> Now, though, there is no confusion: Generation X is safely Republican. One model from 2014 measuring only white voters through the 2012 election shows those born in the mid-to-late 1960s being the most Republican-leaning of all, more so than the older Boomers and Silent generation.
PDF page 10 (page 2 of the cross tabs) asks “would you rather see republicans or democrats control the house.” 64% say republicans or lean Republican, versus 29% that say democrats or lean democrats. 6% say no lean or not sure.
That’s great, but you can get that without getting blue parents. I have a small sample of red parents but a large sample of blue parents in my circle and they don’t answer unknown numbers. I realize this is anecdotal.
Most people don’t answer unknown phone calls, but the ones who do answer the phone don’t skew more red or blue compared to the folks who don’t: https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2017/05/15/what-low-resp... (“Telephone poll estimates for party affiliation, political ideology and religious affiliation continue to track well with estimates from high response rate surveys conducted in-person, like the General Social Survey.”)
Pew is of course the gold standard in polling organizations.
Your linked article discusses how telephone methodology has numerous significant flaws.
> The finding that a low response rate leads to substantial bias on some topics (e.g., volunteering) but not others (e.g., partisanship or religious affiliation) underscores the importance of having high response rate in-person surveys, which make such knowledge possible.
The above quote is saying “we can’t get accurate detailed demographics via phone” but using positively-oriented PR speak to do it. This is another way of admitting “in detail our demographics do not match the underlying population.” This could mean that their blue skews young, their red skews old, or their blue skews uneducated or vice versa, etc.
The article is from 5.5 years ago when they were just transitioning from landline polling to cell phone polling. Call spam has increased significantly since then.
Pew was founded in 1990 to do telephone research so of course they were going to defend it, but 2017 is when questions were just starting to be asked about it (in the context of a shift to mobile).
