© 2024 WRVO Public Media
NPR News for Central New York
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Political polling may soon no longer be a game of telephone

Phil Roeder
/
via Flickr
The corn poll is a political tradition in Iowa.

Political polls were a crucial way of predicting the outcome of Tuesday’s elections. Polls in central New York's seat for Congress saw an 18 point swing in the campaign's final weeks. But how political polling is conducted – over the telephone – faces an uncertain future.

Pollsters have long used landline telephones to reach into people’s homes and ask them about issues and candidates. It’s far from an exact science, but it’s been the best we’ve got.

But the problem nowadays is that most people under the age of 35 don’t have landline telephones in their home.

"This creates an immediate problem in terms of who you’re polling and how they’re going to answer," said Guy Golan, a public relations and political campaign expert at Syracuse University.

That means any poll that relies on random calling won’t include a lot of young people. In this midterm election, those young voters are most likely the ones that also stayed home.

It's all left polling companies in big trouble, and they know it, according to Golan. It’s an increasing challenge to represent young voters in surveys. And so the days of the over-the-phone poll may be going the way of the wagon wheel.

But the industry is shifting toward a new measurement tool, social media. Campaigns are increasingly mining data from Facebook pages and tweets to see what people care about and what they’re talking about.

"Unlike polls where people self-report who they’re likely to vote for or how likely they are to go out and vote, social media analytics allows us to measure sentiment, measure what issues are discussed and map out networks," he said. 

Golan said it’s also about identifying who is getting involved in the conversation:

"How are they talking about issues?" Golan said. "What kind of attributes are they linking to, to a campaign or political candidate? And who is leading the conversation?"

This is a labor-intensive practice that requires resources. So right now, only big, well-funded campaigns are deploying it.

As for the decline in telephone polling, Golan said most people won’t mind no longer being bothered by the phone ringing during dinner time.