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It's been interesting to see my Twitter 'replies' on the amount of polling recently. Some anger. Some conspiracy theories. Some genuine questions, and so on. So here are a few thoughts on why there have been so few.
1) In general, the holidays--both thanksgiving and Christmas--are a poor time to poll. There's usually a bit of a lull during those periods. This doesn't explain the total absence of polling; the early Dec. period is a natural target, for instance. But it's a factor
2) Impeachment, not Iowa, was the most important story during this period. The case for spending on national polling, or at least non-iowa polling, is better than it ordinarily would be at this point in the race.
3) The cost of telephone polls--and virtually all qualifying polls are telephone polls--has skyrocketed. The pres of SSRS, which fields many of the national polls out there, said at AAPOR last year that a standard national poll costs over 100k. As a result, fewer polls this year
4) A good Iowa caucus poll, I should note, is pretty costly. Iowa Dem caucus goers are like 10% of RVs in the state, so you need a big smaple. Those CNN/DMR/Selzer polls sometimes breach N=3000; ours was N=1500 with a 50% D oversample, and that's only bc we're off the voter file
5) I think it is worth noting that December is also at the end of a budget cycle. Costs were probably higher than expected (were in our case) and impeachment created demand for additional polls. Easy enough to see an organization or two making a late cut here
6) I see a lot of DNC conspiracy in my feed. The DNC hasn't reached out to me about our polling plans, and we wouldn't tell them anyway. I'd guess the DNC issued criteria with little to no knowledge of the upcoming polls, and probably hoping there would be more than there was
7) In general, there's little to no coordination between the various polling organizations on their schedules. I think it's possible that someone would have jumped if they knew there was no competition in Dec. But pollsters don't know that at a time when they could act on it
Speaking personally, it certainly would have influenced my thinking if I knew there would be no telephone poll in Iowa between ~11/10 and ~1/10. I don't know if it would have carried the day, but I'd certainly love to be in the field with an Iowa poll right now
Fortunately, I'd guess this drought will be over soon enough. I think it's reasonable to think that some firms that are going to hit this early January window--early enough so that they can come back for a final poll the weekend before.
Looking again at my replies, I'm surprised how many people seem to doubt the importance of the increase in cost. I mean, the cost of our Oct. 2019 polls in PA/FL/NC was basically 2.5x greater per respondent than our PA/FL/NC polls in Oct. 2016.
There's a very reason for this: caller ID allowed and the proliferation of spam calls encouraged many voters to decline calls from unknown numbers. That means pollsters need to make more calls, which means paying for more hours of work. No conspiracy or oligarchic ploy required
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