PITY the pollsters. In the spam age of junk emails, unwanted flyers and chirpy street interviewers, the serious job of finding out how people rate their political masters is becoming much more difficult.
The Pew Research Center in Washington DC, which studies people’s attitudes to the media and politics, reckons response rates to US opinion polls have fallen from 36 per cent of households in 1997 to 27 per cent in 2003. And the more people refuse to reply, the harder it is to put together a representative sample of voters. Some pollsters have turned to the internet to solve this difficulty, but although internet polling…
