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

One thing to keep in mind is that the questions are very broad. We’re not getting detailed opinions. It’s closer to a coin flip dichotomy than an essay question.

You flip a coin 1000 times the overall statistics are going to be extremely close to 50-50. And when it comes to a population of people, if you take pains to spread the sample out over all demographics then you should be in the ballpark of being correct.

One has the *option* of flipping a coin 400,000,000 times instead of 1000 but the percentage isn’t going to noticeably change.