Dissecting the Polls

 

 

THIS ISSUE OF FISH & GAME is hitting the streets around the time most of us will be exercising our right and sacred duty at the quadrennial election polls.

No one—at least no one still in possession of a controlling interest in their wits—would argue the fact that this has been an election cycle for the history books. But we are not about to grab the white-hot end of THAT topic. (seriously… how do you rationally contemplate a political environment in which a campaign bumper sticker with the F-word emblazoned across it is a fairly common sight in traffic, supermarket parking lots… even in the pickup lane of an elementary school?)

Instead, we think this is, coincidentally, an opportune time to examine polls of a different nature: Surveys.

If you have done business of any sort lately, from a simple pizza order to a dental appointment, you have more than likely been inundated with surveys wanting to know how “exceptional” the service or product you just received had been.

These customer service surveys are a relatively new and annoying addition to our lives. But surveys have been around for a long time. The Gallup Poll was once a household name, as were the Nielson Ratings, those mysterious tabulations that determined whether your favorite TV show lived or died.

Now everyone, from your dentist to the kid who delivered your half-pepperoni/half-Canadian bacon pizza eight minutes ago, are getting in on the action.
Statistical analysis is as much an art as it is a discipline in modern mathematics. It is easy to see why the results of polls and surveys are met with distrust and outright disbelief. How can a sample of just a few hundred or a few thousand people voice the opinions of millions? How can such tiny demographic slivers predict the actions and preferences of the greater masses? And when you consider how much harder it is now for pollsters to reach sample respondents than when everyone had landline phones and physical mail vs. email addresses, the potential for survey inaccuracy must have risen exponentially.

And yet, the public seems to be as hungry as ever for survey results as a menu item in their content consumption.

Top 10 lists, Top 100 lists, Best Places to Live, Eat, Work, Vacation, Retire… these staples of popular media are all compiled by polling.

In our arena, fishing and hunting regulations are managed to a large degree by creel and tagging surveys. Wildlife agencies use participation and expenditure surveys to determine the allocation of funding for often competing resources.

In the latter instance, the US Fish & Wildlife Service conducts a national survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation about every five years. In the past, their survey was a gold mine of data. It enabled us to track the strength of fishing and hunting participation in Texas and compare our state’s levels to other markets.

Texas anglers and hunters led the nation by wide margins in the last survey that broke out state-level statistics. Texas hunters dominated the rest of the nation with 40% more resident hunters than the next most active state—and spent 2 million more days in the field than the closest competitor.

We also beat out every other state in fishing, with more resident anglers for both fresh and saltwater. Our fishing days statistic was also dominant: Number one for freshwater and number two in salt (second only to Florida, with its many non-resident anglers).

Unfortunately, USFWS streamlined their methodology and their most recent surveys no longer provide state-level data. Still, when reviewing the region Texas is now grouped into—West South Central, with our TALO neighbors: Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma—we can apply a little “sidearm” to the statistics and get a bit more granular into the data.

In the 2022 survey, published last year, the West South Central region had a total of 4,355,000 anglers—3,971,000 resident and 385,000 non-resident.
Assuming the ratios remained consistent since the last USFWS state-level survey—a reasonable assumption—we can extrapolate that Texas’s 56% share of the regional total is around 2.65 million angers. That’s well over a half million more home-based anglers than second place Florida.

Hunting is an even more dramatic story. Assuming the same share-of-region ratios as fishing, Texas still dominates with 1.065 million resident hunters—almost 50% more than the next state on the list—and Texas is the only state with more than a million hunters.

RESIDENT HUNTERS 2022*

*2022 Statistics, adjusted using 2011 share of region percentages.

RANK	STATE	HUNTERS
1	TEXAS	1,065,000
2	Wisconsin	733,000
3	New York	674,000
4	Pennsylvania	638,000
5	Ohio	496,000
6	Alabama	492,000
7	California	483,000
8	Michigan	482,000
9	Illinois	441,000
10	Mississippi	436,000

 

RESIDENT ANGLERS 2022*

*2022 Statistics, adjusted using 2011 share of region percentages.

RANK	STATE	HUNTERS
1	TEXAS	2,654,00
2	Florida	2,007,000
3	New York	1,725,0000
4	California	1,680,000
5	Michigan	1,460,000
6	Ohio	1,314,000
7	North Carolina	1,266,000
8	Minnesota	1,211,000
9	Illinois	998,000
10	Pennsylvania	970,000

Of course, our interpretation of the available data could be all wrong. But unless and until we can find more complete data, we’ll stand by our conclusions. If anything, we could argue that our numbers are smaller than the actual. We have access to another proprietary data source that contains over 4 million hunting points of contact in Texas.

These findings—interpreted, extrapolated, or, if you prefer, sliced and diced—serve to validate our original concept for Texas Fish & Game—to cover all of the fishing and hunting available, year-round in the Lone Star State.

 

E-mail Roy at rneves@fishgame.com and Ardia at aneves@fishgame.com