Add your own questions to our 2026 election polls!

Strength In Numbers is planning to go big on interactive polling and modeling in 2026. Help us decide what questions to track on a monthly basis

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Today I have a short, interactive post for the whole audience.

One of the things that sets this Substack apart from other political analysis blogs is that Strength In Numbers sponsors its own polling, conducted in partnership with a mixed-mode polling firm called Verasight (“mixed mode” means they source interviews via multiple modes: in this case, via the internet, text messages, and phone calls). And we (Elliott + Verasight) also let subscribers to the site suggest their own questions for us to ask 1,500-2,000 U.S adults each month.

As far as I know, SIN was the first major politics publication on Substack to make bespoke, audience-driven polling a regular part of editorial strategy. This turned out to be one of the best ideas I had in 2025; the polls generate a lot of back-and-forth with readers (I try to respond to every one of you!) and drive press coverage for the website. The idea was so good that others have followed in our footsteps! Yay for independent polling!

These monthly surveys generate a lot of insights beyond the normal toplines and crosstabs you see from many polls. Because I am a pollster and a statistician/data scientist/computational social scientist at heart, I’ve been able to use the raw data Verasight gives me to do a lot of cool things, including visual analysis of open-ended text responses and estimation of public opinion at the state level (and, soon, maybe even counties and congressional districts). Of course, there’s also everyone’s favorite feature of the monthly poll: line charts.

So far, I have devoted about half of each survey to a core set of tracking questions I ask again and again each month. Then, the rest of the survey is filled in with rotating trackers when they become relevant (tariffs, for example, have been in and out of the news since January), plus one-off questions submitted by subscribers.

And this is where you come in.

What questions do you want us to ask in 2026?

I want everyone who reads this newsletter to suggest one question you’d like us to track on a regular monthly basis in 2026. These questions should be suited to trending (ie, visualizing on line charts) and relevant over the course of the whole election cycle (January - November; we’re going to take December 2026 off). The comments are open below for your suggestions.

The questions I’ve been regularly asking so far are:

• Self-reported likelihood to vote in midterms

• U.S. House generic congressional ballot

• Most Important Problem for 11 issues:

  • Jobs and the economy

  • Prices/inflation

  • Trade with other countries

  • Foreign policy

  • Immigration

  • Border security

  • Deportations

  • Education

  • Health care

  • Government funding and social programs

  • Crime and public safety

• Party and political figure feeling thermometers

• “Which party do you trust most to handle ___” for each of the aboved 12 issues

• Trump approval

• Trump approval for those 12 issues

• Right direction/wrong track

And I plan to add the following questions to the regular rotation:

• Do you think your personal financial situation will get better or worse in the next year? (Better / worse / stay the same / don’t know)

• Two open-ended questions asking what single issue Trump is doing best/worst on. (Used to see if I should add or subtract an issue from the issue tracking.)

• What news story did you hear the most about over the last month?

My goal next year is to somewhat dramatically expand the data products produced by the data in the monthly poll, including making regularly updated custom graphics from the interviews we conduct. That would include crosstabs, automated graphs for trended questions, analysis of open-ended text, and MRP modeling for issue questions. We are also planning on sharing the data with academic data archives, and maybe even open-sourcing some of the analysis pipelines on GitHub (stay tuned).

Full disclosure: Some of these features will probably get locked behind a paywall at some point to help grow the business, but I intend to keep the vast majority of insights from the polls freely accessible to the public.

So, please fire away! I want to know what questions you are curious about, so I can provide an interesting and actionable survey to readers. The whole reason we started this project was to make polling more transparent and relevant to the average American.

When you’re writing your question, keep these guidelines in mind:

• Please only submit one question each. I promise to read every submission, but that’s going to be a lot of work already (SIN is closing in on 50,000 readers), so please don’t abuse the comments.

• Make it one concept per question. Avoid “and/or” mashups; they’re harder to interpret and trend cleanly

• Try to use neutral wording. It is important that questions do not lead respondents to answer a certain way. We’ll lightly edit for clarity/neutrality and keep wording stable over time for trend comparability.

• Include response options if you can. Best formats for monthly tracking are strongly/somewhat approve/disapprove, better/worse/neutral, right/wrong track, favorability scales, 4-point “a lot/some/not much/none”, and scales of numeric integers.

Leave your questions below — or, if you’re a member of the Strength In Numbers Discord, tag me there.

Elliott