Ah naw. I’ve had them argue that all end stage civilizations had women empowered and able to vote and that’s what brought them down. Seriously.
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If the polling company does a professional job they start with some questions which establish the category of respondent (age, gender, etc) so that a representative sample of the national population can be built up.
Of course lots of polls aren’t done that way.
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Saw online the other day:
Half of Americans think Trump is a terrible rapist.
The other half think he’s a wonderful rapist.
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So, everyone knows he’s a rapist.
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I am (more or less) all of those, and have never voted R in my life, because they were hypocritical, short sighted assholes even before they became autocratic fascists. Being any or all of those categories gives no one a pass on voting for those flaming hemorrhoids.
(Steps down off soap box)
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But that’s the whole point. It’s entirely meaningless for pollster to ask “Are you the kind of person who answers polls?” as the audience is 100% self-selected to agree. They have zero data from people who disagree, so anything they ascribe to the unpolled segment is entirely speculative.
At most, they can figure out the demographics of the people who answer polls, and come up with “95% Trumpy, 98% white,” etc., and then try to back-match the missing data to the results of some prior event, such as an election. But that’s no longer a poll, that’s just reporting the results of the most recent election. It’s completely invalid.
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I’d further qualify that with “3. still have a landline” and “4. never bothered to put themselves on the DNC list” (though here I’m assuming pollsters have to abide by that). I got rid of my landline about 1 month ago; got tired of waiting for the legit pollster who never called my DNC number.
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Political calls were specifically excluded from the DNC. 
Not that there’s any sort of meaningful enforcement of the DNC. I mean, how many times a day does that rat bastitch Scam Likely call your cell? I have a very old Sprint number, so I get tons.
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I think Quinnipaic is one of the better ones. I just know as an engineer there are limitations to extrapolation of a flawed data set. I can’t imagine that pollsters have some magical tool that wipes away the bias inherent when whole demographic groups don’t participate.
In my industry (medical devices), we lived through (and still deal with) decades of clinical studies that ignored women and BIPOC people. As a result, thousands of devices have been designed and validated that either don’t work, don’t work the same, or can outright harm people from thise communities.
That’s a flaw with a lot of polls, but I read the section on this poll’s methods and they call both landline and mobile phones.
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7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Why did you get rid of your land phone line?
Good for you! Being in all those categories doesn’t mean you should vote there, just there’s no reason to do so. Their current platform appears to be basically only people of exactly those qualities qualify as people and are kings.
You shouldn’t vote R under their current platform for any reason, but if you weren’t in all of those categories, you’d be firmly feeding your face to the leopards.
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