You Ask, We Answer: How The Times/Siena Poll Is Conducted

Whom do we talk to, and how do we reach them? Do you call cellphones?

The New York Times/Siena College Poll is conducted by phone using live interviewers at call centers based in Florida, New York, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. Respondents are randomly selected from a national list of registered voters, and we call voters both on landlines and cellphones. In recent Times/Siena polls, more than 90 percent of voters were reached by cellphone.

One of the most common questions we get is how many people answer calls from pollsters these days. Often, it takes many attempts to reach some individuals. In the end, fewer than 2 percent of the people our callers try to reach will respond. We try to keep our calls short — less than 15 minutes — because the longer the interview, the fewer people stay on the phone.

For battleground polls, we called voters who live in six of the states considered to be key in the upcoming presidential race: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Since presidential elections are decided based on the electoral college, not the popular vote, we focus much of our polling on the states that are likeliest to decide the outcome of the race.

Is a phone poll really still a good way to reach people?

Phone polls used to be considered the gold standard in survey research. Now, they’re one of many acceptable ways to reach voters, along with methods like online panels and text messages. The advantages of telephone surveys have dwindled over time, as declining response rates increased the costs and probably undermined the representativeness of phone polls. At some point, telephone polling might cease to be viable altogether.

But telephone surveys remain a good way to conduct a political survey. They’re still the only way to quickly reach a random selection of voters, as there’s no national list of email addresses, and postal mail takes a long time. Other options — like recruiting panelists by mail to take a survey in advance — come with their own challenges, like the risk that only the most politically interested voters will stick around for a poll in the future.

In recent elections, telephone polls — including The Times/Siena Poll — have continued to fare well, in part because voter registration files offer an excellent way to ensure a proper balance between Democrats and Republicans. And perhaps surprisingly, a Times/Siena poll in Wisconsin had similar findings to a mail survey we commissioned that paid voters up to $25 to take a poll and obtained a response rate of nearly 30 percent.