Pollsters Quotes

Let me tell you the polls that count, and those are the polls a couple of weeks before the election. That's when the pollsters worry about holding onto their credibility. Those are the polls that everybody remembers.

We liked to think that polling and political analysis had become scientific, but this campaign changes all that.

Since the rise of television in the 1950s, the media have become the central forum for American politicking, and increasingly today that role is being played by the blogosphere. With the blogger and the viewer replacing the pamphleteer and the parader, politicians focus on marketing themselves and their causes to passive consumers rather than mobilizing passionate soldiers. The new language of politics sounds like this: Spin doctors stage photo ops as pollsters survey voter preferences, spawning celebrity candidates.

As problems have grown more complex, leaders have struggled to find the language to discuss them clearly, credibly and at the right emotional amplitude. Nonplussed and tongue-tied, politicians give themselves over to message gurus … who peddle the notion that poll-tested words — honed and targeted with scientific precision — can pick the lock of public opinion.

Today’s festering unhappiness with politics is a product of the plummeting faith in politicians and political institutions that pollsters have tracked since the 1970s and the escalating spiral of cynicism and despair that has accompanied it. Intense partisanship among politicians, vicious political battles in the media, and nasty electoral campaigns coexist with extensive citizen apathy and pathetically low voter ­turnout.

As someone who was like a chief spokeswoman for [Donald Trump] and his campaign manager, it wasn't always relevant to what Americans out there were telling us at rallies or telling pollsters behind the scenes concerning them.

Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.

God created astrologers to make pollsters look accurate.

Government or politics in America today is big business. Everybody makes money involving themselves in one way or the other, whether it's pollsters, whether they are policy wonks, whether they are pundits, whether they are those who believe that they must call it as they see it and then to be fair about it.

Pollsters get paid by the poll, ad makers by the ad, phone-calling firms by the call, direct-mailers by the piece. They all have an incentive to promote their services, whether or not doing so helps the campaign win—and they face few consequences if it doesn’t.

The pollsters and pundits will keep trying to read voters' minds.

The pollsters are engaged in an ancient and primitive rite—trying to predict the future.

We had people who obviously didn’t have, necessarily, my best interest in mind… A lot of money was made, and a lot of advantage was taken.

The American television punditocracy - the pollsters, political consultants and other talking heads who become as ubiquitous as air every election cycle - can be incestuous and herdlike.

The pollsters who have telephoners are going to consistently get a lower vote for Donald Trump because the media has attacked him so savagely and so dishonestly that a substantial number of people will not say they're for Trump.

There is a garbage culture out there, where we pour garbage on people. And we pour more garbage on people. Then the pollsters run around and take a poll and say, do you smell anything? And of course you smell something.