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.