Reply #1: There are several factors that go into polling [View All]

First you need to figure out what questions you want to ask and how to ask them. Push polling questions are probably cheaper since you are trying to influence people more than find out what they really want or think.

If you're going to be calling voters then you need to buy the lists from each area that you want to call. And depending on how many voters you want to call this could start adding up very quickly. The lists may only have 10 names a page and at 15 cents a page (which is what the old county clerk used to charge) and thousands of voters it really adds up. If you're doing polling locally the costs can be shared among several candidates of one party.

Then you need people and phones. This is where a lot of money can be spent. Local candidates can do internal polling using volunteers. The volunteers can use either the campaign headquarter phones or their own. Larger campaigns will usually have phone banks to make the calls.

But because internal polling is less acceptable to media outlets campaigns have to hire companies which will do all these steps. The biggest costs for them are going to be phones and people to make the calls. The more reputable companies will also strive to make the questions neutral so people aren't led to answer in one particular way.

fwiw, I've helped do polling for local candidates. Each time I used either my home phone or we went to a someone's office and used their phones. We found it is better to have the calls made at a centralized place so we can start tallying the results.