The paper explores the roll out of a survey-based social science in Palestine/Israel. Historians have failed to connect the rapid development and cross-cultural spread of research on public opinion and consumer behavior in the second half of the twentieth century to the emergent Liberal International Order and U.S.-led efforts to promote security, open markets, and a particular idea of democracy in disparate parts of the world Post-WWII. Addressing this lacuna in the scholarship, the paper focuses on the first national opinion polls that the Israeli State had carried out in 1949 and 1950 and efforts to adapt American survey methodology and practice for dealing with recalcitrant subject populations, doubtful decision makers, and competing definitions of the political Subject whose will polls were designed to measure. Rejecting a narrative of ‘diffusion’ and ‘reception,’ I demonstrate that there was nothing inevitable about the adoption of these scientific methods and tools. Rather, the paper highlights the strange mixture of enthusiasm, distrust, and misunderstanding with which mass surveys were received, and the ways by which they came to support local political projects and interests, thus offering a complex account of mediation, negotiation, and appropriation.