The Minneapolis Morning Tribune launched the first Minnesota Poll in 1944. It was only the second scientific survey ever sponsored by a news organization, following the lead of the Des Moines Register to the south. The Tribune promoted the new survey with great fanfare, proclaiming on its editorial page that this new tool, supported by an advisory committee of “18 prominent Minnesotans,” including the then President of the University of Minnesota, would “help us all not only to understand and analyze better our beliefs and attitudes, but to find out what information we lack, which can lead us to the right answers.”
It is in this same tradition that this project—Eighty Years of the Minnesota Poll—seeks to recognize, take stock of, and consider the future of public opinion research in the state of Minnesota on the 80th anniversary of the launch of this unique institution. During an earlier milestone year, forty years ago longtime member of the University of Minnesota political science department Charles Backstrom wrote in a detailed history of the survey that by “probing attitudes and tracking the behavior of people in this state,” the poll had produced a “cumulative impact” on public understandings about the people of Minnesota that had been unmatched yet not fully appreciated. He echoed arguments made by George Gallup and extolled the virtues of modern opinion surveys, without which, “any politician or demagogue could claim he or she knew what the public wanted, and could proclaim without effective challenge a mandate to carry it out.”
The Minneapolis Star Tribune still conducts the Minnesota Poll, now in partnership with KARE- 11 and Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) News. The nature of this survey, its scope and ambitions, have changed, as has much about the American media and political landscape. But the need for rigorous tools to help people better understand each others’ beliefs and attitudes remains just as vital today as it has ever been. As the Minnesota Poll reaches this new milestone, this project seeks to bring a wide array of researchers and practitioners into dialogue with one another to consider the complex history and evolution of opinion research in Minnesota and beyond, as well as the future tools and approaches that researchers, journalists, and others are increasingly turning to in order to uncover what the public thinks about the most important pressing issues of the day.