How is it that in the U.S.,surveys of 1,000 are accepted as representative of the entire country?

Question

I’ve noticed most U.S. polls query around 1,000 people and sometimes even less. Somehow that qualifies for headlines like “Americans say…” or “Most Americans…” How is it acceptable that 0.0002% of the population is accepted as representative?

In: Other

Answer 1

If the USA has 341 million people, the question to ask is for a question with say four choices are you going to get 341 million different responses?

So the question then arises, given a random set of individuals, how many do you need to get close to the national ratio of the four possible choices?

1000 is chosen as the upper limit as it is not an unmanageable number to poll and gives about a 3% margin of error.