Dem
47
GOP
53
Pollsters are having a tough time getting unbiased samples. Random-digit dialing doesn't work well because so many people refuse to answer calls from unknown numbers, with Trump supporters doing this disproportionately. Pollsters have discovered that sending links to a survey as text messages works much better (higher response rates), so a lot of polling uses that now.
Now Apple is about to gum up the works. In the new release of iOS, there will be "on-device spam detection," meaning that all texts from unknown senders will go directly to the Spambox. This feature has actually been around for 5 years, but the default setting was "off." Now it will be "on," so people who are unaware of the change will not realize that there are many text messages piling up in a mailbox they probably don't even know exists. We understand why Apple is doing this, but it creates more and new problems for the polling industry. It also creates problems for campaigns that spam people 5x a day asking for money, which could differentially affect campaigns that depend on small donors as opposed to campaigns that make a few deals with megadonors to get their money. Making it harder to get through to small donors will probably hurt the Democrats more than it will hurt the Republicans. Of course, people can disable this new feature, but probably not many people will.
Making polling more difficult, expensive, and less accurate cuts many ways. Public polls will cost more, so media outlets will order fewer of them and trust them less. In some cases, the only polling will be campaign polls, and in the absence of alternatives, those will get more publicity, even though the numbers could be fudged or made up. But for campaigns themselves, this will be a problem. It is common for campaigns to run polls in two similar cities. Then they advertise heavily in one of them but not the other. Then they poll both cities again. If the city where they advertised shows a big change while the control city does not, they know the ad had an effect. But if polls are no longer reliable, it will be harder for campaigns to know what works, or at the very least, it will be more expensive to find out. This could affect campaigns with small budgets more than campaigns with large budgets. Think: primaries where an unknown challenger is trying to unseat an incumbent. (V)