U.S. President Donald Trump takes questions from media at a press briefing at the White House, following a shooting incident during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in Washington, on Saturday.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Michael Adams is the founder and president of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. Andrew Parkin is the Institute’s executive director.
Ever since Donald Trump first set his sights on the presidency, it’s been hard to keep up with his non-stop outlandish statements and actions. The provocative things he says in the morning are followed by the offensive things he says in the evening, which are followed by the crazy things he posts on social media in the middle of the night – and the cycle starts over as we check the news over breakfast.
If you think this causes headaches for journalists, pundits and politicians, spare a thought for the pollsters. In normal times, we could periodically ask citizens serious questions about the big issues that affect their lives: what they thought of a President’s budget proposals, health care reforms, or foreign policy. But this only works when there are policies to refer to that don’t change tweet by tweet. And while traditionally these surveys might help governments calibrate their actions to ensure they meet with public approval, any result the President doesn’t like is dismissed as fake news. What’s the point?
There is an even bigger challenge: the moral one. Does asking the public whether they approve of Mr. Trump’s egregious thoughts and behaviours serve to normalize them? Should we really be asking the public if it’s okay to separate migrant children from their parents at the border? If paramilitary officers should be allowed to shoot citizens with impunity? If civilizations should be bombed back to the Stone Age?
These issues are not academic. Pollsters are not just bystanders – we both cover and shape the opinions we measure. When the data we produce land in the public realm, they become part of the story. Asking in a survey if people think the 2020 election was stolen suggests, even if implicitly, that it might be acceptable to say it was. It’s the same dilemma as the media’s: to point out the President’s falsehoods is to potentially display bias, and to not point them out potentially conveys the sense that the falsehoods might be true.
Sitting on our hands at such crucial moments is hardly a better option. It is essential to know how many and which voters continue to support the President, and why. But how we frame our results matter: we need to remind our audiences that polls can never tell you what’s right or wrong. Military actions that contravene international law are no more acceptable when they are supported by a majority of the people.
We should also be wary of the temptation to weaponize polls in the other direction: by using their results to ridicule Mr. Trump’s base. Sure, we can run the numbers to prove that people who think COVID-19 was a hoax, or that Barack Obama is a Muslim, or that aliens (the outer-space kind) live among us are likely to be part of the MAGA movement. But this is a slippery slope that can end with derision and division, when what we need is understanding and even empathy.
Labelling people as deplorables is no more likely to work today than it did for Hillary Clinton in 2016. It is far more constructive to understand people’s (often legitimate) fears and anxieties than to expose their sometimes limited knowledge of science, history or civics.
There is a still a role for responsible pollsters in these crazy times. Tracking approval ratings remains useful. Currently, the erosion of Mr. Trump’s approval at the very least offers much-needed encouragement to the citizens who oppose him. Taking the long view can be productive as well: Comparing public views today on a consistent set of metrics to those from years past can offer more signal than noise compared to overnight reactions to another outlandish statement.
We should also shift our focus to tracking more enduring values. It is natural to want to know whether opinions are shifting on the President’s policies. What we really need to know, however, is how social values are evolving. Have Americans really become more accepting of violence, more religious, more patriarchal, less cosmopolitan, or less interested in other cultures? This type of polling attracts less attention, yet ultimately gives us the clues we need about what’s driving America’s deepening ideological cleavages.
When the polling industry took off in the middle of the 20th century, led by George Gallup and others, it challenged the ability of politicians to claim, without risk of contradiction, that they spoke for the people. Polls tested those claims, ensuring that the voice of every citizen could be heard. The mission of survey research helped strengthen democracy then, and can continue to do so now. Only a genuine faker would call them fake news.