Who Responds to Elections Polling?

Show Notes

Nia and Aughie discuss polling and the media prior to the November elections of 2021.  They cover common mistakes in polling that can lead to confusion and unreliable results.

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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.

Who Responds to Elections Polling?

Announcer: Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.

N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.

J. Aughenbaugh: Morning, Nia. How are you?

N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm good. One of the reasons why I am good is we get to talk about some of the most egregious errors committed in regards to election polling in the history of the United States.

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: I made it through my entire life before I went to grad school, not my entire life because I'm not dead yet, but quite a bit of my life before I went to grad school. When I went to grad school, I took research methods, because everybody in grad school has to take research methods.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: One of the things that the professor talked about was how you sample poll. He brought up the Dewey, Truman race, and there's that famous photograph of Truman holding up a newspaper that says Dewey defeats Truman. For people who don't know how newspapers used to run, they used to print them and have them out first thing in the morning. But that meant that you had to have the story's done by mid night in order for the print set to be done and then all the papers to be printed and bound and sent out to the stands. They jumped that gun at mid night by saying, Dewey wins that election and that, by the way, is President Truman, holding up that newspaper. It's just totally wrong. I didn't realize that part of that problem was the polls, in that race had been so badly done or badly skewed. He got me thinking about polling, and now like this thing that we're going back through and we're looking at votes to try to find errors, part of that is because the polling in the election for 2020 was so weird. That people had expectations about what was actually going to happen in the election and it didn't happen.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because the polling results leading up to the 2020 presidential election, so badly underestimated Trump's performance. It supports the conspiracy that former President Trump and his supporters are fully invested in, which is, if the pre-election polls were so bad, then does that not also mean that how the votes were counted-

N. Rodgers: Could be wrong.

J. Aughenbaugh: Could be wrong?

N. Rodgers: For listeners, neither Aughie nor I believe the "big lie." We do not believe the election was stolen. We do not believe there was mass fraud. We believe there was a little bit of fraud, or not fraud, but a little mistakes were made. We both believe that mistakes were made because humans are involved in this process, and mistakes are going to be made, but not at the level that it would have turned over even one state, let alone an entire national election. Just to put that aside, that's not what we're talking about today. We're not talking about the big lie.

J. Aughenbaugh: Nia and I in previous podcast episodes, have talked about the difficulties that were associated with the 2020 elections. But neither one of us believes that there was enough mistakes made. Certainly there was not a concentrated effort to deny President Trump and other elected officials or candidates from winning their elections in 2020. But back to Dewey defeating Truman headline.

N. Rodgers: Which has got to be one of the to most embarrassing. It was the Chicago paper, wasn't it?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it was the Chicago Daily Tribune, which was a Republican leaning newspaper. They ran a poll before the election that indicated that Dewey, who was the Republican party challenger to incumbent President Harry S. Truman, would win decisively. As Nia just pointed out, back then, newspapers went to print usually by 11 o'clock at night or midnight at the latest, depending on how big their operation was. Because you'd have to get the newspaper set, the story set, then the printers would have to produce hundreds of thousands of copies of newspapers. They would have to be bound, put on delivery trucks, who would then basically drive around a city and the suburbs, all to get the newspapers on people's front porches or yards.

N. Rodgers: By 6:00 AM.

J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, yeah. So that people could read their newspaper as they ate breakfast, or were leaving their house to get on subways, blah, blah, blah.

N. Rodgers: This election is the 1948 election.

J. Aughenbaugh: 1948.

N. Rodgers: This is quite awhile. If you're going to release a paper like Chicago, I'm assuming the tribune had at that point in '48, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subscribers because that's how people in 1948 got their news.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: There would not have been widespread television news, there would not have been widespread radio news, people mostly got it from the paper.

J. Aughenbaugh: You didn't have the Internet. In terms of network news, there was a designated time slot, 6:30 in the evening. That was it. There wasn't 24/7 CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, blah, blah, blah. There wasn't any of that.

N. Rodgers: That's a very modern invention, relatively speaking.

J. Aughenbaugh: Now, in terms of the outcome of the election, Truman won 49.6 percent of the vote, Dewey won 45.1 percent. You're talking about, correct my math, a four and a half percent difference in favor of Truman.

N. Rodgers: That's huge, relatively speaking.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Particularly with a president, whose public approval ratings, particularly compared to his predecessor, FDR, weren't all that good.

N. Rodgers: Well, I mean, in fairness to Truman, he just wasn't as exciting as FDR.

J. Aughenbaugh: No, he wasn't.

N. Rodgers: People probably were like, he's all right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Truman won the electoral college, decisively.

N. Rodgers: How much?

J. Aughenbaugh: 303-189.

N. Rodgers: Okay, that's pretty decisive. I'm just going to go out on a limb and say, wow.

J. Aughenbaugh: But in the aftermath, the newspaper, to its credit, did a post-election, if you will, audit. If I may use the phrase of the day.

N. Rodgers: The current phrase of the day yes

J. Aughenbaugh: Basically what they found is that they over sampled republicans in their pre-election poll. The poll was conducted entirely via phone, and wealthy people in the 1940s were one more likely to have phones. I know some of our younger listeners, are going to be like, what do you mean? This is pre-cell phones. We're talking about landlines. In the 1940s, there were huge segments of the American population, that did not have phones particularly in rural areas. There might be a phone for the entire community, at a general store or the county courthouse.

N. Rodgers: Or the post-office. Some shared space.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.

N. Rodgers: Really only used for emergencies. You call when somebody was dying or you call, something like that. But then again, in 1948, most people had not moved thousands of miles from their family. They were living relatively close. So there were a lot more communications that way, but yeah, that was what he told us. He said the problem here was telephones, and we were like what? He said telephones. That's how they did the poll, and telephones skewed wealthy and wealthy, skewed Republican.

J. Aughenbaugh: Here's the second about the use of phones for surveys. They would call during the day, and the only people who were usually home during the day were wealthy people, and oftentimes wealthy women who did not have to work.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Back then, women were more likely to vote as their spouse did. So if they were married to a wealthy person, wealthy Americans back then tended to vote Republican, whereas today, increasingly wealthy Americans, at least in the last two presidential elections, are actually moving towards voting for democratic.

N. Rodgers: Really? Well, we'll have to discuss that another time because that's interesting too. But the other question that I have though about phone or rather taking that into the modern era, if you did that problem, and it's called -

J. Aughenbaugh: A sampling bias.

N. Rodgers: Right. Sampling bias is when you -

J. Aughenbaugh: The data sample is selected in a way that it does not reflect the true underlying distribution. Because again, remember the sample, with a poll, you can't poll every single American.

N. Rodgers: Three hundred and thirty one million people. Quick, start now.

J. Aughenbaugh: So you try to sample a representative group so that you can generalize or extrapolate from that sample to what more than likely the larger population will do.

N. Rodgers: Right. So sometimes that's helped cover by the size of the poll.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: By calling random numbers as opposed to specific numbers. But I was going to ask you about modern-day sampling bias because I am curious about, if telephones were in 1948, a problematic sampling bias, would you say that in 2021 computer polls are a problematic or could be a problematic sample bias because I know my parents would never fill out a poll on a computer. They are of an age where they would just simply not do that. I know that lots of people in lots of areas, turns out don't actually own their own computers. We have issues with broadband in the United States, but we also just have issues with computer ownership. People think everybody owns a computer, but it's only about 78 percent in the United States, there's a good honk and 22 percent of us that don't own a computer.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, the concept is entitled the digital divide.

N. Rodgers: So if somebody did a poll that way now would the same potential problem hold?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, you would have the same issues because it's generally those with a modicum of income who either have computers or who have access to computers or live in areas where there is broadband connectivity. I mentioned this for instance in my classes and a lot of my students are just like, What do you mean? I said, there, there are parts of the United States to where, with the exception of government offices and the library, there may not be internet to residential homes.

N. Rodgers: There is not to my parents. It goes through their phone line.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then I said, and then you have issues of age which contribute to the digital divide. You've talked about your parents. My mother and my grandmother could get the internet at my mom's house. But neither of them have ever operated a computer.

N. Rodgers: Taking a poll on a computer is not an unsophisticated thing to do.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, right? For our younger generations, for our younger listeners, you guys have been taking surveys, etc.

N. Rodgers: You were born doing that. How was your experience in the womb on a Likert scale? You guys have been doing that.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Right.

N. Rodgers: Of course, but we older folk.

J. Aughenbaugh: My daughter came home last year or two years ago when she was in second grade, and she said she took a survey on her computer, which was distributed by the school system about their lunch menu.

