Chances are, you have never been contacted for an election poll. But the dozens of high-quality election polls that will be released before Election Day represent a reasonable estimate of the opinions of all Americans.
High-quality pollsters select people randomly to take surveys. It is the concept of random selection that allows a relatively small group of survey participants to represent the country as a whole.
However, some pollsters use a different technique, where anyone who wants to participate in their panel can join it. But with that approach, there is less certainty that the group of people responding to any given poll is randomly representative.
If the initial sample does not look like the country as a whole, some views could be overrepresented or underrepresented, making it harder to accurately capture the attitudes of the entire U.S. population.
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