Back in the day, I had worked as a phone monkey for one of those polling places, and I agree with you here as a 'best case'.  The phrasing and even down to the sequencing of questions are carefully crafted for the design of the 'client', and yes, there is ALWAYS a client.    Mainly they are 2 flavors; a client wants to know something or they want to publish something.  Even as a phone monkey I could tell the difference. Add in that average people that answer calls are already lonely people, stupid people that don't realize they can refuse, or people hoping to win a prize.    Then, between the phone monkeys, we often didn't want to talk to someone for 30-40 minutes, so, if you knew the call screener was listening to someone else, you could ask one question and drop the same answer to the next 2-10 questions.    Of course, that was still back in the day when polling had integrity, if you did not see the phrasing "results are accurate to 0.5%, 19 times out of 20" (or similar) you knew it was never a valid poll to start.  Now, like CNN, they will poll 20 democrats - 10 republicans and 10 left leaning 'moderates', and publish that with a straight face.