Published in the April 28, 2026 edition of The Globe and Mail. Michael Adams is the founder and president of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. Andrew Parkin is the Institute’s executive director.
It’s been hard to keep up. For over a decade, since Donald Trump set his sights on the presidency, we have been bombarded with non-stop outlandish statements and actions. The provocative things he says at the morning media briefing are followed by the offensive things he says in his evening speech, which in turn are followed by the crazy things he posts on social media in the middle of the night. And the cycle starts over as we check the news over breakfast.
If you think this causes headaches for journalists, pundits and politicians, spare a thought for the pollsters. In normal times, we could periodically ask citizens what they thought of a president’s budget proposals, health care reforms, or foreign policy. But this only works when there are policies to refer to that don’t change tweet by tweet. And while traditionally these surveys might help governments calibrate their actions to ensure they meet with public approval, now any result the president doesn’t like is dismissed as fake news. What’s the point?
There is an even bigger challenge – the moral one. Does asking the public whether they approve of the current president’s egregious thoughts and behaviours serve to normalize them? Should we really ask the public if it’s OK to separate migrant children from their parents at the border? If paramilitary officers should be allowed to shoot citizens with impunity? If civilizations should be destroyed or bombed back to the stone age?
These are not academic issues. Pollsters, like journalists, are not just bystanders – we both cover and shape the opinions we measure. When the data we produce lands in the public realm, it becomes part of the story. Asking in a survey if people think the 2020 election was stolen suggests, even if implicitly, that it might be acceptable to say it was. In this sense, pollsters in the Trump era face the same daily dilemma as the media: to point out the falsehoods in the president’s statements is to display bias; not to point them out is to convey the sense that the falsehoods might be true.
Sitting on our hands at such crucial moments is hardly a better option. It is essential to know how many and which voters continue to support the president, and why. But the framing of our reports matter: we need to remind our audiences that polls can never tell you what’s right or wrong, only how much work remains to be done to win the argument. Military actions that contravene international law are no more acceptable even when they are supported by a majority of the people.
We should also be wary of the temptation to weaponize polls in the other direction: by using their results to ridicule Mr. Trump’s base. The easiest thing to do with survey questions is to show that citizens are uninformed. Sure, we can run the numbers to prove that people who think COVID-19 was a hoax, or that Barak Obama was a Muslim, or that aliens (the outer-space kind) already live among us are all more likely to be part of the MAGA movement. But this is a slippery slope that ends with derision, when what we need is understanding, and even empathy. Labelling people as deplorables is no more likely to work today than it did for Hillary Clinton in 2016. It is far more constructive to use the techniques of survey research to understand people’s (often legitimate) fears and anxieties, than to expose their limited knowledge of science, history or civics.
So yes, there is a still a role for pollsters in these crazy times, though it is a role that needs to be played responsibly. Tracking approval ratings is useful. Currently, as Mr. Trump’s approval erodes, it is at the very least a possible motivating factor; if nothing else, it is encouraging for citizens who oppose the U.S. president to know they are not as alone as they might sometimes feel. Taking the long view can be productive as well. Overnight reactions to the president’s latest statement only add to the daily cacophonous news coverage. But comparing the public views today, on a consistent set of metrics, to those of 20, 30 or 40 years ago is more signal than noise.
What we really need to know, however, is how social values are evolving: have Americans really become more accepting of violence, more religious, more patriarchal, less cosmopolitan, or less interested in other cultures? This type of polling attracts less attention, yet ultimately gives us the clues we need about what’s driving the deepening ideological cleavages in American politics.
As far as possible, we should also shift our focus from measuring reactions to daily events to tracking more enduring values. It’s natural to want to know whether opinions are shifting on the president’s policies on migrants or tariffs. What we really need to know, however, is how social values are evolving: have Americans really become more accepting of violence, more religious, more patriarchal, less cosmopolitan, or less interested in other cultures? This type of polling attracts less attention, yet ultimately gives us the clues we need about what’s driving the deepening ideological cleavages in American politics.
Whether we measure opinions, attitudes, norms or values, the original mission of survey research remains compelling. When the polling industry took off in the middle of the 20th century, led by George Gallup and others, it challenged the ability of the politicians to claim, without risk of contradiction, that they spoke for the people. Polls tested those claims, ensuring that the voice of every citizen, rich or poor, urban or rural, university graduate or high school dropout, could be heard. They helped strengthen democracy then and can continue to do so now. Only a genuine faker would call them fake news.
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