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Elliot, I'm so glad that you asked where I am because I wanted to be able to do this once you got on the call. Where do you think I am? Are you in Austin? I am in Austin. What? How did you figure? How? It's Lady Bird Lake. Elliot went to college there. Oh, it's less impressive. I know the skyline of every U.S. city. If you showed the Bethesda anthropology, I would know in a heartbeat that that is my hometown.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk.
Can Nikki Haley actually win the Republican primary? That seems to be the question du jour for the National Political Press Corps. And today we're going to do our best to answer it, or at least add some nuance to the conversation. We love to add nuance, don't we? So what precipitated this consideration of Haley's chances? A cynic might say it's a bored press corps in search of any glimmer of a competitive race, but let's remain credulous at least for now.
In the month since the last Republican debate, Haley has been inching up in the national polls while DeSantis has been slipping. Today, DeSantis leads Haley by just three points nationally, 13% to 10%. They're similarly close in Iowa, although they're both doing better there than nationally, and Haley leads DeSantis by a sizable margin in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Trump is at 60% nationally and 40-some percent in the early states.
There were already rumblings about Haley supplanting DeSantis as the alternative to Trump. And then last Tuesday, Americans for Prosperity, the political arm of the Koch network, endorsed Haley, throwing its financial and organizing weight behind her. So where do things go from here?
We're also going to dive into, excuse the nerdiness, one of the intractable polling questions of our time, which is what's the deal with issue polling? A.K.A. when pollsters ask voters the issues motivating them or how they feel about a certain policy, what information are voters giving us? That is our good or bad use of polling example for the day. Here with me to discuss it all is politics reporter Leah Escaranam. Welcome to the podcast, Leah.
Hello. Also here with us is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Brakech. Welcome, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. Good morning. Good morning. Emphasis on the morning. Morning. Yes, it is indeed morning. We're recording a little earlier than usual in case our voices sound gruff. And it takes a second to feel the energy of the moment. Also here with us is director of data analytics, Elliot Morris. Welcome to the podcast, Elliot.
Howdy, Galen. I am overflowing with energy for this podcast. You know, I love to hear it. In fact, I'm on Central Time, so I'm even an hour earlier than all of you. And I'm feeling ready to go. Honestly, it's a new week. We are six weeks out from the Iowa caucuses. Guys, let's do this. You're a madman. It's 9 a.m. on a Monday. Come on. Let's go. Let's get it together. Let's go. To start things off with a very serious question. I
Elliot, let's start with you. Where would you put Nikki Haley's chances of winning the Republican primary?
You want a percentage? Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. I mean, I expect some people on this podcast to chicken out, but if you're willing to give me a percentage, I am here for it. Subtweet. You kind of put me on the spot, so I'm going to have to talk through my rationalization a bit. Okay, so the way I would normally go about this is I would look at historical movement in the polls between now and whatever day of the contest, and then you can back into some sort of likelihood calculation from that. I'm just guessing if you did that, then...
The number of times a candidate has got like a 35 percentage point increase in support in the polls is in the single digits percentage wise. So I'm just going to go for 11%. Let's call it 11%. No decimal? God. Leah, your turn next.
I don't think about this in terms of percentages. I'm sorry. I know I'm on 538, but still, you have to hold two things in your mind at the same time. One is Trump is highly favored to be the nominee. Also, we are in unprecedented times where the highly favored candidate is also facing criminal charges and will be on trial during the primary.
So there's time for things to change. Okay. All right. That's, you know, adding, like I said, adding some nuance, not some numbers, but Nathaniel, um,
Where do you come down on this? Yeah, I mean, you know, if you wanted me to irresponsibly put a number on it without, you know, based on my gut instinct. No, well, at least you, like, actually do modeling. And mine is just, like, based on my gut. Like, I would have given her, like, a 10% chance. So similar, I guess, to Elliot, which I guess is a good gut check. But I think the important thing here is that for the purpose, like, the reason that we're talking about her, right, is that
I think for the first time,
It's not clear that Ron DeSantis is the second most likely candidate to win the nomination. And in fact, I think there's probably a good argument that Nikki Haley is the second most likely candidate now and that Ron DeSantis is not. And I think that's kind of what's notable. I think Trump has been, you know, 80 percent favorite or some some large number favorite for a while. But the interesting thing is what has been the movement that has been happening in the with the lower tier of candidates.
