Can We Trust the Polls? (with Karlyn Bowman)

The National Affairs Podcast

Elections in America and around the world in recent years have raised concerns about the reliability of opinion polling. But the challenges facing the industry go beyond simple reliability and predictive power, revealing a chasm between pollsters and the public they observe that poses a threat to the credibility and usefulness of opinion surveys in our democracy. After the shocking election results in 2016, will Americans find the polls more trustworthy in 2020? Guest Karlyn Bowman joins us to discuss.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow and research coordinator at the American Enterprise Institute, where she studies trends in American public opinion on a wide variety of social and political topics. She is also the recipient of the Roper Center’s 2020 Warren J. Mitofsky Award for Excellence in Public Opinion Research, one of the highest honors in polling and public opinion.

This podcast discusses themes from Karlyn’s essay in the Summer 2018 issue of National Affairs, “The Trouble with Polling.”