It’s a perpetual election cycle and news media are constantly talking about how candidates and “issues” are polling. It’s hilarious to read the spin pollsters have for their complete failure in the 2020 election. Nobody has bothered to ask the fundamental question, “Who are they polling?”

Medial Loves Percentages

If old age teaches you anything it is that media loves percentages. It fills the time slot, sound authoritative, and nobody bothers to check the numbers out. This is one of the reasons MAGA Nazis believe any turd that comes out of the ass sitting on Donald Trumps shoulders, they’ve been conditioned to accept any percentage as a fact.

WBEZ

Not long ago WBEZ had some “debate” being aired over gun control. It wasn’t a debate. They filled some campus auditorium with people who wanted to take away every gun ever made, propped up a token Republican politician to be the Christian fed to the lions, then had a take away all guns politician do a whole lot of the talking.

I’m singling out WBEZ because a steaming pile of excrement got dropped on that stage. Supposedly this “debate” was recorded and put on the Web site, but I can’t remember what they called it. You cannot use the site search function to find it because they seem to run a “take all guns away” story each and every day when you look at the search results.

What was the steaming pile? That “97percent of all Americans believe . . .” Instantly my bullshit alarm went off. In order for that to be true, me or someone I know would had to have been surveyed/polled. The statistical odds of “97 percent” not including myself, anyone that showed up to my last high school reunion, or anyone I regularly exchange emails with is an astoundingly small number. A much more accurate statement would have been:

97 percent of gun control advocates who are the only ones we bothered to survey . . .

Surveys

Posting a survey online isn’t polling. Doesn’t matter where you post it, traffic != readers and certainly doesn’t mean people will actually respond.

Surveys are too *(&^)(&*ing long. There was some place just this past week emailed a survey link to me. I had bought something from them so I clicked. Whoever put that survey together was a complete fool! Nobody is going to sit there and answer a hundred questions! I kid you not. I scrolled down and stopped counting after fifty.

You get three questions in a survey, maybe five if you sold me something I really love and am in a good mood. You do not have the right to waste anymore time than that. It’s minutes of my life I will never get back.

Every few months I get a survey from the Republican party and another from the ACLU in the mail. Usually there is no postage necessary to return them so I fill them out. At the bottom of the Republican survey they have a “what should we focus on?” type question where a person can actually write an answer. I always give them the same answer:

Putting Trump in prison.

My answer

I’m pretty certain the don’t tabulate that.

Polling

Now we get to polling. That room full of people working phones that use auto-dialers. The West Wing has a great episode where they are desperately trying to get a poll conducted and the power goes out. But who are they calling?

We have the National Do Not Call Registry which is supposed to stop spammers but doesn’t. Sadly political organizations are supposedly exempt. Apparently the I-R-S wanting $10,000 in prepaid debit cards to avert criminal prosecution also ignores that list. They even call police stations. Dig through the ABC 7 News archives for that video, it’s hilarious. Cop trying to keep them on the phone long enough to trace the call while other cops are filming it and laughing their asses off.

Our Phones Protect Us

I really miss my Sonim Bolt. Wish they would come out with a 4G/LTE Sonim Bolt and change nothing else. By default it had an “Allow Contacts” setting. If your phone number was not in my contact list, you went straight to voice mail. I didn’t even get a missed call. You couldn’t even get around it by sending a text and like a good human I disabled texting because human beings do not text.

My current CAT S22 flip phone has a “Do Not Distrub” mode which appears to operate in much the same way. You have to read the documentation to figure that out though. It’s in the fine print about “some calls will still get through.”

According to this article in PC Magazine, iPhones have a “Silence Unknown Callers” setting.

That is actually a very good article with lots of tips and services to blocking unwanted SPAM. Most cell phone carriers and VoIP services also have some form of SPAM blocking tools.

SPAM Blocking Services

Before I had a phone that would protect me out of the box, I used to try ignoring any caller I didn’t recognize then looking them up on 800notes.com. If you are suffering from Cheap Bastard Syndrome that method can work . . . assuming your phone lets you block numbers. The downside is the phone rings. When you are in the middle of a debug session or other deep thought situation, that’s expensive.

Many of you subscribe to anti-spam services with online databases like Nomorobo. Even a VoIP phone can be protected by Nomorobo so they claim. I’m sure others do the same thing with a customer/crowd sourced list of SPAM numbers. Even claims to block political calls.

Back to the question

Who are they polling?

Old people with a copper wire land line. I’m not going to throw out a statistic from some survey here, I’m just going to ask how many of you still have a copper wire land line? We have one hooked to a fax machine that isn’t high tech enough to do fax over Internet. Good luck getting through on that!

This is why polling doesn’t work and won’t work going forward:

  • They can really only reach people with copper wire land lines. This rules out most people under the age of 50. Even my 60 year old neighbor got rid of his land line last year. The fax line we have is the only functioning land line on the entire trunk coming this way out of the local switch. Phone repairman told us that. They want us to get rid of it so they can quit maintaining the entire thing.
  • Fools try to put a hundred questions in an online survey the spam out a link to and only people who have absolutely no life will answer that many.
  • A survey you post on a Web site will go ignored for months then one day, long after you wanted the numbers from it 3K people will decide to respond.
  • People trying to earn a living taking paid surveys are focused on volume completion not honest answers. They tend to create an echo chamber parroting whatever they heard in the news. Those services are a great way to manufacture the stat you want, not to get accurate information.