Yeah, I think part of what Leah was getting at is that obviously we can look at historical data, but the modern primary system is exactly that, modern. I think we've only had a dozen presidential elections since it was created. And so while we do have data and historical precedent, we also have to be a little bit humble about applications of that data just because we don't have thousands of data points from which to derive trends. So let's
for a moment, be credulous of this narrative and this exercise.
If Nikki Haley has a path to the nomination, that 10%, 11% chance that y'all described, what is it? Like, what would have to happen between now and June of next year for Nikki Haley to actually win? And we can talk about the kinds of voters she would have to attract, what might have to happen to Trump, whether it relates to endorsements or money or, you know, what is between here and there,
the path to a Nikki Haley nomination. Nathaniel, we'll go and we'll do a snake draft kind of style. Nathaniel, you can go first this time. I mean, yeah, like a lot of the things you mentioned would certainly be helpful for her. I think, you know, the AFP endorsement is...
i don't think i'm not sure how helpful it'll be in and of itself but if it is kind of the beginning of an elite pile on to people being like okay this is our candidate who's not named trump i think you know a lot of republican elites even though trump i should say leads far and away in terms of uh endorsements um and he's already gotten a large chunk of the party enough of the party like frankly like it's comparable to past not
nominees already. But I do think there is a chunk of the party, the size is perhaps up for debate, but there's a chunk of the party that wants to move on from Trump that has mostly kept its powder dry in terms of endorsements, as evidenced by the fact that Haley and DeSantis don't have that many
And if they really start to come on board for Haley, I think that would help. I think the sequential nature of the primary is really important here and could help Haley if she ends up overtaking DeSantis in Iowa, posts a better than expected score. If Trump does a worse than expected score, then I think that
We'll give her a nice little boost going into New Hampshire, a place where she's already, as you mentioned, Galen running second place. And so maybe then she wins New Hampshire. And then at that point, perhaps the invincibility of Trump, kind of that veneer is pierced. And then maybe it becomes a genuinely competitive race. But there are also, I think, a lot of things that would have to go right. Like she has a path, but it's a narrow one.
Yeah, I see Haley with a pretty clear path to winning like a half dozen states and then getting a pretty solid second place finish in a majority of the rest. I don't think that that's her...
her modal outcome right now. But you think her modal outcome is worse than that? Yeah, I think she's I think that's like a little bit optimistic for her. But I think putting ourselves in if you like back into the trajectory over the last couple weeks or something, and you try to think about where we're going to be in Iowa, that's probably a pretty good benchmark.
I don't know, like eight states does not a primary winner make, however. But it could set you up to win the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. It could? And has. And has. Many times. John McCain, Mitt Romney. People don't like when I say this, but there is a chance of a contested convention. That is something that has happened before. And Leah's mentioning we're in unprecedented territory if...
Trump's bound delegates cannot go to him for whatever reason in August. They have to go to someone else. And a second place finisher is a natural thing.
What do you mean cannot go to him? Well, if he drops out or declines, doesn't want to run, can't run, I don't know. It is a possibility. It is a remote possibility. But people should remember that there are systems set up for this. I don't think people hate when you say this. I think people love when you say this. I think people love when the press part talks about a contested convention. The thing is, it's just lampoonable because it never happens.
It's probably not going to happen, but it could. And in those scenarios, Haley seems like a pretty good, you know, pretty good option. The Republican National Committee did release its delegate rules last week and did not have a plan for what happens to assigned delegates in the event that one of the candidates is no longer in the race by the end. And actually, the AP wrote a story about that because I think we're looking at
again, not to make everything a binary, but two different scenarios. One is that this is the most uneventful primary that we have in recent history. And we have Biden's sale to the nomination and Trump's sale to the nomination and it's over. And the other is that it's in the less likely situation, but still possible, is that it's utter chaos. And I think that does get into what
Nikki Haley's path to victory would be, Trump would have to crater. And in order for Trump to crater, I think you'd have to see him... I think you'd have to see a scenario in which it is highly unlikely that he would be able to win the general election. And so if he could not appear on the ballot in certain states...
If something came out that made... And I think that's more likely than something coming out of the trial that makes him unelectable just because...
