Published on 2025-02-08 by Cydney Grannan
Scholars and journalists came together in November to discuss the eight decades of the Minnesota Poll's history and brainstorm how best to leverage the poll's archives for future projects
The Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop: Eighty Years of the Minnesota Poll kicked off its symposia series on Friday, November 15, 2024, with a day of discussion and reflection about the poll’s eight decades-long history. Workshop leader Benjamin Toff, Director the Minnesota Journalism Center, and affiliated scholars from the University of Minnesota were joined by experts in political science, journalists, and public opinion professionals to converse about the poll’s presence in Minnesota journalism since its founding in 1944. Attendees also discussed how best to leverage the poll’s archival data housed through the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.
Toff offered introductory remarks, providing an overview of the Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop (ICW) and its goal of inspiring novel research across academic disciplines as well as data journalism projects. Toff explained how this project came to be: When he first joined the Minnesota faculty, he arrived at an office filled with binders containing archival material from the Minnesota Poll. “They sat in my office for years … and I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll get to them at some point,’” Toff said. After digging into the archives with a research assistant, undergraduate honors student Wilma Agustianto, the idea behind this workshop was born.
Sid Bedingfield, an associate professor of journalism in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, outlined the early years of the poll, starting with the first publication of results in a 1944 issue of what was then the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune. Scientific polling was just beginning to overshadow its predecessor, the straw poll. “It’s sort of hard to imagine what it was like when systematic polling was this bright and shiny new object,” Bedingfield said.
Former Minnesota Poll director Rob Daves provided an in-depth overview of his years leading the survey from 1987 to 2007, polling Minnesotans about former Governor and WWE star Jesse Ventura, as well as Y2K. Daves said the poll was used to boost and assist reporting across the Star Tribune on topics beyond politics to include environmental issues, sports, and religion. The polling unit was also essential to multiple investigative stories.
Patricia Moy, the Christy Cressey Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, hosted a panel discussion as well, which included Daves, along with Minnesota Star Tribune audience editor Matt DeLong and APM Research Lab Managing Partner Craig Helmstetter, who currently collaborate together in leading the modern iteration of the Minnesota Poll. The panel bridged the discussion of the Minnesota Poll’s history to contemporary issues in polling, such as reduced trust in polls and in the news organizations affiliated with them.
The symposium also featured a virtual demonstration of how journalists, scholars, and the public can freely access archival data from the Roper Center. Attendees also paged through the archival Minnesota Poll binders to get a sense of what data the survey collected over its history 80-year history.
The next symposium in this series will focus on the role of journalism in covering public opinion. It will be held on Wednesday, May 28, 2025 in Murphy Hall on the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus.