We try to fix election polling (update)

我们努力修复选举投票系统(更新)

Planet Money

2026-10-21

29 分钟
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单集简介 ...

Polling is facing an existential crisis. People aren't picking up the phone. Nobody wants to talk to pollsters. Trust is on the line. We pluck a solution from the economics canon and convince a polling firm to let us test it.  Today on the show, we head to Marist College — home of the Marist Poll — to learn how to be pollsters ourselves. We learn the great moments in polling history, the latest science of polling, and find out all the tricks that pollsters use to get people to finish their surveys. Then we get on the phone and give it a try ourselves. And offer some of our own solutions.  This episode was originally published before the 2022 midterm elections.  We have an update on our idea to save polling, which Marist is still testing, and we find out what it might be able to tell us about the 2026 midterms.  Music: "Partyline, "The Danzig Connection, and "Saku" Read:  Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life  Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter Our weekly Indicator round-up newsletter Follow:  Instagram TikTok YouTube Facebook This update was produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was mastered by Gilly Moon with help from Cena Loffredo. The original episode was edited by Jess Jiang. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy
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  • This is Planet Money from NPR.

  • Every time election season comes around and you see all of those frantic election polls in the news,

  • I think back to the time that I learned

  • just how hard it is to actually do one of those election polls and why it's gotten so hard.

  • This was back in 2022 when we, as in we at Planet Money, had an idea to try and maybe fix polling.

  • And one very generous polling outfit actually let us try out our idea.

  • So we thought we would revisit that story today because we also have an update to how polling is changing

  • and how our fix is actually still being used, though maybe not how we had originally imagined.

  • Details about that at the end.

  • But first...

  • Let us start with a trip that Nick and I took for the original story.

  • You and I headed to Poughkeepsie, New York, to visit the Marist College Polling Center.

  • Polling is how we figure out what Americans think about anything.

  • And for pollsters, this is the most exciting time of the year.

  • Right here, they are making hundreds of thousands of calls to figure