'Tis the season for phone surveys about the upcoming midterm elections, and if you are in a battleground state, you probably get a lot of political surveys calling you.
Do you answer their questions?
Hell no. I don’t even pick up the phone. It just encourages that sort of behaviour.
Sometimes, if I’m in the right mood. The right mood, and that their caller ID identifies them as a polling service. If it is “unknown caller”, I just don’t answer the phone.
Trouble is, I don’t believe them. In the past, I’ve participated in customer “surveys” that were really ads. I like answering honest surveys, but the fake ones piss me off.
Obviously, I have strong political opinions and am not shy about expressing them.
But poliitical surveys are a nuisance, and I generally don’t have the time or inclination to take part in them.
Put me down as having said this same thing. A pleasant and friendly sounding caller with the right approach can usually coax me into wasting my time on such nonsense.
Rude, poorly spoken, reading from a script types get the “click” almost immediately. Pre-recorded messages from politicians and beggars don’t get that much.
I like push polls, because I can mess with the results.
“Hell, if I heard Sen. Blubberbutt was involved in kiddie porn, I would twice as likely to vote for him! That’s business experience!”
Regards,
Shodan
Same here - I always have my spidey-senses tuned to guard against push-polls. But a “real” poll, surewhynot. Although one can always tell which side the bread is buttered on even for legit polls, for the most part IMHO they are using polling to fine-tune their message at a granular level.
I will sometimes indulge the callier for a while, to see if the survey is actually impartial or not. If they refer to a political figure without proper title (for example “Do you believe Obama is …”) I just hang up. Their bias is clear at that point.
Pre-recorded messages from politicians puts them on my ‘do not vote for’ list. The worst thing a politician can do in my case is have a machine call me the day before the election. When I see his name on the ballot, all I can think is ‘Oh right, that fucker that called me during dinner and didn’t even have the common courtesy to have a human to do the job.’
Truth!
I answered always, but in reality it is most of the time. I’ve been called like 5 times ever, and probably responded to four of them. Polls can really make a difference in how people think about elections, so I think adding my .00002 cents to the conversation is important.
For example, a poll showing that a challenger I support is close to upsetting an incumbent may help people take the challenger more seriously; or if I support the incumbent, a poll may help people decide the challenger is a fringe nutball who doesn’t have a shot.
+1 and all that.
Right. Many polls are “push polls” and I make sure to vote against the fucktards who use them.
Same with Pre-recorded messages.
I respond to polls if they call me when I am not busy.
It depends on what I’m doing at the moment. I answered a poll last night, but it was about a bunch of propositions that I know nothing about. I told the caller that I was saving up all of my political mail and would go through it before voting, and he laughed.
About 30 years ago, I did some political telephone polling, and I was the #1 person in our office for getting people to complete a poll. I have an extremely pleasant, non-threatening telephone voice. It definitely makes a difference in how people respond to a pollster.
Does anybody else see the irony in a poll asking people whether they participate in polls? 
When they were very young, I used to hand the phone to my children and tell them it was someone who wanted to give them a pony. Now I just let the call go to the answering machines. I miss those good ol’ days (sniff).
I will answer a phone survey if I have the time to do it. The most recent call caught me at a bad time; I informed the caller of this, and she understood, thanked me, and hung up.
What I don’t like are the ones involving local politics where the caller can’t even pronounce the city’s name properly. I was going to add, “and it was obvious the person knew nothing about local politics,” but that applies to pretty much everybody from outside of that area unless it’s a really big city. Does anybody in Anaheim care about an election in Pasadena?
I’m not sure if this would’ve been a “survey”, but a guy running for state legislature left two messages on our answering machine that he’d called (calling back the number (since I had no idea who he was and I was on call that weekend) got me his answering machine).
Useful, since I now know who to vote against.
I always welcome the opportunity to tell the surveyor how much I fucking hate everyone that he or she is asking me about. I make lot of joke posts. I’m not joking here.
I always respond. And if it’s a push-poll, I’ll complain about the questions until the caller finally hangs up on me.
This, oh so much this. If I get a chance to mess with pollsters, I will.