More on Polling.

This is a follow up on the post explaining why there may be difference between what polling is telling us - namely, that there is a 13% edge in Democrat voters - and what registration data is telling us - namely, that Democrat registration has fallen below that of Republicans. The answer suggested by Michael Barone is that Republicans may be less willing to cooperate with pollsters.

This post indicates that this might be a very big problem indeed. Apparently, the last decade has seen a dramatic decline in the willingness of Americans to answer poll questions.

Only 9% of sampled households gave an answer to pollsters in 2012:

It has become increasingly difficult to contact potential respondents and to persuade them to participate. The percentage of households in a sample that are successfully interviewed – the response rate – has fallen dramatically. At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today.

The general decline in response rates is evident across nearly all types of surveys, in the United States and abroad. At the same time, greater effort and expense are required to achieve even the diminished response rates of today. These challenges have led many to question whether surveys are still providing accurate and unbiased information.

What's the reason for this? More paranoia among Americans? A growing hostility by 50+% of Americans who think that polls are bogus? "Poll fatigue"?

Check out the anecdotes and this nifty chart of "distrust of the media correlated to ideology":

Look at the interesting "oikophobic" inversion in 2002, when conservative trust for the media rises at the same time as liberal trust in the media drops. What was happening then? The media was taking a more pro-American stance in the aftermath of 9/11.

What's positive for America is negative for the left.