Rob Honeycutt: I’ve always imagined that to be primarily based on a direct polling question, as in, “Are you likely to vote in the coming election?” But maybe qualified further based on whether they voted in previous elections.

Polls suck. Don't listen to the polls.

BREAKING NEWS: Voters turned out in numbers not seen in decades to stop the far-right National Rally from taking power in the French National Assembly. Polls predicted a first-place finish for National Rally, which instead came in third in initial results as polling stations closed.

Projections in France's election show voters rejecting the far rightwww.npr.org Voters turned out in numbers not seen in decades to stop the far-right National Rally from taking power in the French National Assembly. Polls predicted a first-place finish for National Rally, which ...

I’m really curious about polling these days. I think most people now block unknown callers, so who is actually picking up when these polling companies call? How are they possibly representative of the overall electorate?

They aren’t. And then they try and weight the demographics of their poll responders to the population at large so you get like the opinions of the 4% of people who responded to the poll who were below 35 getting inflated to represent the 40% of the population they represent.

I imagine they also ask about how the person voted in previous elections and such, and then weighting for those and other factors. But it’s such a weird subset on the population that the actual figures could be wildly different one way or another.

That’s where you get the “likely voter” vs “registered voters” divide in some of these

I’ve always imagined that to be primarily based on a direct polling question, as in, “Are you likely to vote in the coming election?” But maybe qualified further based on whether they voted in previous elections.

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