Gallup will no longer track presidential approval ratings after more than eight decades doing so, the public opinion polling agency confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday.
The company said starting this year it would stop publishing approval and favorability ratings of individual political figures, saying in a statement it “reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership.”
A thought leader is an individual or firm recognized as a foremost authority in a specific field.[1] As the term implies, a thought leader leads others in the thinking around a given topic".
I can see how they could think it applies (although this action rather negates it).
“Thought leader” always sounded to me like the title a villain in a 1950s alien invasion story would use, though. “I am Thought Leader Algar-Toth of the Valthaxian Empire! Surrender to us or be destroyed, Earthlings!”
Gallup isn’t telling the real secret - that it’s becoming harder and harder to get an accurate broad national sample for anything. The old days when people would willingly pick up a landline with a published number, agree to talk to someone who identified themselves as a pollster and give honest answers are as quaintly obsolete as sittin’ on the front porch in a rocker with a tall glass of iced tea and wavin’ as the neighbors stroll past.
Here are two stories from 2024, from Scientific American and PBS that point out polling consistently underestimated Donald Trump’s popular support in 2024, 2020,and 2016. The lessons they learned in one election (e.g., underweighting non-college educated voters) turned out to be wrong in another.
A longer look at election polling suggests that pollsters have a terrible record when it comes to late shifting by the electorate (“Dewey Defeats Truman!”) and that a screwup in a single state (Florida in 2000) can invalidate the whole system.
Gallup’s bread-and-butter source of income is consumer research for big companies. Political polling has always been an attention-grabber designed to attract real clients. Guessing wrong hurts Gallup’s bottom line, and it’s getting harder to guess right.
I’ve spent my career in market research and advertising. Gallup has, for decades, gotten lots of PR for the company from their publicly-published political polls, but it’s actually only a small sliver of their business.
Most of their business is doing similar sorts of polling and consumer research for corporations, but the results of those studies aren’t made public (i.e., it’s proprietary research for their clients). They (and their competitor The Harris Poll) have used the visibility and brand-name recognition which the public polls have given them as a selling tool to win private business contracts.
The fact that the only thing the general public knows Gallup for is political polling has very little bearing on their actual business.
Political polling (and, frankly, all general-audience polling and research studies) has become more difficult as the old methodologies (door-to-door, mail, random-digit-dialing telephone calls) have become less representative, and newer methodologies (online polling) aren’t necessarily representative, either. And as politics becomes more and more polarized, public political polling is likely becoming a product line that’s becoming more trouble than it’s worth for a company like Gallup.
And, of course, I’m also 100% certain that Gallup is being pressured by Trump (or, more likely, his enablers) to stop publicizing poll results which make him look bad.
A major justification for presidential approval polling is helping people decide who to support in the next election. And since there won’t be a meaningful next election, that justification no longer applies.
Their statement, “an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership,” is carefully-crafted coded business wording that says that, while being anodyne, and intentionally not taking sides in their public statement.
It’s the moral equivalent of someone saying, “I’m exploring new career opportunities,” instead of “I’m looking for a new job because I just got fired.”
I would guess that the pressure from the regime was more under-the-table. Threats against top executives might have been floated, along with additional pressure from the companies Gallup does business with (assuming those are companies equally subject to WH pressure).
Yes but my suspicion is this opens the door for any kooky and unreliable polling company to spout whatever they want and muddy the water. Who here wants a FOX News poll? A Breitbart poll?
Mostly the US has relied on Gallup to be a reliable pollster and to report their numbers honestly and leave it to others to parse what those numbers mean.
Now we need to start anew to see who is reliable and that will take decades.
ETA: I know there are already some other pollsters out there who are well regarded. But they never got mentioned as much as Gallup. Gallup somehow became the household name for polling. Now there is a gap and doubtless many will try to crowd in and not all will be reliable.
