General Discussion

A collaboration between the tech giant and a polling nonprofit will gather five to 10 people each from every congressional district to answer questions about the nation’s most pressing issues. If it works, it could upend the fraught world of political polling.

Earlier this year, Scott Rasmussen, the longtime pollster and political commentator, traveled to Bowling Green, Kentucky, known for its Corvette assembly plant and for being the hometown of Fruit of the Loom. After he toured the city, about 65 miles north of Nashville, he returned home with a novel idea: use AI to transform polling, a notoriously fickle and imprecise discipline that he had studied for decades. To pursue the project, he teamed up with an unlikely partner — Google.

Rasmussen had visited Bowling Green to check out the work of Jigsaw, a think tank inside Google that tackles big societal challenges like online extremism. At the time, it was working with the local government in the Kentucky city and surrounding county on an experiment aimed at jumpstarting civic engagement. Jigsaw asked residents to answer questions about the issues they cared most about, from the potential arrival of a Dave & Buster’s to the debate over marijuana legalization. From there, it would use a Google AI tool called Sensemaker, built from its language model Gemini, to analyze the answers and separate the residents’ disagreements from where they had common ground.

Rasmussen told Forbes he was stunned by the results and said he saw in them an opportunity to try and repair our balkanized political discourse. Why not survey the entire country?