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Can they do a poll to learn what kind of people hang up on pollsters?

It's kind of a problem.

Is there a certain type of person likely to refuse the probing calls? And does that affect polling numbers?

In a January op-ed in The New York Times, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, warned that the disparity between polls and the outcome in the New Hampshire Democratic primary--Clinton beat Obama despite polls showing him with an advantageous margin--could have been due, in part, to the fact that less affluent whites are more likely to hang up on pollsters. "These whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews," Kohut wrote.

Oh, so if the polls show Obama winning and then he doesn't, it's because racism correlates with the tendency to hang up on pollsters?

Several pollsters I [Seyward Darby] spoke to this week said there isn't a notable disparity between the types of people who answer questions and those who do not. John Zogby, president and CEO of Zogby International, told me that over the past few decades, there has been a "democratization of refusals" and that there is a 95-percent confidence rate in polls' accuracy.

Whew.

But this also means that only 25% of people go through with polls these days. So the polls only reflect what these strange people think. Who are they? Why do they lag behind the big national trend of nonresponsiveness? Who cares what they think?

Full post as published by Althouse on September 26, 2008 (boomark / email).