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.