"Pollsters and pundits failed to predict the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Is this because they do not know our fellow Americans and how they think? Who are the public? In A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion, Susan Herbst argues that we need to go back to the beginning of the idea of "public opinion" and a mass public to understand what the American public is now. Herbst contends that the idea that there was a public whose opinions mattered began in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, with the growth of mass media, the devastating impact of the economic collapse on so many people, and the entry of political leaders, like Franklin Roosevelt, who were talented at trying to shape what the public thought. In the 1930s we had a stew pot of political beliefs from far left to far right, many challenging the established democracy of the day, in the wake of the failure of government to deal with the economic and social effects of the depression. Herbst argues that public opinion about political matters can only be understood as a product of a messy mixture of culture, politics, economics-in short, all the things that influence how people live. If we are to understand what people think about politics we must dig deep into the context in which people are developing these opinions"--

Susan Herbst is university professor of political science and president emeritus at the University of Connecticut. She is author of many books and articles including Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in America. She is coeditor of the Chicago Studies in American Politics series, also published by the University of Chicago Press.