N. Rodgers: Chicken nuggets all the way. Yeah. So and like, I think that at my age and I am middle-aged, I am probably the tippy generation where we learn to use computers pretty quickly and we're pretty decent at it. But anyone older than me struggles. They struggle with what do you want me to click on? What do you want me to do? I don't know whether that played into the 2020 presidential issues or not.

J. Aughenbaugh: Let's go back one election.

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: So we're of hopscotch and around your listeners, but we will touch upon some of the more significant issues and use particular presidential elections to demonstrate the problems. If you go to 2016, the poll suggested that democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election. That's what the poll said.

N. Rodgers: Wait, I have a question. Did they say she would win the popular vote or did they say she would win the electoral college? When they're Pauling, are they pulling for the popular vote?

J. Aughenbaugh: It's the popular vote, because again, if you win the popular vote in the state, then you get that state's electoral college votes. The difficulty or the problem that arose in 2016. According to, again, a post-election review, was that the polls in 2016 in a number of states had an issue with pulling in uneducated American voters. In other words, the polls tended to over survey those with college degrees or advanced degrees. Where this became an issue is that many Trump's supporters did not have college degrees.

N. Rodgers: They just simply were not sampled.

J. Aughenbaugh: They were not sampled. So what many pollsters attempted to do in the aftermath of 2016 was to address what they call the education divide. Let's make sure that our samples, include a robust percentage of those without college degrees. But nevertheless, the 2020 presidential election was off on a number of accounts. On a number of variables.

N. Rodgers: So they thought they had fixed it after 2016. Turns out, it's more complicated than they thought it was.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. A lot of the polls for the 2020 in the pre-election underestimated Trump's support. They didn't overestimate Biden's support, but they underestimated Trump's support. Just to give you a sense of what we're talking about, Trump as a loosing presidential candidate, garnered the most votes ever cast for a loser in a presidential election in our country's history. In part, that reflected the high turnout in 2020. But it wasn't just the presidential election, the polls for senate elections and down ballot races, like state races, local government races, in some cases, were off by six percentage points. Six. You had some polls who identified certain people as winning and they lost by four or five percentage points.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, if your margins are that bad, your poll is no good.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: If you had a margin of error of six percent, if you listed that on a poll, nobody would take it seriously. Because they'd say, well, heck, that's huge.

J. Aughenbaugh: What you're talking about, Nia, is what's known as the confidence interval, okay?

N. Rodgers: Yes.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's the plus or minus for a poll. The gold standard for most election polling is three percent or less. Anything above three percent, as you've just indicated, if you're a consumer of that poll, you should.

N. Rodgers: You should also believe in fairies and Neverland.

J. Aughenbaugh: That Professor John Aughenbaugh has some really good real estate to sell you.

N. Rodgers: I was going to say here's some bridges for sale. When you think about okay, just briefly the interval between when you say a plus or minus three. If you say that the election is going to be, let's just do easy numbers because that's the simplest, it's going to be a dead heat 50/50 between Nia and Aughie. If your confidence interval is three percent, that means Aughie could go by as much as 53, and Nia could go down as much as 47.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, or vice versa.

N. Rodgers: Right. Which means that if you had six percent, you're now talking Aughie has 56 and Nia has 44, and that's a drubbing. In the real world, we call that a drubbing. That would be, what is it President Obama call? Shellacking. That would be a shellacking.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's a shellacking. I love that word.

N. Rodgers: I do too, because it sounds like what it is.

J. Aughenbaugh: Right. I got shellacked.

N. Rodgers: We would caution you, if you're looking at polls ever, to look at that plus, minus and see what it is. Because if it's extraordinarily high, what they're basically saying is we don't have any confidence in this poll, the people who put it out are telling you that, which good for them because they're telling you don't really listen to us.

J. Aughenbaugh: In one of the things that the pollsters, they actually have a trade association. Of course they do, because every profession has a trade association. What's the name of their trade associate? The American Association for Public Opinion Research.

N. Rodgers: TM.

J. Aughenbaugh: But what they found out, and of course, these are the folks that got some egg on their face. What they found out is that, it didn't matter what methodology was used to conduct these polls, many of these polls have problems. Nia and I started off, listeners, by talking about the use of a telephone poll in the 1948 presidential election.

N. Rodgers: Which by the way, people probably answered. Because they were flattered to be asked and polls weren't that common and you know what I mean? There's a lot of reasons why people would have, once they picked up the phone and a pollster said, can I ask you a few questions? Especially stay at home people who may have been bored and it would be nice to have somebody to talk to for a few minutes, like whatever, they're going to say, "Sure. I'll answer your questions." According to your notes, that's a problem now.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because most Americans today, particularly for those of us on one side of the digital divide, those of us with access, we're overwhelmed with polls.