In general, things that come out about Trump don't hurt him enough to prevent his core base of supporters from supporting him. But if it gets to a point where for Republican stakeholders like Trump can't appear on the ballot, he can't get enough electoral college votes, then that opens a door for somebody else and that somebody else right now looks most likely to be
Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis. And I think what the dynamic that we're really honing in on is it's increasingly more likely that it's Haley rather than DeSantis. But so like with the race and Nathaniel was touching on this earlier, the race between the two of them has changed, but the race for the presidency has not, or the race for the Republican nomination has not. Trump still has that 90% chance of,
or so of becoming the nominee. But that 10% is a little bit fuzzier now than, you know, it might have been a few months ago.
Let's be clear here that according to the polling and these kinds of polls are conducted, that if in a hypothetical scenario, the Republican primary contest winnowed down to Trump versus Haley, if you poll likely Republican primary voters, they choose Trump by something like 60 some percent still. You know, Haley is only getting about 35 percent in that head to head polling. So it's not just that
Oh, it could winnow down to the two of them. And suddenly Republican primary voters would say, well, now that we have a clear alternative to Trump, we're going to choose that. So what is that 35 percent? Who supports Haley right now?
And then the logical next question is like, where's the path to expansion? Like, who is her next most obvious Republican? I mean, we always talk about lanes and primaries. I don't know how useful they've been in the past, actually, to try to describe what's happening or if they're useful here. But let's at least talk about who her coalition is most naturally and where the expansion is.
Haley seems to be performing better, at least at the state level, maybe somewhat obviously, in states that voted less for Trump in the primary in 2016. So I think better educated states...
less evangelical states. And then she's also doing well in states with more minorities. You know, we have a limited sample size here, so that's probably somewhat due to her home state effect potentially in South Carolina, but it's also true in some other southern states. And she does better with college-educated voters. I think that's a pretty good first approximation at
like the non-MAGA, let's say, Republican base with the obvious notable caveat that it's a small minority of Republican voters. So where does she go from there? Well, then you're kind of getting any of the people that Trump has locked up
at 80, 90%. So that becomes a lot harder. Yeah. Galen, you mentioned the concept of lanes. And I think that lanes are kind of useful, like guidelines for thinking about primaries. But I think they can get oversimplified. Obviously, it's not like, you know, certain candidates are running in the pro-Trump lane and certain candidates are running in the anti-Trump lane. And if one person drops out from one lane, then all of their support goes to the other person in the lane or whatever like that. But like, you know,
There are these rough, you know, lanes, you know, maybe like the dotted line on the road has been worn away with time. But Nikki Haley is running in the more anti-Trump lane. So there was a recent YouGov survey that was conducted in conjunction with Five Theory contributor Dan Hoppe.
is a professor at Penn, and he found that 25% of Haley backers listed DeSantis as their second choice, 22% listed Chris Christie, and only 14% listed Trump. So she's clearly getting her support from a wing of the party that wants to move on from Trump. Whereas DeSantis, for example, 39% of his supporters
voters say that Trump is actually their second choice. So DeSantis isn't clearly a either pro or anti-Trump candidate. He's kind of somewhere in the middle. But in terms of Nikki Haley, I think it's clear that she has a certain lane. And I think that that also speaks to why in head to head polls, she would be more limited, I think, than Ron DeSantis if DeSantis went up against Trump, because she would have a harder time winning over those Trump pro-MAGA voters.
And polls show her losing to DeSantis in a head-to-head, too, I believe. So, you know, your mileage may vary on some of these head-to-heads, but I think that that's consistent. Yeah, to add a little more context, Nathaniel, I think lanes do exist to some extent, but...
You're right that the way that we maybe think of them in a primary situation is maybe a little too, we take them a little too seriously. And there are different kinds of lanes. So, for example, when Tim Scott dropped out, if you were going according to ideology, you would think, well, his support is going to go probably to somebody like DeSantis because he's one of the more conservative, or maybe Trump, I don't know, because he's one of the more conservative people running on Trump.
abortion, religion, all kinds of things. Like he staked out some of the furthest right positions in the field, but stylistically, he was far more similar to Nikki Haley. And you saw in the polling that it looks like once he dropped out, his support transferred to
by a clear trend more to Nikki Haley than to anybody else. And so I think there are lanes, but maybe you have to think in multiple dimensions of lanes. Right. I think it reflects the fact that voters aren't all thinking about the race in a certain way. Some people might have supported Tim Scott because of his position on abortion. Some people might have supported him because they liked his optimist division for the country, et cetera. And those voters are going to make different decisions about who their second choices are.
