinions as real surveys.
To that end, I’d like us at Daily Kos to make a list of legitimate pollsters that are worth the time to talk to. I also think there should be an agreed set of principles and ethics that polling companies should help draw up and subscribe to. One such principle, I think, is that any poll should start off by disclosing who’s paying for it. We probably need a permanent organization that accredits pollsters, and that takes seriously any complaints that a poll crosses the line from opinion sampling to electioneering.
Cribbing from Wikipedia, here’s a list of 24 USA polling companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_polling_organizations#United_States
United States
Statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight maintains a list of pollsters who conduct surveys in U.S. political elections, and assigns each pollster a rating based on its methodology and historical accuracy.[6] Silver also lists the number of polls analyzed for each pollster.[6]
Six are associated with colleges or universities, and I recognize about twelve other names that I believe various articles on Daily Kos have referred to, implying that they are legitimate. Rasmussen Reports has a bit of a reputation for results that lean toward the GOP (at least up to the last couple of weeks before an election) but the experts on polling at Daily Kos seem to consider them legitimate, so I do also. They may have a bit of a conservative bias, but I’d take a poll from them, and from any company on this list. I just don’t want to waste time on some long spiel that’s only designed to mess with my mind.
I’d love for any suggestions on companies to include in this list, or recommendations that any be dropped.