The death of Random Digit Dialing

Number of national public pollsters in the U.S. using method(s)

Stacked area chart showing 29 active national public pollsters in 2000 and 69 in 2022. Live phone with random-digit dialing alone fell from 27 to 4; online opt-in alone grew from zero to 28. In 2022, the remaining categories were live phone with voter-registration sampling only 2; probability-based panel only 7; probability-based panel and live phone 3; address-based sampling with multiple modes 7; interactive voice response alone or combined 4; online opt-in and live phone 4; online opt-in, probability-based panel and live phone 3; and other methods 7.

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Figures represent active national public pollsters in each even-numbered year and the methods they used. IVR = interactive voice response (robo-polling); ABS = address-based sampling; RBS = voter registration-based sampling; RDD = random-digit-dial sampling. Recreated from Pew’s published dataset and codebook.

Source: Pew Research Center, “How Public Polling Has Changed in the 21st Century” (2023)Get the data