Opinion Polling Quotes

We ought to change polls, not to follow polls.

Polling is merely an instrument for gauging public opinion. When a President or any other leader pays attention to poll results, he is, in effect, paying attention to the views of the people.

I'm a pollster by trade, so I'm into things that are actually quantifiable.

My job as a pollster is to understand what really matters.

I believe that the polling data that shows people give Obama 53% approval, I happen to think the polls are right. I just think people are not being honest with the pollster.

I think polling methodology is broken.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

I don't know how you determine exactly what the American people approve of.

The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs.

I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.

According to a new poll, 48 percent of Americans believe that Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy. Then Hillary said, 'Actually I just made that poll up.'

Polling is an art as well as a science, and the art of crafting good questions is still vital.

I don't believe in traditional, head-to-head polling.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

We don't base our opinions on the Gallup Poll.

The media uses polls to create news stories. I think polls are just an extension of the editorial page, an excuse to get them on the front page. You can ask any question you want, get any answer you want, and then run around with that as a news story.

Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult.

I wouldn't place much stock in numbers. I don't believe that they reflect Putin's true popularity. Just think about how the pollsters proceed. They call people and they ask them questions on the street. In today's Russia, it takes a lot of courage to tell a stranger something critical about the head of the Kremlin. And yet more than 20 percent do so nonetheless.

When a poll is really, really out of whack with what I want to happen, I do have a tendency to disregard it.

A poll survey should indicate at the outset whether it is meant to capture opinions and beliefs for preferences and practices or value and perceptions.

I have asked my mom and my sister a couple times if I should post something or not. Or if they think a video is funny.

I have 1.4 million followers on Twitter. I get very interesting, sometimes very diverse input from my followers. So it's sort of like this water cooler, digital water cooler, if you want to think about it, where you go and you listen to conversations that are happening that perhaps will shape your thinking.

Microtargeting, as its name implies, is a way to identify small but crucial groups of voters who might be won over to a given side, and which messages would do the trick.

We saw that our customers required help beyond the data sets they had and that they could benefit from a wider opinion. So we built SurveyMonkey Audience, and we've now got 4 million users who signed up to take surveys. Our clients can choose the demographic they want to hear from, and we can provide that sample.

Reputation is but a synonym of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters.