They use answering machines and caller ID to dodge the calls, and when all else fails, they slam down their receivers. At a time when America's newspapers, computers and airwaves are filled with two or three political polls a day, the trend is beginning to alarm statisticians and experts. High refusal rates, as they're called, raise new questions about the validity of surveys that use responses from 1,000 or fewer voters to conclude, for instance, that George W. Bush is ahead of Al Gore. Any biases could skew pollsters' samples. But members of the polling industry are troubled nonetheless, and some convened an international conference last fall to discuss the problem.
Political pollsters contend they can take a reasonably accurate measure of America's attitudes.
It's just more costly, because they have to make more calls to reach a representative sample. Ed Goeas, president of a top GOP firm called the Tarrance Group, said his firm needs to make 15,000 calls over three nights to reach 1,000 people. She maintains that candidates use polls as a way of sticking their fingers in the wind to see what the public wants to hear, and is urging people to hang up on pollsters. Goeas and Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies, say a legitimate political pollster's goal is to test a policy message, not dictate it or even develop it. As a campaign's intelligence officers, pollsters must gauge how favorably their candidate and challenger are perceived by the public.