George, you have struck a vein with this commentary. First, the answer to “are pollsters wasting their time (and our time)” is absolutely yes, for a host of reasons. There are more reasons than an unwillingness to answer a phone, other than the fact most of the population they want and need to reach only have the phone in their pocket. We do not want to disclose personal information in any form other than when secure and necessary. It is dangerous in today’s America to do so. So the sampling volume and sources can resultantly be so skewed it becomes irrelevant. People are willing to reveal what they think and feel if they are provided with non-invasive options to do so. I know this empirically because I am associated with a group that provides a technology that captures mountains of data frictionlessly while protecting the confidentiality of the respondent. This version is called Tapyness.com, but I am not sneaking in an advertisement here. In fact, it is my wish and hope that more technology developers will create and offer similar service platforms for the purpose of capturing attitude and experience data from the general population. Parsing down poll respondents into gender, generational, and economic class groups can be more noise than signal. I hope to see more good writing from you about the very outdated and useless polling industry. They are so drunk on their own Kool Aid they will never acknowledge their shortcomings and update their methods. The consulting fees they collect are too lucrative to disrupt their own model.