But like how that say like 65% of people who are not choosing Nikki Haley and head to head, what's her like path with them? She's getting elite support. We can talk more about how seriously to take the Americans for Prosperity endorsement, but she's getting elite support. She's going to have money. Like what's the approach that she's going to take or that she's already taken? Because to be clear, she's not like she's not running as a literal anti-Trump.
candidate. What she's saying is, I want to avoid the topic. We need a new generation of conservative leadership. A lot of the things she's saying have broad appeal within the Republican Party. She's a hawk on immigration. She's a hawk on China. It's not as if your average Republican voter would look at Nikki Haley and say, wow, I really can't see my preferences in that candidate.
Well, you'd have to reassess the entire field, right? Like the ecosystem you're working in completely changes in a world where she actually has a chance. So is Trump in the race and losing support or has he been forced to withdraw for some reason? Because that makes a difference. Just because Trump wouldn't be the nominee wouldn't mean that he's not
the defining factor in the party, right? Like it would still probably be, you know, Trump's enemy who kind of agrees with him, which is DeSantis. Um,
Somebody who's critical of Trump without getting – without being entirely hostile to him, which I think is Nikki Haley. And then you'd have the actual anti-Trump candidates, which would be, you know, Chris Christie, who said this weekend that he's not planning on dropping out and endorsing anytime soon. And again, that's very – like, we're thinking about this in terms of lanes, definitely, like what –
what Nathaniel said about what was it like the lanes need to be repainted and it's kind of you can't tell which is which but I think that's the general that's the general environment that we'd be working in. To me the Americans for Prosperity endorsement is
Potentially even a negative signal to the majority of Republican primary voters today. I mean, it's as close as you can get to explicitly anti-Trump group, right? And still call yourself a conservative grassroots organization.
And money doesn't, you know, you're in a presidential primary. She has plenty of money. This isn't some small house race where that amount of money really makes a big difference. I mean, Galen, your question was, how does Nikki Haley attract the 50% or whatever of, or let's just say 30% of Republican primary voters that she would need to actually beat Trump in a competitive race?
Yeah, I think Trump drops out. It was pretty much the only explanation. Following up on what you said about the AFP endorsement, I was looking into this over the weekend, but Club for Growth, which I feel like we've all kind of just I've associated as like a pro DeSantis organization, hasn't technically endorsed DeSantis yet. So there are still other big groups, high profile groups that could get involved. I mean, AFP is a big one, but it's not the only big one.
I think I generally agree with Elliot that the AFP endorsement isn't going to matter that much, but I do feel like there are some things worth
saying in their favor. So first of all, back in 2018, so this is granted a while ago, but myself and Meredith Conroy, 530 contributor, looked at the endorsement records of a bunch of Republican groups and Republican primaries for Senate, House, and Governor. And the Koch Network actually was the only group that had
basically the same success rate as Trump. So 86% of their endorsed candidates won and Trump was 88% and everybody else was like two thirds or less. I totally take Elliot's point that, you know, a house race is different because you can, you know, money will go farther there. And that obviously, like Trump is this known commodity that has a ton of loyalty.
But I do think it's worth noting that AFP does have a strong track record. And I don't think that the money is nothing. You know, Haley just started TV advertising recently. And so she's basically been able to rise in the polls without having a lot of that kind of super big visibility. AFP does have a lot of
not only money, but also like volunteers knocking on doors and stuff like that. So I don't want to say the impact will be negligible, but I agree that it won't be, you know, like going up against Trump, which is who is a stronger force within the party. You know, I don't think it has what it takes. Yeah. To me, the big questions with these endorsements, especially by, you know, billionaire groups is, you know, if the money is not going to change the race meaningfully, then, you know,
The utility in the endorsement isn't a signal to voters. Or elites.
Right. Well, that's sort of what I was going to get at is the signal to elites for Nikki Haley from AFP is likely pretty similar to whatever signal the elites are getting from their social circles anyway. And those signals from elites to voters who ultimately are deciding the outcome of an election could be negative in an environment where lots of voters are polarized against the elites.
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Well, let's maybe then talk about the role that the money can play for a second. I'll say, for my part, it's already affected me. You know, I'm an unaffiliated voter in New York State, and starting on the Tuesday that Americans for Prosperity endorsed Nikki Haley, my phone has been blowing up.
with messages signed from Nikki Haley. I guess the idea there is that they can get some New York voters who are unaffiliated to register as a Republican because New York has a closed primary and then ultimately vote for Nikki Haley in the primary. I'll say it's an ambitious plan, especially given that in New York you have to change your registration by February 14th in order to vote in an April primary.
talk about making it easy to vote in blue states. But also, of course, as you mentioned, she's now advertising on TV. So let's play a clip of her first ad that she came out with.
A president must have moral clarity and know the difference between good and evil. Today, China, Russia, and Iran are advancing. There's chaos in our streets and college campuses. Our security is threatened at home and abroad. It's time for a new generation of conservative leadership. We have to leave behind the chaos and drama of the past and strengthen our country, our pride, and our purpose. I'm Nikki Haley, and I approve this message.
You know, Elliot, it sounded like you were in some ways dismissing the role that money would play in a presidential primary. But to me, what money signifies is attention. And both if you look at the polling and from my experience out in the field, I think that
There's a lot of people who have not been paying much attention to this primary. You know, when pollsters say they don't give you an option of who you're going to of who to vote for, they just say, tell me you provide the name. There's a large percentage of even, you know, likely Republican voters who can't name a name, don't say a name. And maybe, you know,
like Trump is overrepresented even in that kind of a poll because he's maybe the only person that people know or the only person that people can recall. Like if you say to Santa or to Haley, they'll be like, yeah, I've heard of them, but they're not thinking of them immediately. And when I've been out in, you know, Wisconsin or Simi Valley or wherever talking to people, they're like, oh, I haven't really been paying attention. I don't really know who's running. I know it's Trump. There's this governor from Florida. Like,
And maybe those people ultimately don't vote in a Republican primary. But if you can gin up a lot of attention and look in the final two, three weeks, like heading into the Iowa caucuses, the amount of attention, I think, unless, you know, something crazy happens, you never know, will increase dramatically. And Haley will be out in the field with these TV ads. I mean,
I take your point to the sort of elite endorsements not mattering as a signal. But do we also really think that there are diminishing returns on money in a presidential – like, yes, there are diminishing returns on money in a presidential general election because they're both spending a billion dollars. But is that also the case here?
There are diminishing returns on money in general. Once she's sending out one or two ads in your media market, that's going to have a much bigger effect than going from 10 to 20. So does this endorsement matter because she gets a lot of money to run TV ads? Well, the question becomes, does she get more attention from those TV ads than she was getting from the press already?
where we were already exposed to all these signals from the endorsement groups. We have been watching the debate and parroting the sort of dividing lines somewhat ad nauseum for a while now. You know, does your... You're saying that your farmer in Wisconsin suddenly start paying attention to the primary because... Wow, way to reduce Wisconsinites down to the farmer in Wisconsin. Well, sorry, I thought that was...
I thought that that was the example that you used. No, actually, I was up in Whitefish Bay, which is one of the wealthiest, best educated areas of the state. Okay. Well, shame on me. But anyway, does that person in Whitefish Bay start paying attention to the primary because they see Nikki Haley ad or because they know that the primary is coming up and their friends told them about it? This is what the social scientists call overdetermined. There are too many factors for us to really answer the question
And usually ad spending in a primary matters very little. It's worth a couple points maybe. So, hey, look, if the primary is already that close for a couple points to matter, something else probably happened to make it that close. Yeah, I think it's important to pay attention also to the sequence of states here, like
DeSantis has put in a lot of time into Iowa. And in Iowa, that does make a huge difference where there's a caucus. And he just, you know, wrapped up his, was it 99 county tour over the weekend? I mean, he has endorsements from the governor, Kim Reynolds, from evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats, who has endorsed the eventual winner of the Iowa caucuses multiple times, though,
not the actual nominee many of those times. So I think there's a world in which, you know, Nikki Haley needs to, she doesn't necessarily need to win Iowa. Maybe she needs to stem her losses in Iowa and then she can make a much bigger play in New Hampshire. And that's where I do think something like the AFP endorsement might have more of a
It might it might help more just in terms of ads, in terms of just like the kinds of Republican voters, you know, sort of anti-Trump voters in New Hampshire, potentially, though, of course, there are lots of pro-Trump voters in New Hampshire as well. And then here's where it's like, OK, what kind of answer the question? And then here's this new question. What happens if DeSantis places second in Iowa?
