- The Gallup Organization has a solid track record of successful business books, including two recent Warner Books titles: "Discover Your Sales Strengths (3/03), which has 40,000 copies in print, and "Follow this Path (10/02), which has over 60,000 copies in print- Other bestselling Gallup titles include "First, Break all the Rules (Simon & Schuster, 1999), which has sold over 500,000 hardcover copies and was a "New York Times and "Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and "Now, Discover Your Strengths (Simon & Schuster, 2001), which sold over 300,000 hardcover copies.- By examining how public opinion is influenced, POLLING MATTERS will appeal to the same large audience as Malcolm Gladwell's runaway "New York Times bestseller "The Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Company, 2000), now in its 16th hardcover printing, with 693,000 copies in hardcover and paperback print combined.- Frank Newport is editor-in-chief of The Gallup Poll and a frequent guest expert on CNN.- Timed to coincide with the 2004 presidential election, this book is perfectly positioned for maximum reader interest and media exposure.

Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport examines religion in America today, reviews just how powerfully intertwined religion is with every aspect of American society, and explores what appears to be religion’s vibrant future in the U.S. — all based on more than a million interviews conducted by Gallup since 2008. Popular books such as The God Delusion have dismissed religion as a delusional artifact of evolution and ancient superstitions. But should millions of Americans’ statements of belief and their behaviour be dismissed that quickly? The pattern of religious influence in American society suggests mass consequence rather than mass delusion. In God Is Alive and Well, Frank Newport provides a new evidence-based analysis of Americans’ religious beliefs and practices — and makes bold predictions about religion’s future in the U.S. Most Americans are at least marginally religious, significantly more so than in most developed nations around the world. The majority of Americans believe in God and say that religion is important in their daily lives, with many routinely participating in religious rituals. However, levels of religious consciousness are not distributed equally. Systematic patterns of differences in religion occur with surprising regularity. An American’s religiosity is very much bound up with social position and geographic space. There is an important interplay between religion and life status factors — age, gender, marital status, having children — and with achieved status distinctions — class, education, income. Unlike citizens of any other country in the world, Americans group themselves into hundreds of distinct micro religious groups and denominations. These groups are constantly evolving, splitting like amoeba to form new groups. The most common pattern today is the development of the “no name” religious group, consisting of Americans who worship only under the banner of their own nondenominational predilections. These religious groupings are sociologically related to social status, geography, politics, and social and political attitudes. The foundation for God Is Alive and Well, is the perspective of science — analysing what people think, do, and believe about religion. Frank Newport writes in a conversational tone making the book accessible for all, with readers benefiting from his background as a well-known social scientist and authority on American life, and his unique personal history as the son of a Southern Baptist theologian.

How the 2016 news media environment allowed Trump to win the presidency The 2016 presidential election campaign might have seemed to be all about one man. He certainly did everything possible to reinforce that impression. But to an unprecedented degree the campaign also was about the news media and its relationships with the man who won and the woman he defeated. Words that Matter assesses how the news media covered the extraordinary 2016 election and, more important, what information-true, false, or somewhere in between-actually helped voters make up their minds. Using journalists' real-time tweets and published news coverage of campaign events, along with Gallup polling data measuring how voters perceived that reporting, the book traces the flow of information from candidates and their campaigns to journalists and to the public. The evidence uncovered shows how Donald Trump's victory, and Hillary Clinton's loss, resulted in large part from how the news media responded to these two unique candidates. Both candidates were unusual in their own ways, and thus presented a long list of possible issues for the media to focus on. Which of these many topics got communicated to voters made a big difference outcome. What people heard about these two candidates during the campaign was quite different. Coverage of Trump was scattered among many different issues, and while many of those issues were negative, no single negative narrative came to dominate the coverage of the man who would be elected the 45th president of the United States. Clinton, by contrast, faced an almost unrelenting news media focus on one negative issue-her alleged misuse of e-mails-that captured public attention in a way that the more numerous questions about Trump did not. Some news media coverage of the campaign was insightful and helpful to voters who really wanted serious information to help them make the most important decision a democracy offers. But this book also demonstrates how the modern media environment can exacerbate the kind of pack journalism that leads some issues to dominate the news while others of equal or greater importance get almost no attention, making it hard for voters to make informed choices.

This work is the only complete compilation of polls taken by the Gallup Organization, the world's most reliable and widely quoted research firm, in calendar year 2017. It is an invaluable tool for ascertaining the pulse of American public opinion as it evolves over the course of a given year, and-over time-documents changing public perceptions of crucial political, economic, and societal issues. It is a necessity for any social science research.