N. Rodgers: Every time you go to a website, they're like, can you take a short survey to help us improve our website? I will be honest with you, I don't do it. Most of the times I close that window, I can't, I'm like no. That's why you pay focus groups, I'm not interested.

J. Aughenbaugh: I go online and I pay a bill and then I get an immediate email saying, "Hey, would you like to take a survey about your experience with our online pay service?" I'm like, no, the reason I get the online pay service is that, my level of interaction most effort is minimum.

N. Rodgers: Yes. Now part of that is because Aughie and I are Gen-Xers and we don't believe in other. We're like no, no, no, no, no, I've got 10 people in my life, that's as many as I can take. Like, I can't.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. I've already analyzed the cost-benefit analysis, transaction costs of dealing with those 10 people and I'm cool with those 10 people.

N. Rodgers: Exactly.

J. Aughenbaugh: The rest of you all, I have determined that interacting with you, having any kind of a transaction with you, the cost should be minimized. So me doing a survey to talk about my experience with your online pay service.

N. Rodgers: Isn't going to happen.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because it has now increased the cost.

N. Rodgers: Exactly. We're terrible humans.

J. Aughenbaugh: We're terrible.

N. Rodgers: But the reality of that too is, part of that is me saying to myself, don't you have focus group, like don't you have a more organized way to deal with this? That's part of what I think when I see those things online, but also part of what I think is, you are the 700th person to ask me this in the last week. Like leave me alone computer, leave me alone. Part of that, I wonder is not what happens in polls with humans. Where another human, they just think, you know what? During this election season, I have been asked enough and I'm done. I don't want to be asked anymore. I don't want to venture an opinion to you because part of that too and this goes back to us being Xers. Listeners, please just deal with us accordingly. We don't trust anybody. We're cynical about almost everyone and everything. Our trust level that our experience is actually going to be taken into account when we do give you an answer, is pretty low.

J. Aughenbaugh: For those of you who are well-versed in the Bible, we're doubting Thomas.

N. Rodgers: I'm going to need you to show me your bleeding wound in order for me to actually believe that you are the risen Christ. I'm not saying you're not, but I'm going to need some proof.

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to need some proof. We're a generation that we're latchkey kids.

N. Rodgers: Left on our own.

J. Aughenbaugh: We were left on our own, so we come to our own independent evaluation of things, and a lot of times, when we're talking collectively, generationally, there are some individuals who might be different. But collectively, we're just like, these institutions really don't work. Parents, yeah they're not all that great.

N. Rodgers: Or they're fine.

J. Aughenbaugh: They're fine. Okay.

N. Rodgers: They're fine.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, whatever.

N. Rodgers: Exactly. That's our generation's word, whatever.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: I don't think we make good polling samplers or samplees.

J. Aughenbaugh: Subjects.

N. Rodgers: Subjects. Thank you.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, We're not good subjects.

N. Rodgers: I also suspect that people who feel like they have been screwed by the government, who feel like they've been screwed by politicians, probably also are not particularly good subjects because they're not interested in answering polls either. You know what? You've set my job overseas, you don't represent me with my moral and ethical and religious choices. You don't represent me with my political choices. I don't want to have anything to do with you people, and I'm not going to answer your stupid poll.

J. Aughenbaugh: What you're getting at here is a debate among professional pollsters, and political scientists who study the use of polling. You have some pollsters who believe that in 2016 and 2020, many Trump's supporters fell into that category that you just mentioned. They don't trust government institutions. They don't trust people they perceive as elites. They are unwilling to participate in polls because even if they responded honestly, they believe that their responses will somehow be mischaracterized, changed, ignored, or used to further an already existing narrative about how they, and people like them are dumb, stupid, irrational, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's one theory. Another theory is that this has longer historical roots. I know this is something that you and I have talked about before, and this is known as the social desirability bias, otherwise known as the Bradley effect.

N. Rodgers: Or in Virginia, the Wilder effect.

J. Aughenbaugh: Basically, what we're talking about here is in elections, where one candidate is white, and usually male and the other candidate or main candidate is a person of color or a woman. There has been some evidence that people, when they are polled before the election, will tell the pollster, what they think the pollster wants to hear because they don't want to look for instance, racist or sexist or something else. But then that gives skewed polling results before the election. The reason why it's referred to as the Bradley effect is that Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, in 1982 ran for governor in California. He was an African-American. pre-election polls suggested that he was going to win, and he lost. Now, there have been numerous studies done about that particular election. Some scholars have concluded that social desirability bias did take place. Other scholars who interviewed staffers involved with both campaigns have concluded that a significant percentage of voters change their mind or made up their mind at the last moment. That's another thing that pre-election polls struggle with. If it's an election, where we have a significant percentage of undecided voters. They may make up their mind at the last moment after the last set of polls have been done. Think about this, for instance, Nia in 2016. The number of Americans in pre-election polls who indicated that they found both candidates, undesirable, and what we've come to find out is a significant percentage of them decided at the last moment to vote for Trump because he wasn't perceived as a government elite. He was an outsider.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, he was perceived as outside the system.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.

N. Rodgers: That's the whole point of populism.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. That's the whole point of populism. They are not one of the elites. Why is that attractive? Because elites are not paying attention to me and folks like me.

N. Rodgers: They don't represent me. What I find fascinating about that is in that particular instance, and I'm not going to try to get us off too much, but I find fascinating that many Americans saw Trump as an outsider, and not an elite. I'm, dude was in government and politics on the periphery in New York for years. Not with office but with influence and he's extremely wealthy, he runs in those circles. To say that he is an outsider, and not just Donald Trump, but Barack Obama ran under the same thing. I'm, you went to Harvard. You're a high powered lawyer, you're now a Senator. You don't get to call yourself an outsider. You're not really an outsider.

J. Aughenbaugh: You taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I'm sorry. You're part of whatever.

N. Rodgers: You're not an outsider, you're part of the elite.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's funny, you just brought that up because last night in my politics and film class, we discussed the movie, all the king's men. The character in that movie, Willy Stark was based on well-known Louisiana politician Huey Long, King fish, a populist, and my students and I, were discussing candidates, who claimed that they are populist. I went ahead and made the comment, " When you hear a politician who has been an elected official for decades say that they are one of the people." They haven't been one of the people for years.

N. Rodgers: Exactly. When Senator McConnell or anybody like that, says blah, blah, blah from the people, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You have been the Senate for about 400 years, and you have a benefits package that is killer. Your job isn't like my job. Your life isn't like my life. Somebody drives you to work. Like don't even, we don't have the same experience.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's funny, you mentioned Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

N. Rodgers: He's not the only one by the way, I feel that way about Josh Revak.

J. Aughenbaugh: No, I mention both him and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, right?

N. Rodgers: Exactly. They couldn't get more elite.

J. Aughenbaugh: Did I even say that? I said, when I hear Speaker Pelosi say that.

N. Rodgers: Identifies with the little people, yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: The little people, I'm like she hasn't been a little person her entire life. Her father was an elected official. Okay?

N. Rodgers: Yeah. I'm not buying what you're selling. Sorry.

J. Aughenbaugh: She is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. It's been a few years since she's been one of the little people.

N. Rodgers: It's been a few years since she lived paycheck to paycheck. Let me just put it that way. Where the vast majority of Americans do live paycheck to paycheck.

J. Aughenbaugh: But the appeal to populism is one of the fundamental elements of the American political myth. Right?

N. Rodgers: Well, it's the little guy myth. It's the underdog myths. If the baseball team and everybody wants to win, isn't the Yankees except to you, you're the exception. It's anybody playing the Yankees because the Yankees always win, so it's that kind of thing. It's not that people hate the Yankees. It's that they want to see the Yankees lose occasionally.

J. Aughenbaugh: When the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, in this decade, they had not won the World Series in over 100 years.

N. Rodgers: For a moment, everybody in the world loved them because they were like yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: But the Chicago Cubs historically is a well-supported team in one of the largest markets in the United States.

N. Rodgers: It's not really an underdog team.

J. Aughenbaugh: The reason why they frequently failed is that they were poorly run, poorly managed with some really bad players. But nevertheless it fits that narrative. But the thing about 2016 and it reminded me, and I actually found some scholarship about this, what many in the media when they report pre-election polls, don't stress enough and what many Americans perhaps don't remember, is that there are some elections where the minds have already been made up. The divide is so stark there's not going to be a lot of undecided voters making up their mind at the last moment. What happened in 2016, you had two candidates that a lot of Americans were just like, "Oh, these are bad."

N. Rodgers: Scylla and Charybdis.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, right.

N. Rodgers: I am between the rock and the hard place. I don't know what to do.

J. Aughenbaugh: I joked with my students, I went to the polls and I did this to go ahead and make my daughter laugh. But as I was casting my vote I held my nose as though the ballot stunk. Right?

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: But think about this, Nia, in 2000 the presidential election between Bush 43 and Al Gore. Pre-election polls suggested that Al Gore was going to pretty comfortably win the election. Now he won the popular vote but there were a number of important Electoral College states like Florida, where voters, there is evidence to suggest that they change their mind at the last moment. That the reports about Bush skipping out on military service and may have been arrested for drugs and drinking actually Boomerang against those who made those reports, that many Americans were just like, "Well, why is this coming out at the last moment? What are they really afraid of?" Okay.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: They voted for Bush.

N. Rodgers: I wonder too if in some instances voters react to the feeling that the media is trying to make them do something?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Where not only people who are pulling them, but then the people who are reporting it are saying only a lunatic would vote for so and so, it's not what they say, but it's the tone. The person says, "Oh, no, you did not just tell me who to vote for. You wait, I'm going to write in Mickey Mouse on this ballot or whatever." Because I tell you that I believe in my heart of hearts, it's a fundamental American value. We talked about this before and it's not really I'm going to sue. It's, don't tell me what to do. It's the personal freedom of, if I want to jump off a cliff, you don't get to tell me I can't jump off a cliff. It's my cliff to jump from if I choose to do that.

J. Aughenbaugh: The American value of liberty.

N. Rodgers: Is foremost.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, is so acute. Even if what you tell me to do will benefit me I might not do it simply because you told me I had to do it.

N. Rodgers: Of course. Yeah, I appreciate that eating vegetables will make me live longer. Here, give me that loaf of bread, I'm just going to start gnawing on one end of it.

J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, that's when mentioned it, because I still remember and this was seven or eight years ago, my general physician, my GP. I'm doing my annual physical and he's telling me that I got to eat more vegetables, blah, blah, blah, and I just sarcastically say, "Really doc? What vegetables would you recommend?" He said, "You ought to eat more kale," and I looked at him and I'm like, " You want me to eat more kale." I said, "Doc, do you know anybody who wants to eat more kales?" Of course, the nurse who was in the room was just laughing. Right?

N. Rodgers: Yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because I just went off on it. I said, "Even if kale was the tastiest vegetable in the world, you know what I'm going to do now, doc?" He goes, "Yeah, I know you, Augie." He goes, "You're going to make it a point to at least for the next two or three months never eat kale." I'm like, "Yes."

N. Rodgers: If you want me to do something, you should probably tell me to do the opposite, reverse psychology. But also the media portrays itself as, I think, hyper-educated, hyper-elite. One of the reasons that Fox News has the following that it has is because their commentators don't tend to be as, what I think of as snooty, as some of the other channels.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: I think there's a snootiness factor that some of the other channels feel like they're looking down on their viewers, whereas Fox News folks who by the way, are not regular people. They are regular people in the way that Nancy Pelosi is a regular person.

J. Aughenbaugh: Or Mitch McConnell is, right?

N. Rodgers: But they have a different tone.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: To their network coverage. I think it plays into that. They are very smart to play into that idea of it's us against the elites in the system and everything else. Fox News portrays itself as an underdog in that sense when it's, "We're not the mainstream media", but you are the mainstream media because you make as much or more money than the other networks.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. You've got higher ratings depending on the year.

N. Rodgers: Which you also bring in an enormous amount of money.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's a lot of money.

N. Rodgers: Don't talk to me about being all like Roman Dale with the little people or whatever, no you're not.

J. Aughenbaugh: But again, think about how other media organizations will report poll results. I remember in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election where you had mainstream media organizations; New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, talking about poll results, wherein the newspaper articles, there were just downright dismissive of how many people were voting, who said they were going to vote for Trump, all right?

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: I remember on-air talent for CNN and MSNBC openly questioning why anybody in their right mind would still want to vote for Trump. Now, if you know that, that's how the poll results are going to be portrayed and you're a Trump supporter.

N. Rodgers: Why would you talk to these people?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Again, we can be critical. We can be critical of the choices that voters make. But you and I have talked previously in podcast episodes in the lead-up to the 2020 election about what are some of the most important variables in determining why people vote the way they vote. I shared with listeners, political scientists, Murray Edelman's book, the symbolic uses of politics. Successful politicians are able to convince a large number of voters that they are a blank slate, that the voters can write all over them. That's why Nancy Pelosi can go ahead and convince a whole bunch of people that she is one of them. Why Mitch McConnell can go ahead and represent to a whole bunch of voters in Kentucky, I'm one of you.

