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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE PROBLEMS WITH POLLS  
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Samuel Earle
September 29, 2024
The New York Review of Books
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_ Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete
co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no
longer imagine without it. _

A reenactment of polling methods on the CBS television program
America Speaks, hosted by the political pollster George Gallup, right,
New York City, September 5, 1948, CBS // The New York Review of Books

 

The twenty-first century was supposed to be a new golden age for
political polling. In 2008 Nate Silver, a thirty-year-old sports
journalist, became an overnight celebrity after predicting Barack
Obama’s election victory with uncanny accuracy, calling forty-nine
of fifty states correctly on his personal website, FiveThirtyEight.
His method was to aggregate multiple polls, weight them based on
various factors, and then subject them to the kind of forensic
statistical analysis used to evaluate the performance of baseball
players.

Reviewed:

Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them
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by G. Elliott Morris
W. W. Norton;  200 pages
July 11, 2023
Paperback:  $16.95
ISBN:  978-1-324-05207-4

 
W. W. Norton
In the 2012 presidential election, Silver went from celebrity to sage.
He picked the winner in all fifty states while traditional pollsters
delivered mixed results. “You know who won the election tonight?”
asked Rachel Maddow. “Nate Silver.” According to Marie Davidian,
the president of the American Statistical Association, the reason
Silver “could predict the election perfectly” was simple:
“dispassionate use of the data.” _The_ _New Republic_ declared
that it was “1936 all over again”—a reference to the year that
launched modern polling, when pollsters like George Gallup and Elmo
Roper predicted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory, upstaging more
old-fashioned election forecasts that he would lose to Alfred Landon.
Their innovation was the sample survey—gathering responses from a
group of people deemed representative of the entire population,
according to characteristics such as age, gender, and race, rather
than gathering as many responses as possible through much larger but
untargeted opt-in surveys or straw polls. Silver’s innovation was to
bring the sample survey into the age of big data.

The excitement of 2012 proved short-lived. In the 2016 election, polls
were ubiquitous—by one count, television networks discussed election
forecasts around sixteen times a day—but Donald Trump defied almost
all their predictions and won the presidency. Worse than that, the
polls were accused of enabling his victory by creating a fog of
complacency that inadvertently sank Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. In
his book _A Higher Loyalty _(2018), for example,
former FBI director James Comey expressed regret for publicizing the
bureau’s resumed investigation into her e-mails mere days before the
election. “I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was
going to win,” he wrote.

After Trump won, the polling industry joined journalists—many of
whom were lulled into similar complacency by misleading polling
numbers—in a period of soul-searching. How had their supposedly
objective methods underestimated Trump’s support so starkly? Their
British colleagues’ failure to foresee the Brexit vote months
earlier enhanced the mood of doubt and introspection. Then, in 2020,
after concerted efforts by polling companies and their aggregators to
correct previous mistakes, the polls ended up being more inaccurate
than at any time since 1980. The polling industry plunged into a
reputational crisis from which it has yet to recover fully.

In _Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them_,_ _the
journalist and data scientist G. Elliott Morris sets out to defend the
polling industry against its detractors and restore some
self-confidence to his peers. “The rush to declare polling dead is
misguided,” he writes. Morris understands the challenges polls face
today: plummeting response rates, rising costs, erratic voting
behavior, and public suspicion of pollsters (particularly among
Republicans). But he argues that the real problem is not so much the
polls as the public’s and the press’s misunderstandings of how
they work. For Morris, the answer is not fewer polls but more of them,
with audiences better educated to interpret and—most
importantly—appreciate them. After all, he asks, “would we want to
go back to sending out newspaper reporters to trawl the streets for
enough willing participants to release straw polls before voting
day?”

Morris’s bullishness is typical of the polling industry, a reflex
that shields it from facing knottier questions about polling’s
political and social usefulness. To many, the point of it seems
self-evident: political polls measure public opinion, and every
democracy should want its leaders to know more about what the public
thinks than the broad results that elections can provide. “Good
polls can reveal the will of the people,” Morris writes.
“Condemning them as worthless is dangerous to this cause.” But
that obscures their greatest achievement and larger influence, which
lies not in any particular prediction or service to democracy but in
the industry’s complete co-option of our understanding of public
opinion, a concept that predates polling but that we can no longer
imagine without it. The nature of this conquest now seems so natural,
so self-evident, that it passes without remark—even in a book on the
achievements of polling.

Public opinion has always been an elusive concept. “How does this
vague, fluctuating complex thing we call public opinion—omnipotent
yet indeterminate—a sovereign to whose voice everyone listens, yet
whose words, because he speaks with as many tongues as the waves of a
boisterous sea, it is so hard to catch—how does public opinion
express itself in America?” the British jurist, historian, and
Liberal politician James Bryce asked in _The_ _American
Commonwealth_ (1888). A half-century later Gallup invoked Bryce and
announced that he had found the answer: polling with sample surveys.
It was as if polls would do for public opinion in the twentieth
century what Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs had done for animal
motion in the nineteenth century: reveal to a wide audience what was
previously imperceptible to the naked eye. But like those of
photography, polling’s claims of accuracy—one early pollster
called the sample survey a “psychological X-Ray”—veiled an
intrinsic deception: it was all too easy to forget how reality is
framed and flattened by the medium’s design. (Pollsters have
cultivated comparisons with photography, describing their polls as
“snapshots”—ironically as a way to prove both their accuracy and
their partialness.)

Following their success in 1936, Gallup and his fellow pollsters—the
term was coined in 1939—promised that polling would revolutionize
not only our understanding of public opinion but democracy itself. No
longer would voters need to rely on elections to make their voices
heard. No longer would politicians need to gauge public opinion by the
size and volume of the crowds that cheered or jeered them or by the
ventriloquism of journalists. Thanks to their “new instrument,”
Gallup wrote, “the will of the majority of citizens can be
ascertained at all times,” realizing a “truer democracy” and
ensuring—“with little probability of error”—that dictatorships
will “become mere bogey stories to frighten our
great-grandchildren.” Such optimism was shared by Roper, who claimed
that the public opinion survey represented “the greatest
contribution to democracy since the introduction of the secret
ballot.”

Gallup and Roper did not invent the sample survey. They imported it
from the increasingly professionalized field of market research, where
both their careers began. It is hard to determine whether advancing
democracy was an honest goal or simply part of their marketing spiel.
But it’s clear they thought that political polling would make them
rich. “If it works for toothpaste, why not for politics?” Gallup
reasoned. “I saw [it] as a veritable gold mine if we could learn
fast enough how to use it in all of its ramifications,” Roper said.

These early pollsters preferred to ground the industry’s origin
story in the scientific method rather than the profit motive. To this
end, journals, institutions, and complex terminology proliferated in
the field’s first decades, giving polling the aura of scientific
inquiry. Gallup played the role of scientist, comparing his craft to
that of a meteorologist. He made sure his name was always prefixed by
“Dr.”—he had received his Ph.D. in applied psychology in
1928—and he made a great performance of not voting in elections,
which supposedly proved that he was separate from “the new science
of public opinion” he studied. “We have not the slightest interest
in who wins an election,” Gallup said. “All we want to do is be
right.” Roper agreed, describing the field as an “infant
science.”

Some of polling’s problems in measuring public opinion are indeed
typical of the natural sciences: supposedly “objective” methods
were, and still are, suffused with the prejudices of their day,
creating blind spots and distortions that only become clear in
hindsight. In the early decades of polling, for instance,
college-educated white men were widely assumed to be more interested
in politics than anyone else, and so survey research drastically
underrepresented black people, women, and low-income households in
pursuit of accuracy. (Surveyors also preferred spending time in more
affluent areas and households, while poorer neighborhoods were
sometimes avoided out of fear.) Such problems persist: one explanation
for polling’s failure to predict Trump’s win in 2016 is that
college graduates, who were more likely to favor Clinton, were
overrepresented among respondents.

Other problems with polling are typical of the social sciences: every
attempt to study how people think and act has the potential to
influence how they think and act, thus changing what is being
recorded, either in self-fulfilling or self-negating ways. The results
of any poll on a particular issue are liable to change how people
think about that issue, just as any poll showing a candidate’s
popularity is liable to influence that candidate’s popularity. The
effects are unpredictable: some social scientists record a bandwagon
effect, when people rally behind a candidate who is ahead in the
polls, while other studies point to an underdog effect, when the
opposite happens. Add to this respondents’ hypersensitivity toward
the wording and ordering of questions—Roper once quipped that “you
can ask a question in such a way as to get any answer you
want”—and any analogy between opinion polls and “a weather
forecast,” which Morris makes at least twice, collapses. (Like
“snapshot,” the weather forecast analogy suggests both accuracy
and unreliability.)

