This chapter tackles two additional activities of the pollster as fortune teller. The first is the assessment and prediction of government approval ratings. As we have already seen in Chapter 8, approval ratings are extremely important in predicting elections. There is both an art and science to the analysis of such measures. Here, we want to lay out an analytical framework which will allow pollsters to assess both structural and policy factors related to approval ratings and then how to utilize multiple methods to triangulate future outcomes. We will focus on the Biden administration circa August 2022. Ultimately, a fairly large component of a pollster’s workload is the continual assessment of government initiatives and their convergence (or not) with what people want.

The second is a discussion of more context-based analysis. The pollster has an important role in helping decision-makers understand the bigger picture. Here, broader demographic and social trends help gird such analysis.