At the heart of democratic governance is the notion that what government does should be responsive to what people want. To reflect citizens’ desires, political leaders need to have a sense of which policies most people would prefer, what kinds of concerns they have, and ideally why they are making the choices they are making. Public opinion polling is the primary vehicle through which the desires, hopes, and preferences of members of the public trickle up to influence the decisions of social and political leaders.

Institutions of governance in contemporary democracies offer citizens relatively limited opportunity to express their preferences and provide no meaningful mechanism for explaining those preferences to leaders. When voters enter the voting booth, they typically indicate who they think should represent them at various levels of government and sometimes also get to express up-or-down views on ballot initiatives. These choices are not particularly revealing about public desires. Election results don’t tell us who made which choices or what their motivations might have been. Indeed, knowing only who won does not reveal whether voters were expressing a preference for the candidate they chose or against that candidate’s opponent. So, although representatives often begin their terms in office asserting that they have a mandate to lead, the results of elections provide little insight into what, if anything, that mandate is for.

When it comes to opinion research, it sometimes isn’t just a matter of meeting scientific standards, but about assuaging doubts about whether measuring should be done at all. This is especially true these days when questions have been raised about the accuracy of scientific polling in recent elections. Some of the criticisms made after the 2016 and 2020 elections were helpful, and survey researchers responded as scientists —reviewing their methods and making improvements where necessary and possible. Other criticisms are often the result of disappointment with what public opinion research reports. Like election denial, disappointment with a preferred outcome causes some people to question legitimate results. Of course, we all know that polls are a snapshot in time and opinions can change — and have changed — dramatically following major events. In 2022, pre-election polls gave Americans an accurate sense of who was favored in the elections and how public evaluations of them were changing as the election approached. They also underscored those elections where polls were just too close to say what might happen (and the days of vote counting after November 8 underscored the accuracy of many close pre-election polls).