Modern polling is hard because people tend to distrust elites more than in the past. It's a fundamentally unsolvable problem to elicit attitudes from people who

Modern polling is hard because people tend to distrust elites more than in the past. It's a fundamentally unsolvable problem to elicit attitudes from people who lie to you, lie to themselves and make up opinions on the spot. That said, modern polling uses a host of techniques and is of course not tied to landlines. Companies use access panels of available participants, f2f sampling (walking to random people's houses, but that's expensive of course), and in particular statistics such as poststratification.