But the most fundamental problem with polling is that the phenomenon
it claims to record—public opinion—has no coherent meaning or
existence. The polling industry resolves this conundrum by simply
making “public opinion” synonymous with its methods: polls record
public opinion; public opinion is what polls record. Skeptics could
see this sleight of hand from the start. “Dr. Gallup does not make
the public more articulate,” Lindsay Rogers, a political scientist
at Columbia University, wrote in an early polemic against polling in
1949. “He only estimates how in replying to certain questions, it
would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘don’t know.’ Instead of
feeling the pulse of democracy, Dr. Gallup listens to its baby
talk.”

Polling, in this analysis, was not so much an infant science as an
infantilizing one: political matters were reduced to facile either/or
stances, with little concern for how lightly or intensely one held an
opinion or whether the opinion even existed before the survey. One of
the oldest and most ambiguous concepts in the social sciences—a
survey of the literature in 1965 quoted almost fifty conflicting
attempts at a definition of “public opinion”—was reduced to a
simple percentage: “60% think this, 40% think that.”

The conceits of such a percentage—its mirage of an equally informed,
equally engaged citizenry, its impression of a country that has
spoken—have been criticized by figures as varied as Martin Luther
King Jr. and Pierre Bourdieu, for whom public opinion was too
amorphous and impressionable to be fixed in the form of a number.
Those conceits have also been exposed by many researchers. In an
experiment conducted in 1980, people were asked whether they thought
“the 1975 Public Affairs Act” should be repealed: a third gave an
opinion, even though the act does not exist. In 1995 _The Washington
Post_ replicated the study with similar results, but found that
another tenth could be goaded into an opinion with a follow-up
question. (“Which [stance] comes closest to the way you feel?”)
When people were told that either President Clinton or the Republicans
wanted to repeal the act, more than half of respondents had a view.
More recently, a UK poll found that nearly half of respondents claimed
an opinion on a nonexistent politician, who actually proved relatively
popular. (Anyone who has knowingly nodded along to a name they’ve
never heard, hoping to avoid embarrassment, can relate to this.)

No poll can ever be sure what portion of answers are similarly offered
off the cuff or to what extent respondents hold their positions
outside the survey setting. The sociologist Leo Bogart said in 1972,
“The first question a pollster should ask is: ‘Have you thought
about this at all? Do you _have _an opinion?’” But usually
polling companies don’t want to know: adding questions costs time
and money, and ideally they want everyone to have an opinion on
everything.

Morris has strong opinions about polling and a wealth of experience
beyond his years. Born in 1996, he rose to prominence while still an
undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin by accurately
predicting that the Democrats would regain the House in the 2018
midterms. After graduating he joined _The_ _Economist_ as a data
analyst and journalist. He published _Strength in Numbers _in July
2022. In May 2023 he was announced as Nate Silver’s successor at
FiveThirtyEight. (Silver left amid a round of job cuts at
FiveThirtyEight,_ _now under the stewardship of Disney, with about
two thirds of its staff reportedly laid off.)

Morris’s book is filled with fighting talk: whatever the doubters
say, polls remain “one of the most democratizing forces in American
political history”; they can “reveal the will of the people”;
they serve “as a pipeline from the governed to the government and as
a xxxxxx against despots”; they are “the key to social
knowledge”; they “hand a megaphone to the voice of the people,
causing it to reverberate through the halls of government.” In one
of his most strident moments, Morris even suggests that critics of
polling are enemies of democracy: “In many cases, the denigration of
polls is made by elites, elected officials, and ideological activists
who have a stake in the public’s voice not being heard”—a claim
that would be easier to take seriously if he engaged with the critical
scholarship on the polling industry. Rogers’s 1949 polemic and
Gallup’s combative response receive a few paragraphs. Susan Herbst
and Sarah Igo are referenced in the acknowledgements, but any
influence of their important work on how polling hollows out
understanding of political participation and on the foundational ties
between the polling industry and market research is hard to find in
the main text of Morris’s book.

The reasons Morris gives for his fervent faith in polling are
underwhelming and overwrought. In the introduction he celebrates how
Republicans and Democrats now use polling to determine which
presidential primary candidates participate in debates, hailing this
as proof that “you don’t have to look far to find concrete
examples of polls serving meaningful functions in our electoral,
judicial, and governing systems.” He omits the fact that even major
polling companies have criticized this use of their findings. (“I
just don’t think polling is really up to the task of deciding the
field for the headliner debate,” Scott Keeter, then Pew’s director
of survey research, said in 2016.) Later we learn how in 1960 John F.
Kennedy’s pioneering pollsters “advised…a strategy for his
upcoming debate [with Richard Nixon], telling him to come off strong,
competent and understandable to the average American”—leaving us
to wonder how any candidate could ever have fared without such
scintillating guidance.