Nikki Haley places second in New Hampshire and Trump places first in both. And that means we will be continuing to have this very same conversation, like the exact same conversation at the beginning of 2024, because we will be no closer to answering the question of what happens if Trump gets kicked off the ballot or something like that.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I think there's a really thorny question in terms of if that happens. Yeah, I think people are still going to be talking about DeSantis and Haley, even though, wait, Trump won those states probably handily. And I think we are all going to have to come together and like come to an agreement that's like, OK, guys, like if Trump gets above, you know, X percent in Iowa, New Hampshire, can we win?
like agree that the primary is on its track to being over. And like basically we need to decide what is a like good performance of Trump and what is actually a potentially like damaging, vulnerable performance for him in those states, because there's going to be a lot of weird narrative setting based on like, oh, man, Nikki Haley finished second in Iowa. Oh, yeah, Donald Trump, he also won with 60 percent. But we're not going to talk about that part.
But like it does, it does matter. That's the thing. Like, I don't think it's necessarily like a thought exercise. Like, it does matter who comes in second because there's a non-zero chance. A non-zero is not a high chance, but there is a non-zero chance and we all need to like
We should have learned this by now. Non-zero means that it exists. So there is a chance that Trump is not the nominee. And then like we should be paying attention to the second place person who could be president of the United States or the Republican nominee. So I don't think it's a I don't think it's fully a thought exercise. I don't think it's a useless exercise as long as we can like
again, be like hold two things in our brains at once that like this is maybe an interesting, helpful conversation to have. And also it's less it's not likely to happen. Right. But I just don't think that most people are going to be able to hold two things at once. And I think that the ratio of like it is it will be interesting to see who finishes second in in Iowa. But if Trump wins the state with 55 percent, like that should be getting most of the coverage, I think. And I don't trust that that's going to be the case.
Isn't that... Sorry, I'm about to argue. But, Jalen, you can cut me off. But, like, isn't that our job to, like, make sure people can hold both truths at the same time? I mean, I understand that it's difficult and I understand that it's harder to get clicks that way. So, gosh, are we fighting a potentially losing battle? But I absolutely think people can hold those two things in their brains at the same time if we...
We just have to be responsible with our coverage. And that's where I'll be banging my head against the wall throughout 2024. But that's all. I'm off my soapbox. We can move on. Hear, hear. Hear, hear. All right. Well, we will come up with those baselines for support in the Iowa caucuses at a later date. So stay tuned and stay excited. My final question here is,
I can't tell based on this conversation if you all agree with the media criticism that this whole Nikki Haley news cycle boomlet is
is because of a board press corps that wants a competitive primary or because it's like a meaningful conversation to have no she's gained ground no this is i think it's empirical she's gained ground nationally she's rival she's within the margin of error in almost every survey nationally with desantis she's in the lead in new hampshire now which is a change depending on
when we update our averages and trying to get them updated for today instead of the day that the most recent survey was released, that could also change and inflate her support a little bit more or increase her support. Inflate implies it's artificial. So to me, it's totally rational. News events follow changes in public opinion. Like, wow, big news.
I think the criticism may be a little too harsh to journalists. Yeah, I think it's clearly because of the debates. Her rise really started after the first debate. It has continued through the debates. Our polling with Ipsos and The Washington Post has found that she has consistently been perceived as a strong debater. After the first debate among debate watchers, really the only time that the debate
has seemed to move the needle in terms of support was the first debate with Nikki Haley. So 30% of debate watchers said that they were considering voting for her before that debate. And then that was up to 49% afterward. And that's the biggest jump that anybody has seen. And then, for example, this latest debate
In November, a plurality of Republican voters who watched the debate said that she was the winner of the debate. 34% said that she did the best. And she's, yeah, like I said, she's consistently done well in those polls for the first three debates. So I think that that has been a big part of it. And sure, some of that is the media being like, oh, she did well and kind of, you know, spinning that out because obviously not a ton of voters are actually watching these debates.
