When Gallup announced, through reporting in The Hill, that it will stop tracking presidential approval ratings after nearly 90 years, most outlets treated it like a business decision.

It is something else entirely.

For generations, the Gallup approval number functioned as America’s political heartbeat. Presidents rose and fell by it. Strategists adjusted messaging around it. Financial markets even reacted to it.

Now it is gone.

Gallup cited declining response rates and structural pressures inside the polling industry. Those pressures are not temporary. They are systemic. And they have been building for years.

Anyone who works in political measurement understands this.

The old model is straining under modern conditions.

The Response Rate Problem Is Real

In the 1970s, telephone surveys routinely produced response rates above 30 percent.

Today, according to the Pew Research Center, response rates for national telephone surveys have fallen to roughly 6 percent, sometimes lower. Pew’s 2023 methodology review makes clear that probability-based polling has become more expensive and more difficult with each passing cycle.

The American Association for Public Opinion Research has documented the same trend. In its recent reports on election polling performance, AAPOR notes that declining participation forces heavier weighting adjustments and more complex modeling simply to approximate representativeness.

In plain English, we are asking a shrinking slice of Americans to represent 330 million people.

Worse: that slice is not........

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