But Morris also knows that polls are not the “crystal balls” that
their most avid cheerleaders sometimes claim them to be, and he
vacillates between championing their indispensable place in democracy
and admitting their fallibility. Morris the populist revels in
nebulous expressions like “the will of the people,” “the power
of the people,” and “the voice of the people.” Morris the
scientist takes every opportunity to plead for caution and emphasize
plurality. Morris the populist prevails: by the book’s conclusion,
he is still insisting that “the will of the people is now quantified
and easily accessible by any reformer, legislator or interested
citizen”—despite beginning the same paragraph with a nod to
“what we have learned about the uncertainty in polling and the
varying quality of public opinion across issues.”

Caught between the seriousness of its science and the need to market
its product, the entire polling industry is trapped in a version of
this double act. Gallup was no different. As Igo noted
in _The_ _Averaged American _(2007), he wrote that “the American
people are as various as their land” and in the same article
repeatedly invoked the mythical “average man” discovered by polls.

Morris concedes that, overall, polling has yet to live up to its lofty
promises. But his reasons for why polls don’t work are even less
convincing than his reasons for why they do. His main targets for
blame are not pollsters or their methods but the public and, above
all, the press. As I read his defense of polling, the words of Oscar
Wilde came repeatedly to mind: “The play was a great success. The
audience was a failure.”

According to Morris, the public has failed to appreciate that every
poll comes with a margin of error, so really no poll can be wrong:
“Consumers of polling and election models should not trick
themselves into mistaking polls and projections for a science
they’re not—and will likely never be.” While more
polls—particularly in the very close 2024 presidential
election—have started to include the margin of error in their
results, Morris’s mixed messages will hardly help confused
consumers: he advises resisting total faith in polls but also says
that “they are scientific” and that “informed readers” should
turn to “RealClearPolitics and Pollster to know who’s ahead, and
to FiveThirtyEight to know whether they’ll win.”

But Morris saves his harshest words for the media, decrying “the
damage done to the polling industry by an overconfident and naïve
press.” The polling industry and the media have always had a
difficult, if also mutually dependent, relationship. While many
journalists initially resisted polls as an encroachment on their craft
and authority—“Today, unless you can say ‘According to the
Poop-A-Doop survey, Umpty-ump percent of the people chew gum while
they read Hot Shot News!’ you fail to make an impression,” one
journalist lamented in 1950—it’s also true that from the start,
the pollsters’ most important client was the press, and the two
quickly established symbiotic ties. The press commissioned polls to
generate news stories and bolstered its reporting with persuasive
statistics, while polls relied on the press for funding and,
crucially, publicity. By the end of the century, most major news
organizations had their own in-house polling operations or formal
partnerships with polling companies.

This partnership inevitably affected the nature and purpose of polls:
newspapers didn’t want to pay for boring findings; they wanted
engaging, dramatic stories, tales of conflict and controversy. The
polling industry obliged, with varying degrees of reluctance and
enthusiasm, and received not just money and publicity but an alibi:
the media could now be blamed for its worst traits—exaggerating
social conflict, simplifying issues, overstating accuracy. In the same
vein, Morris insists that whereas the media “want
attention-grabbing, confident predictions,” pollsters understand
“all the nuance and uncertainty that are inherent in their data.”
Elsewhere, Morris concedes that “pollsters systematically
overestimate their own accuracy,” but the nature and gravity of this
contradiction—that pollsters understand and systematically ignore
inconvenient truths—elude him.

The fact is that polling companies need engaging, dramatic results,
not only because such results keep their patrons in the press happy
but also because interesting poll results travel further and faster,
spreading the name of the company and thus attracting more clients.
While Morris laments how the pollsters and the press both do a “poor
job” conveying polling’s limitations, with no account—no
mention—of the business side of polling and no sense of how polls
need publicity, he misses how pollsters can become invested in their
own simplifications and misinterpretations. In pursuit of both
accuracy and profit, compromises are made.

