Good question. Especially as the wall-to-wall TV coverage of the election consists mostly of reading the latest poll over the air. That's why newsies love elections, they are so easy to cover, you don't need to know anything, you don't have to get out of the office and talk to people, you just read the poll results over the air.
Longish piece in the Wall St Journal over the difficulties of the pollsters in this cell phone age. The Journal says that a special law passed back in 1991 forbids the use of demon dialers on cell phone numbers. For a pollster to call a cell phone number, he has to hand dial the number. Which is slow. So all the pollsters prefer to call real wired phones. But, the Journal says that most of the people who answer the wired phones are over 65, which is not very representative. I can believe this, none of my three grown children has a wired phone. To add insult to injury, a large number of people just hang up the phone when they hear it is a pollster. I can believe that too. I have done a bit of political phone banking over the years. Used to be, the voters were sort of pleased to receive a call from the party and would talk to you about politics and stuff. Not any more. Now a days, they just hang up as soon as they learn who you are.
So the pollsters have trouble reaching a representative sample of voters. They compensate by "weighting" the sample they do manage to get. "Weighting" is adjusting the results based on past experience, or hunch, or voodoo. Actually it is surprising that they do as well as they do. And they have missed trends, like Brexit completely.
So, it might be worthwhile watching the election results come in next Tuesday. There might be a November Surprise for all of us.
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