How a poll can represent your opinion even if you weren’t contacted for it

WASHINGTON (AP) — Chances are, you have never been contacted for an election poll. But the dozens of high-quality election polls that will be released before Election Day, Nov. 5, represent a reasonable estimate of the opinions of all Americans.

The best pollsters do that by ensuring they can randomly select the group of people who respond. That means each household in the United States has an equal chance of being included. Pollsters cannot reach every single household or even come close, so they assemble a group of people with the same range of political affiliations, ages, genders, educational backgrounds and locations as Americans overall.

In other words: You may not have been contacted to participate in the latest poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago, but someone else who shares your background and outlook likely was.

High-quality pollsters select people randomly to take surveys

It is the concept of random selection that allows a relatively small group of survey participants to represent the country as a whole.

Top-quality pollsters often start with lists of possible home addresses or telephone numbers, and then people are randomly selected from within that group. This is the kind of method that the AP uses in its polls conducted through the AP-NORC Center.

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