It’s hard to believe, given the number of polls being conducted in
2024, but Gallup and Roper were always skeptical of election
forecasts. “All of us in the field of public opinion research regard
election forecasting as one of our least important contributions,”
Gallup said; Roper thought they were “socially useless” and might
“do very much more harm than good.” But election forecasts are the
only verifiable “theory” that this “science” puts forward:
their accuracy is fact-checked by the final ballot in a way that other
opinion polls never can be. For polling companies, election campaigns
are thus marketing campaigns. The results are twofold: an inordinate
number of polling companies participating in the game of predicting
elections, on the one hand (in 2020, there were at least 1,572
state-level preelection polls, including 438 in the final two weeks
alone, by over 200 different polling companies—all eager, in
Morris’s telling, to strengthen American democracy); and on the
other, a huge investment in election-forecasting over
opinion-measuring methods.

Polls may have once promised to make politics about more than
elections, but in practice they have surely done the opposite, with
each vote presaged by months, sometimes years, of obsessively
dissected forecasts and horse-race coverage. No one embodies this
trend more than the politically indifferent, election-obsessed Nate
Silver. “With the politics stuff, I just like the elections part,”
he told _The_ _New Yorker_ as he was leaving FiveThirtyEight.

Perhaps the polling industry’s standing in society today is most
analogous to that of the advertising industry that spawned it: polling
organizations are similarly ubiquitous, profitable, and treated
cynically by members of the public, who suspect an ulterior motive.
Like advertising, political polls are increasingly associated with
attempts to manipulate public opinion, tailor messaging in superficial
ways, and inform public relations strategies. Politicians of all
stripes denigrate polls in public and obsess over them in private.
“I don’t have a pollster,” Trump declared on the campaign trail
in 2015, before soon hiring one. “No one tells me what to say.” In
the months before Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw his candidacy,
his advisers frequently attacked the polls in the press for
underestimating his support. Despite polls that increasingly indicated
he was unlikely to defeat Trump, Biden refused to leave the race until
the political fallout from his disastrous debate performance forced
his hand.

In the 1990s a new technology replaced polling as the tool destined to
transform democracy: the Internet. In a fuller realization of
polling’s potential, people would be able to speak up and share
their opinions at all times, leading to a better-informed public, more
responsive governments, and a truer version of democracy for all. Just
as Gallup promised to bring the “town meeting” ideal into the
twentieth century—“This time, the whole nation is within the
doors,” he wrote—the Internet promised to bring it into the
twenty-first. “The function of the Net, in this conception, is to
facilitate a running national poll of public opinion, with immediate
electronic feedback from citizens to government and vice-versa,” the
political scientist Bruce Bimber explained in 1998.

Soon a specific kind of website became the medium for these hopes and
dreams: the social media platform, Facebook and Twitter in particular,
which launched in 2004 and 2006 respectively. Twitter pitched itself,
in a way reminiscent of Gallup’s early polls, as “The Town Hall
Meeting… In Your Pocket” and a “real-time measure of public
opinion.” It also seems relevant that as a nineteen-year-old
sophomore at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg first made a name for himself by
designing an online poll: FaceMash had users choose the more
attractive of two female students from their photos from the Internet
and built a university-wide ranking. “I almost want to put some of
these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on
which is more attractive,” the young Zuck wrote on his blog before
launching the short-lived site. Facebook followed a year later, and
soon he was celebrated as a champion of democracy.

Like the polling industry, social media platforms’ ties to the
advertising industry were either downplayed or ignored: the aim was to
give people a voice to enrich democracy (and then use what they said
and did to sell them stuff in increasingly sophisticated ways). Social
media platforms arrived at the same convenient conclusion as the
polling industry: healthy markets and healthy democracies needed the
same thing—to know what the public thinks. But surveys were no
longer necessary: through social media, users’ thoughts and actions
could be tracked at all times. By 2008, advertising gurus excitedly
announced, the Internet had already overtaken all other market
research methods—“postal, face-to-face and telephone”—to
become “the leading global modality for quantitative data
collection.” “No longer is recruitment an issue; no longer is the
phrasing of the question an issue; no longer is the duration of the
interview an issue; and no longer is respondent fatigue an issue,”
Finn Raben, director general of ESOMAR, one of Europe’s largest
conglomerates of market researchers, enthused in 2010. “If the topic
is of interest, then the material is already there…thus is born the
‘Age of Listening’ as opposed to the ‘Age of Questioning.’”

What the advertising industry celebrated as “listening,” however,
others saw as something more sinister. The digital economy, premised
on the invasion of privacy, was soon denounced as “surveillance
capitalism.” Information became its lifeblood, and digital companies
developed insatiable appetites for more and more information on users,
however trivial. This created a double dynamic: a desire not just to
record information but to generate more information.

