Most of the major media polls — the ABC News/Washington Post, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, CBS News — are conducted using a traditional phone methodology. | Pau Barrena/AFP/Getty Images Politics Pew: Phone polling in crisis again

The percentage of Americans willing to participate in telephone polls has hit a new low, according to a new report, raising doubts about the continued viability of the phone surveys that have traditionally dominated politics and elections, both in the media and in campaigns.

The Pew Research Center reported Wednesday that the response rate for its phone polls last year fell to just 6 percent — meaning pollsters could only complete interviews with 6 percent of the households in their samples. It continues the long-term decline in response rates, which had leveled off earlier this decade.


In releasing the data, Pew is also announcing that it will move “the lion’s share” of its tracking of political and social trends — considered by many to be the gold-standard in public-opinion research — to its online platform, part of a broader trend away from phone polling and toward the internet.

“We felt like we were sort of at this transition point,” Courtney Kennedy, the director of survey research at Pew, said in a phone interview.

The response rate for telephone polls has cratered over the past three decades. In 1997, the response rate stood at 36 percent, meaning interviews could be conducted with more than a third of households in a sample.

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But as technology like wireless phones, caller ID and telemarketing proliferated, response rates fell dramatically. By 2012, Pew’s response rate stood at just 9 percent, where it held through 2016.

Pew’s data suggest that decline is underway again, with response rates slipping to 7 percent in 2017 and 6 percent in 2018. What’s to blame for the recent slippage? Kennedy says it’s harder to get people to complete polls over cell phones because they are getting more calls they don’t want, which makes them less likely to talk to pollsters.

“It’s our sense that that exponential increase in robocalls, spoofing of incoming calls, pretending they’re a local number, has really changed the environment in using a cell phone,” said Kennedy.

Most of the major media polls — the ABC News/Washington Post, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, CBS News — are conducted using a traditional phone methodology, as are some of the academic polls regularly cited in the media, including from Quinnipiac University and Marist College. Phone numbers are generated and dialed to obtain a random sample of Americans, or voters.

Pew's report makes clear that the low response rates don't automatically mean all phone polling is invalid. Indeed, studies show pollsters have mostly been able to counter some of these forces by making complex adjustments to ensure they have a representative sample.

But all of that work is getting more difficult, potentially cost-prohibitive and could become increasingly prone to errors, the report says.

“That creates obvious massive problems for anyone doing telephone survey research,” said Mark Blumenthal, a pollster and co-founder of the website Pollster.com, which covered the polling industry. “The biggest problem is now about cost and the time needed to complete interviews.”

Already, many polling firms have transitioned to online surveys. Both CBS News and NBC News have commissioned online surveys. POLITICO partners with Morning Consult, an online polling vendor, for its public-opinion polling.

Pew’s move to online polling is driven partly by the increased difficulty in interviewing Americans over the phone. But Kennedy also said there are advantages to its American Trends Panel, a randomly selected, nationally represented group of people recruited to participate in its online surveys: allowing respondents to complete the surveys on their own time, and the ability to track changes in respondents over time.

“There’s definitely a lot to like about having an online panel,” Kennedy said. “And once we really started investing in our panel … we’ve really been happy with how that’s performed.”

But while that is a solution for a national poll, it may be more difficult to move political election polling online. Most national panels are too small to survey individual states, especially smaller states. And online polling of congressional districts — like the nearly 100 polls the New York Times and Siena College conducted of House races in the 2018 midterm elections — is virtually unheard of.

“There’s a real challenge, particularly for political campaigns and advocacy groups interested in measuring public opinion in smaller states and geography below the state level,” said Blumenthal.

Added Blumenthal, “At some point, you have to be able to complete calls at a reasonable cost.”

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