WASHINGTON -- A fledgling advocacy organization attacked CNN pollsters in April, but the transgression they alleged did not pan out. Still, the details of this dust-up help illustrate two big challenges for opinion polling: First, the growing number of cellphone-only households is making it much harder for pollsters to reach adults under 30 years old; second, when pollsters are opaque about their methods, it makes it hard for the rest of us to make sense of their data.
It all began when Our Time co-founder Matthew Segal noticed something odd in a set of tabulations published by CNN. The data was from a recent national poll conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) for the news organization. Segal and his colleagues, who advocate on behalf of under 30 Americans, were puzzled that the questions on marijuana legalization and gay marriage were broken out by demographics like age, gender and race, but included no data for the 18-to-34 age group. The pollsters had instead inserted the abbreviation "N/A" in place of the numbers.
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