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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The key is that it’s (suppposed to be) random, and acknowledges that it’s not a precise result.
It’s easier to understand if you think about it in the context of rolling dice.
Imagine I tell you i am going to roll a dice, and I won’t tell you how many sides it has: so it could be a normal, six-sided dice or a twenty-sided dice, or a four-sided dice or whatever. But, I will tell you the results of the roll.
How many times would I need to roll before you could safely tell me, with say 95% certainty, how many sides the dice had? Even if I were going to roll it a billion times, after a relatively small number of rolls between 1 and 6, (100, 500, 1000) you’d be able to say pretty confidently that it was a d6.
Same thing here. Even if there are 300 million people, if you ask a thousand of them and have reason to believe they represent a random-enough sample of the population, you can extrapolate from their responses with confidence about the bigger population.
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