Despite getting closer than before in 2024, the public polling industry has consistently underestimated support for President Donald Trump, in part due to more people ignoring unwanted calls and texts from pollsters.<\/p>\n
And polling is unlikely to get a helping hand from Big Tech: A new feature in Apple\u2019s incoming iPhone operating system could make it tougher and more expensive to get ahold of respondents.<\/p>\n
An Apple press event\u00a0from June<\/a>\u00a0describing new features in iOS 26 like \u201con-device spam detection\u201d and \u201cthe ability to screen new senders\u201d sent panic through the political polling and fundraising worlds.<\/p>\n \u201cThe modern problem of polling is reaching people in the first place, and everything that makes it harder to reach a potential respondent is damaging to our ability to poll,\u201d Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, told NOTUS.<\/p>\n When a filter is turned on, the Messages app sorts texts from unknown senders into a separate inbox. Users can choose to let through certain messages like urgent alerts, verification codes or texts from senders identified by Apple \u201cas not sent by businesses or organizations,\u201d the setting description says. Though a feature in Messages to silence \u201cunknown senders\u201d has existed since 2020, it is off by default and gone largely unnoticed until this upcoming Apple upgrade that includes a new specific folder for \u201cspam.\u201d The company touted the changes in their\u00a0release of iOS 26<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cUnknown senders will appear in a dedicated folder where users can then mark the number as known, ask for more information, or delete. These messages will remain silenced until a user accepts them,\u201d the company wrote. (Apple declined to comment for this story).<\/p>\n The setting could go far beyond filtering out robocalls or telemarketers. Already political fundraisers are\u00a0worried<\/a>\u00a0that their solicitation texts could get marked as spam.<\/p>\n \u201cApple\u2019s iOS 26 update introduces aggressive message filtering. Political texts \u2014 even from verified and compliant senders \u2014 will be treated as spam by default,\u201d the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote in a\u00a0memo<\/a>. \u201cApple isn\u2019t just targeting cold outreach or spammy actors. Every political message \u2014 shortcode, long code, doesn\u2019t matter \u2014 gets pushed into the dark.\u201d<\/p>\n More worrying for public opinion polls, pollsters told NOTUS their calls and texts being filtered out could make polling more expensive and\u00a0obtaining statistically random and reliable results more difficult, especially at the state and local levels.<\/p>\n Franklin has been conducting both statewide Wisconsin polls alongside national surveys since the Marquette poll\u2019s inception in 2012. He said that for about a decade, Marquette tried initially to reach potential respondents by cold-calling, about 99% of which went unanswered. Of that 1% who actually picked up, 35% to 45% would agree to be interviewed for the poll.<\/p>\n \u201cSo you can see where the problem lies. It\u2019s not that those 99 people were refusing to do a poll, it\u2019s that they didn\u2019t even know that someone was calling to do a poll,\u201d Franklin said.<\/p>\n For pollsters, this means getting calls answered and texts read is critical. And for every call or text that goes ignored, pollsters have to keep trying to find a respondent. The time, cost and effort only goes up if they are automatically filtered out.<\/p>\n That also means smaller operations and newer candidates might struggle more. Republican pollster Conor Maguire said those campaigns are already more likely to rely on cheaper \u201csnapshot\u201d polling done over texts in a short period of time due to financial constraints, as opposed to lengthier live polls backed by bigger budgets. Texts from small campaigns also may go unread with the new iOS.<\/p>\n \u201cThe incumbents are in better shape. Generally, they can raise more money and pay for full, all-live polls,\u201d Maguire told NOTUS. \u201cBut a lot of smaller campaigns and campaigns with lower budgets, they\u2019re gonna have trouble affording all live. And it\u2019s gonna raise the cost of these text -message snapshot polls.\u201d<\/p>\n tate-level polling is also more likely to be affected than national, Franklin said, partially because national respondents often agree to be followed up with. It\u2019s \u201ca reasonably low-effort ask to have them input your contact information once they\u2019ve agreed to be polled consistently.\u201d<\/p>\n But for his Wisconsin statewide polling, Franklin finds his sampling from the state\u2019s voter file. So even asking someone to save your number \u201cstill leaves out in the cold our state poll,\u201d which is \u201cjust one more barrier to getting through to those folks.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond these constraints, a major concern is how accurate the work-arounds are. Many traditional academic surveys rely on \u201cprobability sampling,\u201d which is randomly selecting from a representative overall list like the voter file. If pollsters know the whole voter file, they also know the statistical probability of each person being selected to be called is.<\/p>\n That fact underpins the math that makes random selection meaningfully representative of the whole, larger population.<\/p>\n But another method, one brought up by multiple pollsters on getting around the iOS 26 feature, doesn\u2019t involve that. This \u201cnon-probability sampling,\u201d like opt-in online polls, is when pollsters don\u2019t know what the odds are that someone taking the survey could have been picked.<\/p>\n That kind of polling is generally cheaper and more accessible. But those polls also \u201cjust are not representative of the population as a whole,\u201d Democratic pollster Adam Carlson told NOTUS.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re always going to be leery about people that are self-opting into something,\u201d Maguire said. \u201cThat\u2019s not great scientifically, as we want a real cross section of whatever district or country that we\u2019re researching.\u201d<\/p>\n If you\u2019re looking at a voter file, \u201cyou\u2019re trying to contact people, and you can target people by different demographics that you\u2019re lower on, that are hard to reach. That\u2019s where it\u2019ll be much, much more difficult to do,\u201d Carlson added.<\/p>\n People opting in to a poll online are also reaching out themselves and are more likely to respond to a call or message they signed up for. Randomly selecting people, to align with probability sampling \u2014 the preferred statistical method of many pollsters \u2014 doesn\u2019t allow for that.<\/p>\n That means this feature in iOS 26 might uniquely threaten the more accurate selection methods that pollsters like Marquette rely on.<\/p>\n \u201cTo the extent that this new Apple policy makes it harder or more expensive to do good, high-quality probability samples, it puts a little bit more of a thumb on the scale in favor of non-probability samples,\u201d Franklin said. \u201cThose of us that are committed to probability samples look at this as a bad thing. Anything that makes high-quality probability sampling harder to get makes the polling industry as a whole a little bit less reliable.\u201d<\/p>\n However, not all hope is lost for the polling industry, which is already looking for ways to adapt to new technologies. Carlson said some of his peers have spoken to their text vendors, who seem more optimistic about iOS 26.<\/p>\n \u201cIt could make things more challenging, for sure, but it\u2019s not quite as devastating as it seems at first glance. Users have to opt in,\u201d Carlson said. \u201cThe default on iPhones will still be what it is now, which is not separating out known and unknown numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n But even those who aren\u2019t expecting the entire industry to be reshaped are still wary.<\/p>\n \u201cI do think with the amount of people that are going to take the steps to sign up for it right now, it\u2019s not going to be a real drastic, fundamental change to the business,\u201d Maguire said. \u201cBut I do think it\u2019s going to increase costs all around.\u201d<\/p>\n Nuha Dolby<\/a>\u00a0is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Samuel Larreal<\/a>\u00a0is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and San Jos\u00e9 Spotlight.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite getting closer than before in 2024, the public polling industry has consistently underestimated support for President Donald…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[25679,165,74],"class_list":["post-64352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-centerpiece","tag-mobile","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}