Can we trust the polls on policy issues?
Is the looking glass merely cracked, or completely shattered?
On Sunday, I wrote to you with an excerpt from my book about the benefits of thinking about polls as a “cracked looking glass” that sometimes distort reflections of the public’s attitudes, but otherwise serves an important institutional purpose that no other tools provides. We also talked about how we should approach defining “the public” anyway.
These questions matter for determining both how accurate polls are and how they get incorporated into the political process. This post offers a few additional thoughts and supplementary evidence for the former question: just how good are issue polls?
