Curiosity as a moral act

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Exciting personal news, I have a new job and am firmly back in the world of polling. I’m the Director of Analytics at the newly launched Searchlight Institute, and I am absolutely delighted to have a mandate to run a bunch of thoughtful and experimental polls for the purpose of finding things out about the American people. Plus, I’m going to be releasing the entire questionnaire for every poll we publish, in the interest of getting more high-quality interesting polls out into the public. I’ve got a whole set of polling principles written up if you want to hear more about how I’m planning to run things there.

Highly related to the new job thing, I am having a ton of conversations about polling with folks, and spending time explaining why I care about it. Kinda in my feelings about it, tbh. So here are some notes on that.

I really, really care what the American people think. I mean, I care what people across the world think, I just specialize heavily in American politics so that’s where my focus is. The reason I went into survey research in the first place is because I was fascinated by human behavior and especially the way people formed opinions and beliefs. There are so many people walking around with completely different things going on in their heads, and yet a large chunk of them manage to form opinions on the issues of the day. And you can ask them about it! They’ll just tell you! They’ll get things wrong, they’ll misunderstand what you’re asking, but they will just tell you stuff. That’s really damn cool.

I also think it’s moral to stay interested in what average people think. Not because you’re looking for approval (turning a big dial, etc), but because fundamentally the broader public is who you’re doing politics for. There’s tension between the delegate and trustee models of politics, but I really think that assuming you know what’s best for people runs you into trouble every time. People have wants and needs and feelings about the direction of the country. Those things won’t necessarily be coherent (especially on policy!). They are still real.

Sometimes maintaining this interest is hard. I’ve spent a lot of time reading survey open end question responses and man, some of those are *not great*. It’s depressing when you run questions and get back results that seem to show cruelty, disregard, or outright hatred. It sucks even more to report out those results. But I don’t think it serves anyone to pretend those things aren’t real, or that they aren’t present. At its best, opinion research can help you figure out where those opinions are coming from, what’s driving them, and what points of connection and compassion can help you reach people who hold them. At minimum, it gives you a better idea of what you’re dealing with.

Polling helps you reach people you normally wouldn’t talk to or hear from. Doing that reaching is *really hard*, as the evolving state of polling methods would tell you. I think it’s absolutely worth it for the chance to figure out what is going on in people’s minds. Are they like, doing okay? (sort of, but not as okay as they’d like.) Are they content with the direction of things? (noooooope.) I firmly believe that this can make you a more connected, more empathetic actor in the political space, if you do it right.

That’s enough mushy moral feelings for now. If I’ve timed this correctly, my new housing polling should be live on the Searchlight site. You should go check it out.