Per WaPo which broke the story.
How significant is Gallup’s decision? On the one hand, the firm’s view that its job approval ratings are no longer distinctive is hard to deny. The New York Times tracked 51 polls measuring Trump’s approval rating in January — so many that poll watchers may not have noticed the absence of Gallup’s monthly figures.
But Gallup is not just another pollster. The firm has earned a reputation for high-quality surveys over nearly a century, and its polls carry more credibility than most. And by so regularly asking Americans about the president, Gallup was able to give politicians, journalists and the public a invaluable way to compare modern executives with those of decades long gone.
Gallup’s polling is also useful because of how it is done. Gallup was one of the last polling groups that tracked presidential approval using phone — rather than online — surveys, and that contacted a new, random sample of respondents for each poll.
By using those techniques, Gallup was able to collect up-to-date data on things like party identification that pollsters across the country, including myself, use as a reference to ensure their own polls are representative of Americans overall.
One thing the article doesn’t seem to explore is the one thing I suspect matters most - the money.
How much was Gallup earning by running and releasing these figures? Who was buying the data and how were they, in turn, profiting off of it?
After decades of media consolidation, I’m willing to bet the stock of newspapers and journals that had historically subscribed to Gallup for this metric has dwindled relative to the cost of running a phone survey poll with random sampled users.
Perhaps Ellison buying out CBS was the final straw. Or perhaps it was simply cutbacks across the entire industry, leading to publishers losing interest in Gallup as a breaking news source.
Evil always hides what it does
