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?
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Adding to the other answers, let’s see an example where having a lot of people answer your poll won’t give you an accurate prediction *because* it wasn’t representative of the population. I’ll talk about the 1936 US presidential election, and how a publication called The Literary Digest conducted one of the biggest polls ever (if not the biggest).
This publication managed to get more than 2 million answers, for an election where 80 million people were eligible to vote. They predicted that Alfred Landon would comfortably win against Roosevelt, but in the end the margin of victory was the other way around.
The main reason why their result was so off, was that they polled their own subscribers, plus people on two public lists: automobile owners and telephone users. All three lists are not representative of the population: it’s 1936, and the only people on those lists are the ones that have enough disposable income to keep buying the magazine, have a car, or own a telephone.
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