Minnesota Poll symposium focuses on role of journalism in covering public opinion

By Benjamin Toff  Minnesota Journalism Center

The Minnesota Journalism Center's second installment of the Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop: Eighty Years of the Minnesota Poll brought together leading public opinion and journalism scholars and working journalists this spring to tackle questions of representation and the role of journalism in surfacing and interpreting what the public thinks.

The scholars and practitioners gathered in the Hubbard School's Murphy Hall for a daylong symposium interrogating what works and what doesn't when public opinion research methods meet daily journalistic processes in helping audiences better understand what the public thinks.

Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop: Eighty Years of the Minnesota Poll

Workshop participants from the Minnesota Journalism Center and their colleagues from multiple units across the University of Minnesota — as well as local journalists from several media organizations — were joined by leading experts in public opinion, communication and political science in the second of three symposia designed around the 80th anniversary of the Minnesota Poll, which since 1944 has catalogued the opinions and perspectives of generations of Minnesotans. 

The events bring together scholars and journalists to reflect on the poll’s long history, its present applications and the theoretical and practical issues facing the future of state and local opinion research.

Susan Herbst, University Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, kicked off the day's discussion by delivering a keynote address reviewing the legacy of opinion research in the 1930s, extending themes covered in her most recent book, "A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion." Herbst posed several questions concerning common journalistic practices around coverage of public opinion today.

The remainder of the day included panels featuring a mix of interdisciplinary scholars and journalists. University of North Carolina professor Shannon McGregor, Michigan State University professor Danielle Brown and University of Michigan emeritus professor Michael Traugott led the first panel on theme of Defining, Measuring and Reporting on Public Opinion. 

During the next session, former FiveThirtyEight editor G. Elliott Morris and Axios Twin Cities political reporter Torey Van Oot were joined by PhD student and Microsoft Research affiliate Parker Bach, in a session where each discussed their own perspective on how polls (and prediction markets) are used and abused in forecasting elections.

A final panel included Humphrey School professor Larry Jacobs alongside then-Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. and University of South Carolina political scientist Kathleen Searles, who spoke about implications of public opinion research and journalism for democracy itself.

The third and final symposium in this series will focus on the future of state and local opinion research. 

It will be held on Friday, Sept. 19, 2025 on the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus.