Not many polls in December for first states in Democratic primary

[Drunken Irishman]

20. If it's a conspiracy against your candidate, why have they decreased each cycle since 2008?

Maybe you should look into it more instead of throwing around conspiracy theories. The reality is that polling is far harder today than it was in 2008. It doesn't take someone with an advanced degree in statistics to understand this.

In 2008, 80% of U.S. households had a landline, while only 20% used cellphones only.

Today? Only 41.7% of U.S. households have a landline - 54.9% of households are 'cellphone only':



That is a dramatic, massive decrease from 2008 - an election that was only a little over a decade ago.

Fact: polling cellphones is much harder today than it is to poll landlines.

Fact: Americans willing to participate in polls is at an all-time low.

Pew’s data suggest that decline is underway again, with response rates slipping to 7 percent in 2017 and 6 percent in 2018. What’s to blame for the recent slippage? Kennedy says it’s harder to get people to complete polls over cell phones because they are getting more calls they don’t want, which makes them less likely to talk to pollsters.

“It’s our sense that that exponential increase in robocalls, spoofing of incoming calls, pretending they’re a local number, has really changed the environment in using a cell phone,” said Kennedy.

What does this change mean? It means pollsters have to weigh their sample differently to be as accurate as possible, which also means more effort is placed into mining the results - and yes, more money:

“(W)ith the rise of cellphones and the increasing prevalence of people who decline to answer or complete surveys, how do you ensure that those you are interviewing are in fact representative of the underlying population?” Cook said. “This is not an intractable problem, but it places a premium on rigorous methodology, which can be complicated and costly.”

This article was from January, 2018 - long before Bernie announced he was running for president. And they came to the same consensus as the article you posted: it takes more money to poll today than it did a decade-plus ago because of the changing demographics. That is why there's fewer polls today than four years ago and eight years ago twelve years ago.