But I think that that's to her credit. She was a strong debater and she is reaping the benefits of that. Yeah, I think that's an important point. People oftentimes ask like, oh, do debates even matter? And I don't think they have a massive ability to change public opinion in a general election where people are pretty well sorted already. But in a primary where there's a lower barrier to change your support because it's all Republican voters considering all Republican candidates, it's
It can change things. And I think you're right. The debates have mattered in this primary in that Nikki Haley would probably still be polling at 3% nationally and maybe not even be in second place in, you know, any of the states had we not had these debates. Like it's actually been a reaction to her ability to debate that has changed the dynamics, at least of who's the alternative to Trump in this race. And to that point, we have another Republican debate coming up
on Wednesday in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which is where I will be going next from Austin. So folks, get ready for some more late night podcasting. It'll be interesting. And also the question in this one is like, I think we've been saying here, we're at the cusp where maybe Nikki Haley has already supplanted DeSantis. I think the goal for both of them is like,
Either DeSantis is like, no, you know, bat down that sort of talk or Nikki Haley's goal is like really supplant him after this debate. So it'll it'll be interesting to see folks and we will be there. But let's move on to our good or bad use of polling example for the day.
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A couple weeks ago, friend of the podcast, Nate Cohn at the New York Times, dove into a sensitive topic, which is issue polling. Specifically, whether or not issue polling as we know it is broken and if the 2022 midterms were evidence of it. So Nate wrote in his newsletter, quote, by the usual measures, last year's midterm polls were among the most accurate on record. But in harder to measure ways, there's a case those same polls were extraordinarily bad.
Poll after poll seemed to tell a clear story before the election. Voters were driven more by the economy, immigration, and crime than abortion and democracy, helping to raise the specter of a red wave.
In the end, the final results looked just about like the final polls, but they told a completely different story about the election. When abortion and democracy were at stake, Democrats excelled. And while the polls had sometimes or even often showed Democrats excelling, they almost always failed to convincingly explain why they were ahead, making it seem that Democratic polling leads were fragile and tenuous.
So there's a lot there to discuss, and we will get into it. But basically, Nate blames these failures in explaining voter motivation on a crisis in issue polling. And as a result, the New York Times is experimenting with its approach to those sorts of polls. So the question, as it always stands, is this a good or bad use of polling? Do the results of the 2022 midterm suggest a crisis in issue polling? Um...
Leah, let's start with you here. I would say bordering on bad use. Bordering on bad? That's not a binary answer. Trying to hedge here. Well, I mean, we'll get into it. I want to hear what Nathaniel... I want to hear Nathaniel and Elliot's votes. All right, Nathaniel, good or bad use of polling? I would say more good. I think that basically what Nate is saying here is that we still haven't come up with a good way of measuring how...
how salient an issue is, right? We can ask how, like, what's the most important issue? But like, I think clearly what we did see in 2022 was the people who were motivated by abortion and democracy, that was more motivating for them than people who were motivated by the economy, for instance. And I think that there is probably a good argument that like people are just, people who maybe are just like
Like, generally, like, you know, looking to vote for one party or the other will say the economy because the economy is kind of omnipresent and tied into everything and things like that. And maybe when people say the economy is the most important issue, they're just kind of voting on partisanship or anything. And obviously, also people vote on multiple different issues and, like,
People also don't necessarily form their partisan identity based on what they don't just go through, like, you know, DW nominator or whatever, the quiz of what ideology are you and then vote based on the candidate that they get. So I think that that is a concern. And I agree that the polls, the issue polls in 2022 didn't kind of end
end up telling us the correct story about that election. That said, I think the big caveat here is that not all issue polling, in fact, most issue polling is not about predicting elections. And that is something that, you know, we at FiveThirtyEight obviously are interested in and Nate Cohn is interested in as well. And so I think that his like, you know, quest to kind of come up with a better way of measuring issue salience is good. But I think that saying there's a crisis in issue polling because they failed to predict
the results of an election isn't that part I would take issue with because I think that there is obviously like really good and interesting issue polling and stuff that isn't horse racy that is happening. And I think that like just like methodologically, those polls are fine. At least they're as sound as election polls are when they're telling us, you know, that
Trump is going to win by two points or whatever. And, you know, not to say that there aren't problems to be solved with those polls, but I wouldn't say that there's a crisis with those polls. Okay. All right. So there's a lot there. Elliot, where do you come down on this good or bad use of polling? So on the very narrow question of is it a good or bad use of polling to argue that there is a crisis in issue polling based on the 2022 polls,
quote, not giving us the right narrative about the election or whatever. That's not an actual quote. I'm paraphrasing. Bad use of polling. I mean, this is somewhat hard for me to answer because I wrote like a whole book about this topic, about issue polling and democracy. So I'm
I'm going to try not to talk too long. I think there are a couple of things wrong with that very narrow case. And I will caveat that by saying I do think there are problems with issue polling. And Nathaniel has pointed out a lot of the weaknesses with how we understand public opinion using national opinion polls in particular. But on this very specific issue.
