American journalist Morris, a writer for the Economist, analyzes public opinion polls and pollsters, maintaining that they more reliably report trends, similar to weather forecasts, than provide unassailable predictions...He dissuades readers from dismissing polls and faults researchers for overemphasizing the easily accessible views of highly educated people...This book’s lucid language explains techniques such as manipulative push and unofficial straw polls, while setting the topic in its historical context.
In the 2020 presidential election, a poll taken by ABC News and the Washington Post projected that Joe Biden would defeat Donald Trump in Wisconsin by a towering 17 percentage points...Ultimately, Biden’s lead was less than 1 point...How did the pollsters get it so wrong?...Morris looks deep inside the often flawed assumptions of the pollsters and efforts to overcome the mathematical flaws inherent in their surveys, from sample bias to margins of error...Those readers with a bent for statistics will take interest in the author’s descriptions of such matters as sampling errors, the law of large numbers, and the corrective tools of smoothing and aggregation...Morris makes a solid case for polls as tools to give voice to the people while allowing that improvements are needed.
Economist journalist Morris debuts with a detailed rundown of how public opinion polling has evolved from ancient Greece to the present day and why it is essential for democratic societies...Contending that polls 'shape the government’s understanding of what the people want from their leaders,' Morris traces the concept that public opinion, or the 'general will,' should guide the processes of lawmaking and governing to Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and notes that the first published straw polls appeared during the 1824 U.S. presidential election...Though Morris’s discussions of technical matters, including the 'raking' algorithm pollsters use to determine whether their surveys are representative, can be heavy going, he makes a persuasive case for the necessity of polling and the need to better educate the public about how it works...Political junkies and policy analysts will savor this informative deep dive.