This is one of social media’s most significant resonances with the
polling industry. Just as polls want respondents to have an opinion on
everything, cuing views through specific questions and portraying an
opinionated public while claiming a neutral detachment, social media
platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now X, repeat the same trick on
an even greater scale. “You don’t have to have an opinion on
everything” has become a refrain online, reflecting how much
pressure is applied in the opposite direction. Facebook asks its
users, “What’s on your mind?” X prompts its users, “What is
happening!?” (The panicked exclamation mark is a new addition,
neatly symbolizing both the platform’s neediness toward its users’
information and our disorienting present moment.) Shortly after
purchasing the platform in October 2022 for $44 billion, Elon Musk
implored users, “If I may beg your indulgence, please add your voice
to the public dialogue!”

Social media companies assure the public that their ravenous hunger
for opinions simply stems from their deeply felt desire to give people
“a voice.” (Speaking at Georgetown University in 2019, Zuckerberg
used the word “voice” over thirty times in his thirty-five-minute
address.) But what they really want is a reaction: a “like,” a
“share,” an emoji, a short comment, or some other form of
quantifiable communication that, following Lindsay Rogers, we might
call twenty-first-century “baby-talk”—information that can then
be packaged, analyzed, and sold. In this monetized vision of the
“town square,” more talk means more profit, and users are ideally
both perpetual pollsters—always courting reactions to their thoughts
and experiences—and obsessive respondents, offering simplified views
on a huge number of issues, from politics to brands of toothpaste.

The affinity between social media and polling is perfectly captured by
the polling function on many social media sites, which brings the
straw poll into the age of big data. Twitter launched one in 2015, and
Facebook followed two years later. As Twitter’s new CEO, Musk was
initially fond of using the feature. In November 2022 he announced
that his decision to reinstate Trump—who was banned from the
platform after the storming of the Capitol on January 6—would be
determined by a Twitter poll. More than 15 million users voted, and
51.8 percent voted “yes.” “The people have spoken,” Musk
tweeted. “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”
(Trump’s account was restored, but it wasn’t until August of this
year that he added his voice to the platform’s public dialogue once
again.) In December 2022, facing mounting criticism over his
leadership of Twitter, Musk held another Twitter poll on whether he
should continue as CEO. The online survey lasted twelve hours and
17.5 million users responded, with 57.5 percent wanting him out. Musk
made himself executive chairman instead, and he continues to call the
shots. His penchant for polls seems to have passed, but he continues
to defend their integrity. In March, spreading the conspiracy theory
that the polling industry uses fake interviews, he posted: “The vast
majority of polls are bs. Polls on this platform at least reach some
real users.”

In 1921, as the editor of the student newspaper at the University of
Iowa, the nineteen-year-old George Gallup wanted to attract new
readers. He published a notorious article titled “The Unattractive
Women,” which took the form of an ostensibly overheard conversation
between two male students and declared that it was women’s “duty
to…make themselves as attractive as they can”—a duty that, like
Zuckerberg some eight decades later, Gallup seemed to think many women
on his campus were failing at. The article led to a spike in
circulation and on-campus misogyny. “All of the girls were angry,”
Gallup later recalled, but “from that day on, the newspaper was
eagerly read.”

Gallup’s interest in getting attention and his desire to discover
“what the public wants” were two sides of the same coin. His Ph.D.
dissertation sought to pioneer an “objective” way of measuring
what parts of a newspaper readers spent time on. Gallup found that
they really enjoyed looking at comic strips and pictures, not the hard
news they liked to claim in surveys, and he called on “the modern
newspaper” to offer more of both “to get itself read” and become
more appealing “from an advertising point of view.” In Gallup’s
crowd-pleasing quest, polls were doubly useful: they were both a means
to discover what people wanted (respondents’ dishonesty
notwithstanding) and a product that people wanted—a form of
journalism that, like cartoons and pictures, could make politics light
and accessible.  

Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate
election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide
an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally
fickle social forces. That isn’t to say that polls don’t have uses
beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping
candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can
provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating
than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense—a vague
and sometimes misleading sense—of what 300 million people or more
think about an issue. But, _pace_ Morris, the time for celebrating
polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites
closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to
boom. Democracy isn’t faring quite so well.

Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about
democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive
to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only
they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The
virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and
power are left intact—all that matters in democracy is that everyone
has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical
sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a
loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and
economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the
discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard.

_—September 18, 2024_

_[SAMUEL EARLE is the author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the
World’s Most Successful Political Party
[[link removed]] and
a Ph.D. candidate at the Columbia Journalism School. (October 2024)]_

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