Polls are astrological race science, and the reason you'll never be able to convince anyone of this is adequately covered by the book When Prophecy Fails. I've come to think that their bias is only slightly ideological, but instead springs more from a self-serving impulse to mirror the current beliefs of the audience most likely to believe in polls i.e. people overly impressed by credentials. They enjoy the sheer volume of numbers, rather than their actual usefulness.
Alternate phrasings of identical questions asked in polls creates differences in outcome vastly larger than the effects they claim to detect. Somehow Nate Silver managed to get rich by selling synthetic CDOs of arbitrary polls (to people with his identical political outlook.)
The only real poll is to ask the same questions, in the same way, as the ballot sheet does. Ideally these should be asked as people are entering or leaving the voting booth, and people should be paid for their responses, in order not to bias yourself towards bored loudmouths with nothing to do. This would be good for accuracy, not for usefulness in anything but generating a suspicion of election fraud.
Instead, they're trying to figure out what percentage of black people go to the polls in Missouri, and pretending that the self-selected black voter has more in common politically with the general black phone answerer than the Missouri voter. Relying on that arbitrary assumption is the entire basis of their field.
edit: I haven't read https://site.pennpress.org/aha-2021/9780812250046/race-and-t... yet, but I heard an interview with the author around the time that it came out, and it's another hidden history of a field that has completely unearned legitimacy. "Political Science" might largely be considered an outgrowth of scientific racism.
Alternate phrasings of identical questions asked in polls creates differences in outcome vastly larger than the effects they claim to detect. Somehow Nate Silver managed to get rich by selling synthetic CDOs of arbitrary polls (to people with his identical political outlook.)
The only real poll is to ask the same questions, in the same way, as the ballot sheet does. Ideally these should be asked as people are entering or leaving the voting booth, and people should be paid for their responses, in order not to bias yourself towards bored loudmouths with nothing to do. This would be good for accuracy, not for usefulness in anything but generating a suspicion of election fraud.
Instead, they're trying to figure out what percentage of black people go to the polls in Missouri, and pretending that the self-selected black voter has more in common politically with the general black phone answerer than the Missouri voter. Relying on that arbitrary assumption is the entire basis of their field.
edit: I haven't read https://site.pennpress.org/aha-2021/9780812250046/race-and-t... yet, but I heard an interview with the author around the time that it came out, and it's another hidden history of a field that has completely unearned legitimacy. "Political Science" might largely be considered an outgrowth of scientific racism.