I do kinda' suspect that unless there's some incredibly drastic changes to the ecosystem they're functioning in, polling in general and phone polling in specific just... isn't actually going to work going forward. You can't operate effective polling when your operators are fundamentally untrusted by the vast majority of the public. There's zero way to get a representative sample out of that, it's just flatly
impossible. The people who do respond are not going to be representative of the population, flat out. Statistics can massage a lot but it's
incredibly difficult to do anything worth a damn with a data set poisoned from one end to the other right at the root.
Unfortunately, there's also sod all the polling companies can
do about it. The problem isn't what they're doing, it's what third parties are doing that renders their efforts functionally useless. Folks (that is, a representative sample of the population) have to be able to, largely, trust that whoever's on the other end of the line is legitimate and largely non-malicious, and right now you just... can't. You can't trust random phone calls, you broadly can't trust any call except ones you've previously vetted. You can't trust random websites aren't going to try to infest your system with malware or phish your private information. So on and so forth. Every venue polling can use, the only people that's going to respond to them are people who
aren't representative of the general population.
And, like. You can try to guess what the rest of the population's acting like based on how those ones are. But that's not exactly reliable even by polling standards, might as well be ringing up cleo and seeing what the horoscopes are saying that week
Basically what they need is some way to strangle scam and robo calls (and websites, and emails) in the crib, put a cap in the fraud market's head and dump the body in a sump. Good friggin' luck with that one.