Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We will weekly guide the numbers

all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford.

It's become fashionable to bash opinion polls and often with good reason.

Polling before the US presidential election in 2020 put Joe Biden and the Democrats

clearly ahead of Donald Trump and the Republicans. In the end, the results were much closer.

So although Biden won as forecast, the polls gave a very poor prediction of his vote share.

A newsletter from the US political website, Politico, declared that the polling industry was

a wreck and should be blown up. All that came on top of Donald Trump's win in 2016,

and the polls had forecast victory for Democratic rival Hilary Clinton.

So is it time to call time on polling? Not so fast, Tessna Mann, you're about to hear.

G. Eliot Morris is a data journalist for the economist. He's also written a book about why we need

polls more than ever, called Strength in Numbers, how polls work, and why we need them.

It's really in the 20th century that political polling comes into its own, so who was behind that movement?

The heralded founder of public opinion polling is a man named George Gallup. He was born in 1901

on a farm in Iowa. He goes to school for journalism, and he has this interesting question,

which is, well, how do we know what people actually want to read? And has this really interesting idea?

What if we ask them? And he publishes his dissertation on this, how to measure what people want,

basically. And he gets hired by a much bigger advertising agency in New York, called Young and

Rubikam. And they basically give him a blank check to do their research, to figure out how to call

people, how to talk to them, to figure out if they remember or like to certain product,

basically to figure out early methodologies in advertising. And then by 1931 or so, he's wondering,

well, if it works for toothpaste, why not politics? And so he goes back home, and he does some polling for

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