About these polls...

[Talitha]

I've NEVER been contacted to participate in a political poll.

How do "they" determine who to poll?

[oswaldactedalone]

1. It's all statistical

sampling and modeling. Believe it or not, polls are generally accurate but always come with a margin of error, +/- 3% or so. You sample about 1800 people taking into account gender and age, and you have a representative look at what 3 hundred million people think.

[Roland99]

2. I got a call once. From quinnipuac before the 2016 election

[titaniumsalute]

3. Random sampling

You actually don't know if you have been contacted. Most of the time if the line is busy or you don't answer there is no VM message.

[blueinredohio]

4. It's hard to believe that many people answer their phone

with all the scam calls I never answer mine unless I know the number just let them leave a message.

[bearsfootball516]

7. New York Times does an interactive live poll every night.

You can watch them make the calls in real time, they literally have to call 50,000 people just to get 400 respondents.

[anarch]

5. I dunno...I thnk I may have responded to one once...

but they only asked about Republican candidates (this was during the primaries for the 2016 presidential election), so it seemed like it was maybe an intra-party poll, and I don't know what they may have done with my response since I stopped the caller from going through the whole list of potential repubs to tell him "there is no way in hell I would ever vote for any of those cretins; just mark me down as 'strongly dislike' all of them" or something like that, and the call pretty much ended after that.

[brooklynite]

6. You've never been contacted by Nielsen either, I';d wager

[Maeve]

8. We get LOTS of calls

We have a landline and we answer it.

Sometimes...we lie. Particularly if it is an obvious push-poll for a Republican candidate. But usually, if the poll appears legit, we are honest. Sometimes brutally so.