N. Rodgers: Yeah. When's the last time that Mitch McConnell was really in Kentucky?

J. Aughenbaugh: Kentucky in? No.

N. Rodgers: He is a Washington Insider.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. He was a Washington Insider.

N. Rodgers: But he sure does portray himself well and he keeps getting re-elected. His constituency loves him. Can we pivot then to the future? How does it get fixed? I know, big question, you probably can't answer in the next 10 minutes or so, but it's got to get fixed because we need polls that actually accurately reflect. Or do we need polls that accurately reflect what the nation is thinking?

J. Aughenbaugh: I get to ask this question sometimes, Neo. Why should we care about polls? Why should we care about them? I tell students and people who ask me that question, if you want to be educated and engaged in what's going on with governments in elections, then we probably should continue to have polls, but I always advise caution in part as you correctly identified a few minutes ago. I'm a skeptic. If I read an article that discusses a poll, I will try to find the actual poll to make sure that how the media was reporting it is actually accurate.

N. Rodgers: That is an excellent point and thank you for making it. We should have said that at the beginning. Polls, you should always look at the poll. You should look at the methodology. You should look at what question they actually asked because sometimes the media reports an answer that they could not have possibly been answered by the question that was asked in the poll. They're just making assumptions about what those words mean. But that is regularly not the case. You should always go look at the originating poll and see what questions were asked and how they were asked. Did it lead people to an answer? Did the way the question was worded influence or could it have influenced? The really good pollsters work on that and make sure that they're not asking questions like that, but it can still happen.

J. Aughenbaugh: In really good polls, you also try to determine whether or not the response is to something current or if it's a deeply held, if you will, belief or response because polls in one sense are snapshots in time. They're asking you to go ahead and reflect on a series of events and you have a recency bias. It's like the poll results that get released this past week about a shrinking percentage of Americans actually approve of the work of the Supreme Court.

N. Rodgers: Well, that's because right now we're all mad about shadow doc.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Yeah, a whole bunch of Democrats and a whole bunch of women aren't pleased because the Supreme Court did not step in and immediately declare the most recent Texas Abortion Law unconstitutional. Could that possibly change in two or three months? Yeah. The Supreme Court could issue a number of opinions or the Supreme Court is no longer on the media's attention on the meeting's agenda, and we'll go ahead as we usually do and forget about the Supreme Court until June of next year.

N. Rodgers: One should always remember that the media is constantly looking for a dumpster fire. If there's not one, they'll make one, but also, dumpster fires have a way of horrifying people and making them feel a certain way but then do they really feel that way? That's one of the things I've noticed with polling questions is if the election were held today, a lot of them start off that way. I think that's a pretty smart way to start off because it lets you do that, exactly what you're talking about, which is snapshot in time, but will you feel this way six months from now? I know it's not gubernatorial, I know it's gubernatorial, but I prefer guber because that's most of the people who run the state of Virginia to both parties, as does both parties.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin.

N. Rodgers: What we're hearing in the polls is that they are in a dead heat, and that goes to your question of what you were saying earlier about people walking in the booth and making a decision short of flipping a coin. I think they're just making a decision like, "Okay, that guy," and I'm not sure we're going to get a good poll in Virginia.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Here's the other thing that I would suggest to listeners. For those of us who follow politics, and we like to follow politics, polls are important. As somebody who's worked for elected officials, polls are a way to convey what that politician, that elected official's constituents might be, at that point in time, consider to be important. Now, good politicians, like good pollsters, will try to understand or try to figure out and get at whether or not an issue has any salience, how important is it, but pre-election polls, interestingly enough, help generate interest in elections because if you've seen polls and your preferred candidate is not doing well, then you might want to go ahead and start browbeating your friends and family or volunteering or making a campaign donation.

N. Rodgers: Well, or even making you aware that the election is happening in those weird off-year elections, I like to think of them in Virginia off-off-year elections, where you're not electing a governor and you're not electing a president. Oh, there's an election this year? What's on the ballot? The polls actually can make people aware that it's even happening when they weren't aware of that before because everybody knows when the presidential, you cannot get away from the presidential elections unless you, every four years, go live in a cave under a rock somewhere, and even then, you'd have to do it for a year and a half.

