4 - The Wild West of Contemporary Polling

Summary

This chapter describes contemporary practices of probabilistic and nonprobabilistic pollsters. First, even pollsters who aspire to random sampling are doing something quite foreign to the random sampling paradigm. Continuing to use the language of random sampling is therefore becoming increasingly untenable. Second, the energy and growth in polling is concentrated in nonprobabilistic polls that do not even pretend to adhere to the tenets of the random sampling paradigm. When we use, teach, and critique such polls, we need a new language for assessing them. Finally, one of the biggest vulnerabilities for both probabilistic and nonprobabilistic polling is nonignorable nonresponse, something largely ignored in the current state of the art. It is striking that despite the incredible diversity of techniques currently deployed, academic and commercial pollsters mostly continue to use models that assume away nonignorable nonresponse.