Catching up... and new "wireless only" estimates
What I've been up to, my recent writing, and the U.S. adult population is now nearly 90% wireless-only or wireless-mostly
Hello again. Apologies for the gap in posting - I have been busier than I anticipated since leaving my full-time role in mid-April to embark on consulting and figuring out what’s next. I’ve had a lot of conversations (with some of you! thank you!), and today through Friday I’m at my professional “Christmas” — aka, the annual conference for the American Association for Public Opinion Research — which required some prep work. I hope to do some dispatches from AAPOR but I might spend the time in conversations instead of writing. Also, I’m a natural introvert, so I get people-tired and run out of steam. I love people. I don’t always love talking; that’s why public opinion research is such a good field for me… I get to play with the data without having to make small talk.
In the meantime, I’ve written a few things for National Journal since I last posted. Here’s the run-down, in case you’ve missed it:
My April 25 column (now behind the paywall, sorry) looked at the odd paradox in which President Joe Biden is simultaneously viewed as too old to run, but also the only Democrat who can beat former President Donald Trump in a possible 2024 rematch — with a look back at 2020 for why the poll numbers might show what they do.
How Biden’s 2020 nomination played out matters tremendously in how we interpret his popularity going into 2024. Most people looking at his polling numbers seem to have forgotten that he wasn’t overwhelmingly popular among Democrats in 2019, either. He led in national primary polls, but never had a majority of the party behind him until after Super Tuesday ...
Biden struggled even more in the early states. In the winter of 2020, he came in fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary. He managed second in Nevada, but with less than 20 percent of the vote. His South Carolina win, fueled by a key endorsement from Rep. Jim Clyburn, saved him. Within three days the other major contenders in the centrist lane dropped out and endorsed him, allowing the former vice president to run the table on Super Tuesday.
But it’s notable that it wasn’t necessarily the electorate that made that decision – Biden was the choice for the majority of Democrats only after most of the competition in his lane was eliminated. … In that context, it is less surprising that now, survey after survey has shown that Democrats have tepid views of Biden’s run for 2024.
My May 2 column (still outside the paywall until Saturday!) looks at how the structure of poll questions — and reporting on those questions — can create a mirage of polarization in the public that may or may not actually exist.
A lot of political polling follows this pattern of forcing choices between extremes, and it means that what we’re doing is less about finding out what people think and more about finding out which extreme they find more palatable.
That is perfectly fine—there is value in knowing what is more palatable, and respondents will typically fall in line and pick one side or the other. The problem is that their answers don’t necessarily mean to respondents what they do to the twitterati and political junkies. These results are reported and interpreted as “Look! This is what the American public wants!” Or “look how divided we are!” In reality, we didn’t ask what they actually wanted, and we didn’t give them a chance to not appear divided.
Yesterday’s column (outside the paywall until May 20) is a reminder that we are 546 (now 545) days out from the 2024 general election. Polls are only very roughly predictive of what might happen at this point. It will be close. We knew that.
This reminder comes to you courtesy of widespread discussion about a Washington Post/ABC News poll that showed some fairly abysmal numbers for Biden’s job approval, plus a 7-point deficit to Trump in the 2024 general-election ballot question. The numbers are not in line with what most other polls are showing, meaning that it could be the start of a new trend, or simply an “outlier”—meaning the sample of Americans was off somehow, which can happen to even the best polls (and this is a good poll).
Also, in important polling news, we have new population estimates of the type of phones adults in the U.S. use. This is critical information for pollsters who still rely on telephone surveys (there are a few). Our resource for these estimates over the past couple decades has been the National Health Interview Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a large sample size in person survey — which is by far the best way to ensure you get a random sample of Americans and a high response rate, but it’s also really slow and expensive, so it’s only used for surveys that have a ton of time and resources available.
To the results:
We see here that about 72% of U.S. adults only have a wireless phone — no household telephone. Another 15% are wireless-mostly, meaning that they have a landline household telephone but they don’t really use it. That’s 87% of adults that we can generally only reach by mobile phone, and of course that is only if they answer it (which the survey does not ask).
If a telephone survey is not using at least this proportion of cell phones, it is not adequately capturing the population. Why would surveys not do that? Because Federal Communications Commission guidelines make it more expensive to call cell phones by banning automatic dialing technology; it’s a legacy rule based on when we paid per minute on cell phones (some people still do). Plenty of junk calls on cell phones use auto/robo-dialing, but legitimate researchers are not going to flout those rules, so it becomes much more expensive to call cell phones since an interviewer has to dial each number.
Importantly, don’t sleep on those age differences. If you’re not calling enough cell phones, the sample will be biased toward older people who are more likely to have landlines. You’re also going to disproportionately miss Hispanic and multiracial Americans.
Phone polling is generally on its way out; it’s still a good method if done correctly, but the time and labor it takes to get people to answer their phones is prohibitively expensive for a lot of efforts.