Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop:
Eighty Years of the Minnesota Poll
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Agenda
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
9:00am – 4:30pm
Room 100, Murphy Hall
206 Church St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455
| 9:00am – 9:30am | [Light breakfast] |
| 9:30am – 9:45am | Welcome and Introductions Benjamin Toff, Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center |
| 9:45am – 11:00am | Keynote Address: Public Opinion Legacies of the 1930s and the Contemporary Challenges for Journalists Susan Herbst, University Professor of Political Science University of Connecticut |
| 11:00am – 12:30pm | Defining, Measuring, and Reporting on Public Opinion Shannon McGregor Danielle K. Brown Michael Traugott Benjamin Toff (Moderator) |
| 12:30pm – 1:00pm | [Buffet lunch is served] |
| 1:00pm – 2:30pm | Aggregating Polls, Forecasting, and the Horse Race Parker Bach G. Elliott Morris Torey Van Oot Sid Bedingfield (Moderator) |
| 2:30pm – 2:45pm | [Break] |
| 2:45pm – 4:15pm | Perceptions of Public Opinion and Dissent in Democracy Perry Bacon Kathleen Searles Larry Jacobs Patricia Moy (Moderator) |
| 4:15pm – 4:30pm | Wrap-up and Next Steps |
About the Speakers
Susan Herbst is University Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. Before returning to the faculty at UCONN in 2019, she was the 15th President of the University. She is author of several books including most recently, A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion. Along with Larry Jacobs, Frances Lee and Adam Berinsky, she is Editor of the Series in American Politics at the University of Chicago Press.
Parker Bach is a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a research assistant with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective, and an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). His research focuses on digital political cultures, including political humor, political influencers, and the far right. His dissertation project will investigate the culture of speculation on political prediction market platforms (e.g. Polymarket) and the framing of these markets as measures of public opinion.
Perry Bacon is currently a columnist at the Washington Post. He has previously written for Time Magazine and FiveThirtyEight and been a commentator at MSNBC.
Danielle K. Brown, Ph.D. is the 1855 Community and Urban Journalism Professor and an associate professor in the School of Journalism at Michigan State University. She is also the founding director of the LIFT Project—an engaged research effort aimed at identifying and supporting networks of trusted messengers in Black and immigrant communities in the Midwest.
Larry Jacobs is an American political scientist and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance (CSPG) at the University of Minnesota. He was appointed the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs in 2005 and holds the McKnight Presidential Chair. Jacobs has written or edited, alone or collaboratively, 17 books and over 100 scholarly articles in addition to numerous reports and media essays on American democracy, national and Minnesota elections, political communications, health care reform, and economic inequality. His latest book is Democracy Under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History. In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Shannon C. McGregor is an associate professor and PhD Director at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a principal investigator at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life – both at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She holds appointments also with UNC’s Department of Political Science and the School of Information and Library Science. Her research focuses on the role of media and social media in political processes, with a focus on the interplay of three groups essential to a functioning democracy: politicians, journalists, and the public.
G. Elliott Morris is the author of Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them, a book about public opinion polling and democracy, which was published in 2022 by W. W. Norton. He was also most recently the Editorial Director of Data Analytics at ABC News, where he developed polling aggregation and election-forecasting models and managed the research and data visualization teams for ABC’s data-journalism website FiveThirtyEight/538. He was a regular guest on the network’s broadcast and streaming news programs providing political analysis on notable events and upcoming elections. Before that, Elliott was a Senior Data Journalist and US Correspondent for The Economist. Elliott writes a regular Substack called Strength In Numbers about politics, polling, and elections through the lens of data and statistical analysis.
Patricia Moy is the Christy Cressey Professor of Communication, a senior fellow at the Center for Journalism, Media & Democracy, as well as associate vice provost for academic strategy and affairs at the University of Washington. A scholar of political communication and public opinion, she is a former editor of Public Opinion Quarterly and currently serves as editor-in-chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Communication. Moy is a former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, its Midwest chapter (MAPOR), the World Association for Public Opinion Research, and the International Communication Association, where she is also an elected fellow.
Kathleen Searles, Ph.D., is the Olin D. Johnston Chair of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. Her interests include news media, information communication technology, and political psychology. She co-authored a book published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, respectively, and has been awarded more than 7 million dollars in grant monies. Much of that funding has supported her research on the effects of occupational intimidation, which has culminated in the creation of Expert Voices Together, a trauma-informed rapid response system of care for experts facing technology-facilitated harassment. A second initiative informed by this work is the Researcher Support Consortium, which connects funders and institutions to resources that help them support researchers facing occupational intimidation. She is a founding member and executive emerita of Women Also Know Stuff, and a co-convener of the Election Coverage and Democracy Network, which works with journalists to cover electoral politics.
Michael Traugott is Professor Emeritus at the University Michigan where he has studied campaigns and elections, voting behavior, political communication, the use of polls to construct news, and survey methodology. He has published extensively in all of these areas. He is active in the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), serving as president of both organizations. In 2010, he received the AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Service, and in 2012 he received the Helen Dinerman Award from WAPOR for particularly significant contributions to survey methodology. He also served as president of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research (MAPOR). He is a frequent resource for journalists interested in discussing American political campaigns and government operations.
Torey Van Oot covers Minnesota politics for Axios Twin Cities, a free daily newsletter that helps readers get smarter, faster about the biggest stories shaping the metro. Before joining Axios, Torey was a reporter in the Star Tribune's Capitol Bureau. Torey, who hails from the East Coast, began her career as a politics reporter for The Sacramento Bee. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from InStyle to The Washington Post.
