Do you answer political pollsters when they call?

[jhc68]

Because of union affiliations and political stuff I've done our home phone # is out there and we get lots of political boiler-room survey calls.
Aside from the annoyance of the phone ringing, I can't understand why anyone woud spend time responding to these yahoos. Of course some of the calls are not legit polls but campaign shills hoping to influence opinion.
But even for the legit polls, does any sane person answer questions from strangers on the phone about your personal opinions ? If so, why?
And if no sane person answers such cold-call surveys, what does that mean about the state of political polling?

[gh]

all of my phones have caller ID: if I don't know who it is, I don't answer.

Come to think of it, 75% of the time I don't answer when i DO know who it is!

My take is that the phone is generally a one-way device: I use it to call you. You don't call me.

That's why god invented e-mail.

[guru]

Eliminated my landline around eight years ago. Life is heaven...

[tandfman]

I hang up on pollsters and survey takers. I get lots of charitable solicitation calls; I interrupt the caller and tell him/her that we do not respond to any telephone solicitations.

Unfortunately, when Congress passed the law that prohibited unsolicited calls to those who placed themselves on the national do-not-call list, they yielded to pressures and carved out exceptions for political calls (but, of course), and also charitable solicitations. The not-for-profit lobbyists convinced Congress that they'd find fund-raising for good causes impossible if they couldn't use the telephone.

[lonewolf]

I'm with gh. If I don't recognize the name or number (and sometimes when I do) on my "phone screen", I don't answer..
Sometimes when a survey does get through and I am in a playful mood I turn the interview around and ask the caller to answer the same question before I do.. usually they quickly hang up.

[gh]

There has also been a house rule at Hacienda Hill for some 30-odd years now: if the phone rings between 17:00 and 19:00, don't answer it!

[Flumpy]

Only 1 person has my lanline and that's my mum. I answer about half of the time

[tandfman]

I'm with gh. If I don't recognize the name or number (and sometimes when I do) on my "phone screen", I don't answer..
Sometimes when a survey does get through and I am in a playful mood I turn the interview around and ask the caller to answer the same question before I do.. usually they quickly hang up.

If you have the time, one way to deal with people soliciting either sales or charitable contributions is to engage them in conversation. Ask them questions about everything they say, protract the call any way you can, and then say no or hang up. That really hurts them because you've wasted their time. Most often, they're compensated on a commission basis, and their success is very much related to their volume of calls. If you put them out of business for 5 minutes, they hate it. But what the heck, I hate being interrupted by phone calls from people I don't know, and they can't blame me for interfering with their livelihood because I didn't initiate the call. They've interfered with whatever I happened to be doing when the phone rang. Screw 'em.

Fortunately for them, I never have the time to do more than terminate the call quickly.

[tandfman]

There has also been a house rule at Hacienda Hill for some 30-odd years now: if the phone rings between 17:00 and 19:00, don't answer it!

At my house, we ignore the phone ringing between 1900 and 1930, Mondays through Fridays. Jeopardy!

[Marlow]

I'm with gh. If I don't recognize the name or number (and sometimes when I do) on my "phone screen", I don't answer..
Sometimes when a survey does get through and I am in a playful mood I turn the interview around and ask the caller to answer the same question before I do.. usually they quickly hang up.

If you have the time, one way to deal with people soliciting either sales or charitable contributions is to engage them in conversation.

Agree.
If I do answer (rarely, except for family always) I ask solicitors for their home phone number (they are calling my home number, after all) so I can call them back later when I have some 'free-time". Strangely enough. they never give it to me, but I insist . . . until they hang up.

[jeremyp]

My wife likes to pick up and "give them what for" on occasions. She's even been known to refer them as being a mendacious sack of feces.