that’s interesting, I did not know that.  Does that presage the Koch brothers opening a bail bond division?

it would be time for a big party if all polling vanished.  That requirement to create a narrative in the media and the constant polling that it’s built around goes a long way to explaining the vacuity of the public political discussion.  It keeps us (the body politic) stupid.  The next big narrative driver may be fact checking, IMO.  At least then Chuck Todd will have a real job.

Starting October 1, the FCC began enforcing the “no automatic dialing for mobile phones” rule with more teeth. The fines are significant now. For this reason, the polling firms are obligated to use better techniques to ensure that their autodialing doesn’t accidentally captrue mobile numbers (e.g., for numbers ported from former landlines). As a result, the number of mobile phones polled after October 1 likely dropped appreciably.

This, of course, coincided with the first Presidential debate.

So…how much of the shift to the right after the first debate was caused by the debate itself (i.e., by shift in voters’ opinions) and how much by the change in sampling? I truly have no clue. In order to determine the answer, we’d have to look at polls conducted on October 1 and 2, and compare them to those on October 4 and 5. I doubt we’d have a statistically significant number to go on with such a small window of time, so we may never be able to determine the answer.

My own fuse is, of course, very short, and I passed go about 10 years ago, sometime during the first term of C+ Augustus.  I think I have now been joined by a majority of the electorate.

But the fun part here (and for the pollsters, too) is guessing just which way their polls are being thrown off by this phenomenon.

what I’m getting at is that ‘perversion’ you seem to enjoy, is not randomly distributed.  And further, there are some specific societal rational that ‘may’ explain it.

Me, I never do polls, except perhaps for recreation or curiosity.  As a committed capitalist, if they want marketing info from me, pay me and not Google for it.  I won’t even wear a logo T-shirt unless I personally have an affinity for it.  

According to political science, the vast majority of people who answer polls are sincere and honest in their responses, and those who aren’t tend to cancel each other out.  However, I’ve received an obscene number of polling calls this year. (Of course, this is the first Presidential election season where I’ve been in a swing state, and no one cared what I thought when I lived in Texas or California.) During this past month or so, I’ve been getting a call almost every day, sometimes more than one per day. At first, I answered honestly, but lately if it’s a robopoll, I just press numbers randomly. I even took the Spanish version once. heh. I can’t be the only voter experiencing polling fatigue, which probably partly explains the dramatic decline in participation. That has to impact the reliability of polls.

How is that served by polling on who you are going to vote for?  The person ahead in the polls has no reason to take a courageous stand.  The person behind in the polls has only one incentive: to be more like the person ahead in the polls, because, obviously, that’s the person the people like more.

The only time I answer questions about who I would vote for is when I tell them I’m a Muslim voting Libertarian, or a Buddhist voting straight Green Party.  But mostly I’m too busy these days to even bother.

In summary, there’s no benefit to answering polls for the individual, and people have mostly figured it out.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine who, in this election cycle, has less incentive to bother answering polls.