Harvard Should Break up With the Harris Poll

Harvard is lending its name to a methodologically flawed poll that often promotes a right-wing political agenda.

Every month, the Harvard-Harris Poll (a partnership between Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies, The Harris Poll, and HarrisX) administers a public opinion survey that tracks Americans’ attitudes on a wide range of political and social issues.

It’s no secret that the Harvard-Harris Poll is inaccurate and misleading. A number of experts from both sides of the aisle — including statistician Nate R. Silver, Democratic pollster Geoff D. Garin ’75, Republican pollster Chris Wilson, liberal journalist Josh M.J. Marshall, and conservative law professor Ilya Somin — have criticized the survey. FiveThirtyEight, a public opinion blog that aggregates political polls, recently ranked Harris Insights & Analytics in the bottom 50 percent of American pollsters.

Harvard aspires to be the top academic institution in the world — so why is the University attaching its name to a mediocre poll that has been blasted by political experts? Harvard should immediately disaffiliate from this flawed and biased survey.

Since 2017 — when Trump sympathizer Mark J. Penn ’76 became one of the poll’s co-directors — the poll has relied on leading questions. Unlike a proper survey, which asks unbiased questions in order to collect accurate and reliable information, Harvard-Harris poll questions tend to align with right-wing narratives and prompt respondents to lean toward conservative choices.

To see this ideological slant, let’s take a look at a question in last month’s poll about U.S. President Joseph R. Biden’s bipartisan immigration bill.

In the prompt, the poll regurgitated Republican talking points, citing the number of migrants that would enter the country each day, — a claim that is highly misleading — and stating that Trump has opposed the bill “to give the Biden administration any wins on an issue that he says they failed to do anything about.”

The question failed to specify a single positive consequence of the bill. Naturally, as a result of this skewed framing, the results showed that a majority supported Trump’s position of blocking the bill from passing.

There are other examples of extreme bias, too. In 2017, one question — asking whether the respondent supported the renegotiation of the Iran nuclear deal — seemed blatantly designed to achieve an answer in support of renegotiation. The question assumed the premise articulated by Trump that Iran was secretly “building up their nuclear capability,” thereby violating the existing terms of the deal.

As The Intercept reported, the question ignored multiple verifications from the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran was, in fact, keeping up its end of the bargain when the poll came out, instead propagating Trump’s one-sided narrative. The question asserted that some people wanted to let Iran’s violations “slide along,” while others preferred calling Iran out. Unsurprisingly, the poll found that 70 percent of respondents agreed with Trump’s decision to renegotiate the deal.

In addition to ideologically slanted wording, the poll frequently lacks a “don’t know” option. “That’s going to force respondents with different views to pick a side at random," criticized Will Jordan, a Democratic pollster. “But the numbers get shared as if they’re real attitudes.”

Furthermore, the poll often reports perplexingly contradictory results. In Dec., the poll simultaneously found that a majority of young adults believed Israel was committing a “genocide” and that the country was “trying to avoid civilian casualties.” Similarly, the poll results claimed that a majority of young people both believed that Hamas “would like to commit genocide” and that all of Israel should be surrendered to Hamas. These contradictions are bizarre and difficult to account for.

Finally, the Harvard-Harris poll sometimes sequences questions in ways that can confuse respondents. For instance, the Dec. poll also found that 67 percent of young adults agree that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors” — an eye-popping result. This finding aligned with a narrative pushed by many conservatives: that leftists and young people are deeply antisemitic.

But that question was placed immediately after multiple questions about affirmative action and could therefore have been easily misunderstood as a question about the way that Jews should be treated under an affirmative action system.

Somin also pointed out multiple other flaws in that question — including its combination of two separate issues in the same response and use of complex terminology that may be unfamiliar to respondents who don’t follow politics. These problems further distorted the results of the question.

The Harvard-Harris poll misleads Americans with its flawed methodology and right-wing political agenda, but it’s unfortunately widely cited by mainstream media in potentially misleading ways. For example, the finding that young adults believe Jews are oppressors was cited all over the news.

Of course, the most attractive part of the poll’s brand is the name “Harvard.” It’s time for the University to break up with the Harris Poll. This decision won’t fix the poll’s flawed methodology and practices, but Harvard shouldn’t lend its name and prestige to this dubious project.

Maya A. Bodnick is a Government concentrator in Mather House. Her column, “Forging Harvard’s Future,” appears bi-weekly on Tuesdays.