J. Aughenbaugh: Think about it, listeners.

N. Rodgers: You'd know why you were living in the cave so you still can't escape, not really.

J. Aughenbaugh: Think about it, listeners. More than likely, next spring, you're already going to see newspaper articles, media stories about the jockeying for position in both the Democratic and Republican parties as to who might be their candidate in 2024. I know you and I've talked about, Nia, but think about this, Canada just went ahead and held a set of elections for their national legislature, which will determine who will be Prime Minister, and it at all happened within 2 1/2 months. Justin Trudeau said, "I'm calling early elections, and they're going to happen in 2 1/2 months," and they happened earlier this week.

N. Rodgers: How does that even work? That's so fabulous. He literally did that 10 weeks. He's like, "We're going to hold elections in 10 weeks," and everybody went, "All right," because that's how their system works. To wrap up this whole thing, do you think that pollsters will figure it out or do you think that it's going to be just a work in progress from here on out?

J. Aughenbaugh: I think it's going to have to be a work in progress in part, Nia, because they're going to have to continue to use multiple methods if they really want to get a representative sample, and that requires more money and different kind of training for those who conduct the polls. I think pollsters are also going to have to get better at qualifying the claims of their poll results. They're going to have to go ahead and show a little bit more humility because you can't go ahead and say that there aren't any problems after what happened in 2016 and 2020 because there were problems. There were problems at the national level, state, and local levels. This wasn't just a big oops in regards to a presidential election. Some of the mistakes at the state and local levels were even worse, but they didn't really get reported because we tend to focus on the presidential election, so they're going to have to show a little bit more humility in saying, "This is what we do know and this is what we don't know," and I'm not entirely sure that they're willing or capable of doing that, but I hope that they are.

N. Rodgers: Can I say for my opinion that I hope that because it's more expensive, there'll be fewer of them?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Because I think that that also muddies the water. When everybody and their cat is putting out a polling and the polling data is contradictory, then what people end up doing is throwing up their hands. They end up saying, "Then none of this works," and it's all meaningless and I'm not going to bother with any of it because on one poll, it says this but on another poll, it says that and those of the exact same candidates. Whereas I think if there were fewer, but they were better quality, you might have more confidence in them.

J. Aughenbaugh: What you're referring to is polling fatigue. Even if you are somebody who will fill out polls after a while, God love you, but after a while, it's like anything, it becomes rote and you stop paying close attention to the questions or you've already figured out what they're looking for as an answer unless you're being recalcitrant.

N. Rodgers: Because if I [inaudible 01:00:52] apple pie and drink coffee every meal, after a while, even he would get tired of apple pie and coffee. He'd be like, "Okay, you know what I need? I need a lemon meringue and a glass of tea," and everybody would fall down in the floor in shock.

J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, listeners, and I'm going to concede or acknowledge this, before we recorded this particular podcast for breakfast this morning, I got two cups of coffee, a really big slice of apple pie.

N. Rodgers: I did not know that.

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm not making that up.

N. Rodgers: I want it noted for the record. I didn't know that; I just know you.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because last Sunday, McKenzie and I went to a farmers market, and there's really nice elderly woman, had a couple of apple pies. I bought two of them.

N. Rodgers: Of course, you did.

J. Aughenbaugh: This morning, I was just like, "Well, hey, apple pie can't be that bad for breakfast because it has fruit."

N. Rodgers: I was going to say it has fruit and it has wheat.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, right.

N. Rodgers: We can justify anything if we change.

J. Aughenbaugh: The nice woman who made it put liberal amounts of cinnamon.

N. Rodgers: Which is very good for your heart, and she made it with love. That's always good too.

J. Aughenbaugh: Of course, assuming that I have a heart, but nevertheless, and then I washed it down with two rather large mugs of coffee. I kid you not.

N. Rodgers: I just am glad that I called that without even knowing. Thank you, Aughie. We will, I'm sure, be back to talk about polling and elections as they go along because we're going to see a lot more of that.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Again, listeners, Nia just said something really important. Virginia basically has elections every year. We have statewide elections coming up this fall, so please vote, but we also have midterm elections that are scheduled in 2022, and you're going to see a whole bunch of polls. If nothing else, be better consumers of polls. Be better consumers. Anyway, that's my public service announcement.

N. Rodgers: Thanks, Aughie.

J. Aughenbaugh: All right, dear. Have a good day.

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