Question: Why is polling expensive?

From what I have read, polling is fairly expensive, meaning that only candidates running for high offices or candidates with a lot of money can afford it. Does anyone know why this is or have any recommendations for books or websites that might explain this?

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.

Scientific polling involves taking a statistical sampling. Because of the laws of probability, you can actually get a pretty accurate scientific survey with a relatively small sampling of the voting population. So the costs are the software plus the phone bank, plus the manpower to collect a few hundred surveys (usually calculate that at 2 to 3 respondent interviews per man hour).

For push polling to work, you have to target your calls better--that means buying phone numbers of registered and likely voters from the local party or another provider. This is far more expensive than random digit dialing. Then you have to call far more people--enough people to sway an election rather than the number needed to gather a statistical sampling.

I guess there's also some ethical problems with push polling too.
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I saw that post without any answers so I was trying to help a fellow DU'er out based on my own experiences. And, I've never done push polling so thanks for correcting my erroneous information.

Lots of candidates ask questions they would never want the public or press to know they were being asked on behalf of particular campaigns.