US elections 2020: Why Americans are so enamoured with opinion polls

The Republican pollster Frank Luntz warned on Twitter and elsewhere the other day that if preelection polls in this year’s presidential race are embarrassingly wrong again, “then the polling industry is done.”

It was quite the forecast.

While it is possible the polls will misfire, it’s exceedingly unlikely that such failure would cause the opinion research industry to implode or wither away. One reason is that election polls represent a sliver of a well-established, multibillion-dollar industry that conducts innumerable surveys on policy issues, consumer product preferences and other nonelection topics.

If opinion research were