Can You Trust the Polls? Inside the High-Stakes Battle to Measure Public Opinion

Veteran Republican pollster Micah Roberts, partner at Public Opinion Strategies, takes listeners inside the high-stakes world of public opinion polling. He explains how pollsters turn relatively small samples into meaningful insights, how the industry has evolved from landline calls to voter files and text-based surveys, and why reaching a representative audience is now more difficult and expensive.

Roberts also explores how social media can rapidly reshape public opinion, how researchers detect bots and unreliable respondents, and what listeners should examine before trusting a headline-making statistic. Looking ahead to the U.S. midterm elections, the conversation considers declining institutional trust, economic concerns, ideological shifts, and what polling must do to remain credible in an era of AI, misinformation, and political division.