Why are Millenials so difficult to poll?!?
Bernie Sanders winning the Michigan primary was a surprise to everyone who is actually paid to predict that kind of thing.
Literally every poll and survey conducted showed Hillary leading by more-than-a-small margin, with Sanders trailing by between 20 and 25 points.
In. Every. Poll.
That’s right: Not one major poll predicted that Sanders would win the Michigan primary, let alone in such a major upset victory. Chalk it up to the millennial vote, which seems stragely impervious to regular methods of data collection
So why are Millenials so hard to poll? What’s up with the tried-and-true data collection that methods that seem to be failing on the coming-of-age Millenial generation?
The first problem seems to be that the standard data collection method used by election pollsters hasn’t kept up with the times. Most polls are conducted by landline telephone, which in the past made sense as it gave easy location and demographic information to attach to the respondent. However, most millenials communicate via cell phone, and many millenial home owners are opting not to have a land line at all. So any data collection done over a landline skews heavily towards older voters, with more ‘outdated’ opinions, and largely excludes the millenial voice.
Another problem seems be the sheer diversity under the umbrella term ‘millenial’. Wide-swathed generalizations worked when values, attitudes and race were largely homogenous, and the media streaming at any given home was within a very limited scope, like with the Baby Boomer generation. However, the days of entire white, similarly-idealed, anglo-saxon American generations (living on one television channel and no internet to transmute different ideas and aesthetics ) is gone, and with it, statistically easy generational generalizations.
Another flaw in the data collection seems to be ambiguity in the term ‘Millenial’. For now, consensus marks it as a term for someone born between the early 80’s and the late 90’s, but there is a huge difference between a 30 year old mother of two who didn’t have a cell phone until she graduated college, and an 18 year old college bro who’s had an internet-enagled iPhone in his pocket for as long as he can remember. It doesn’t seem to be a good strategy to lump these two vastly different people into the ‘millenials’ category.
So what do we do? Clearly, landline methods of data collection don’t work anymore, and we can’t continue to use them. Perhaps a better strategy would be to implement official e-mail addresses for citizens. Sure, we wouldnt have the same grounded demographic information of the actual living location of the respondent, but that doesn’t seem to be serving a real purpose nowadays anyways, when Millenials don’t even use landlines. Polling companies have got to change the way they collect data, as their current methods are turning up serious flaws in their predictions.
