A woman walks past an electoral map during a US presidential election watch party at the US embassy in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia on November 4, 2020.Polls had a rough 2020 election season. While some states were spot on, others were way off and district-level polls also showed issues.But polls can also help us better understand out country, from religious life to our demographic divides.
Certainly, the misses are attracting more attention and leading early critics to publish overwrought headlines that probably overshot the severity of the problem. . And when you dig beyond the surface, it is clear that some polls and pollsters did better than others.Polling serves a critical function in American society beyond alerting us to the ebbs and flows of political campaigns.
Few research methods are subject to the same level of scrutiny as surveys. And that's okay. Surveys have become incredibly common and we rely on them to make informed decisions about public investments and private enterprise. We would know little about decline of Christian identity and the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. We would know far less about the rise of political polarization or its proximate causes. We would be caught off guard, by changes in cultural norms and political attitudes — such as the rise in support for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization as well as the increasing acceptance of premarital sex.
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