The cracked looking glass of public opinion polls 📊 April 18, 2021

Polls are often wrong, and sometimes meaningfully biased — but nothing else can do what they do.

Dear reader,

I am almost done with the revised draft of my book. I’m sure many of you want me to just print the damn thing already so you can buy a million copies, and maybe even read it. Me too! But the process is out of my control. I am told it takes months to edit copy and print galleys and send metadata to book sellers and get reviews and on and on. Alas, I am not the publisher.

The act of finally finishing my conclusions has colored my analysis of the polls this week. I am going to pull on a few different threads in this post, but hopefully it all comes together in a nice, neat package. The angle is: polls are great, but often flawed.

Separately, I have been thinking about how the public will react to the CDC’s pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Early signs are that aggregate hesitancy has not risen, which means demand for the Pfizer and Moderna shots will probably increase. I got my first Pfizer shot last week and am looking forward to regaining a sense of normalcy soon.

Not…