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I'm Lily Jamelli. There was a time when pollsters went door to door to figure out what all of us are thinking.

Gallup did that for almost 50 years

before switching mostly to phones by the mid-80s.

Phone polling was cheaper but still reliable.

That is until the cell phone came along. was cheaper but still reliable.

That is until the cell phone came along.

I asked John Clifton, CEO of Gallup about this.

His company stopped doing presidential horse race polling in 2012 but still polls

Americans for their views on the sitting president and on topics ranging

from immigration to inflation. Well all the methodologies that we use are what we call probability based.

So we're trying to get as close as we can to true random probability.

And phones many decades ago got us almost exactly there, although that we still had to pick somebody within

a household once we randomly dialed up a household.

But today we can do that with address-based sampling, we can do it with phones, but we can also do it with

web, but only after we've recruited from those other samples.

Well, so help me understand what's happening with response rates on polls.

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