The first big issue that it's non-falsifiable. We can't actually observe public opinion on issue polls. We don't get a measure in reality of how many people think that abortion is more important than crime. Right.
or the percent of people who support a 15-week abortion ban, or what have you. We do have measures by proxy. We have ballot initiatives, which can test very specific wording of issues, but that's not the same thing as testing public opinion on the issue. So the fact that we don't have an actual quantitative baseline here to say whether or not something is in crisis, I think to me kind of suggests you shouldn't be making the argument. But if we
If we set that aside, let's just agree that the non-falsifiability is an issue and look at the argument on its merits. I think there are three bigger issues. And the first is that national polls don't really meet people where they are. People come to their opinions about politics using information and values from their day-to-day lives and
And using sort of heuristics about parties and issues that are close to them, which means you need to take polls that are close to them. That could be geographically, like a state-level poll, for example, or polling that, like,
has question wording that's closer to how they're experiencing the world. So that's sort of the question wording argument that I kind of agree with Nate and Nathaniel on. But if you look at the state level opinion polls from 2022, I think you do come away with a somewhat different
prior about the issues motivating people than the national polls. State-level opinion polls in Michigan show the ballot initiative for abortion rights there favored like 57 to 40, for example. By the way, the result was 56-43, so that's a pretty good issue poll, if you want to call it that. And then polls in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania showed that ideologically extreme Republican nominees were unpopular and that democracy was a more motivating issue for them
there. So I think part of the problem here with this argument is that there's a pretty big disconnect between what we measure nationally and then the election outcomes that we observe at the state level and the public opinion that we could observe theoretically at the state level. Second, though, I think that it's like the more fundamental issue here is that this is really a critique of a very particular narrative about the election. It's a critique of
of political analysis, not of polling. So here I would say I do agree that there's a crisis in political analysis. I don't think that there's a crisis in issue polling as a tool.
You can see evidence for that in the fact that people came to the 2022 election with a very different understanding of the stakes of the election, depending on what information they took in in issue polls and their analytical agenda and capacity and a bunch of other variables with the same data suggesting this is not entirely true.
attributable to the tool. That's why I think it's a bad use of polling. And then I'll just make one plea in general, which is something I'm going to do a lot. Please take issue polling and all polling a little less seriously. Thank you. Polls are not equipped to give news readers a fine-grained understanding of what's motivating people, what is in voters' hearts and minds. One single poll cannot do that. One single poll question about one issue certainly cannot
do that. So if you're writing grand theories about politics, about abortion based on one or two polls, I think you're doing a disservice to data journalism, to understanding of politics, and that does not make a crisis an issue polling. Listening to what Nathaniel and Elliot both had to say, I think
It clarifies for me why I was hedging and why it's hard for me to answer this question. And I think it's because on the question of was issue polling the reason why election analysts failed to see Democrat success in 2022? I don't want to relitigate the midterms, but I think that the answer there is no.
The data was there if you were looking for it. If you looked among Democrats, their top two issues were abortion and democracy. And we don't have to go all the way into this, but in midterms, the concern is that President Biden's first term that Democrats would not show up. So Democratic enthusiasm was
was much more effective predictor of turnout than looking at kind of national interest in the economy. So I do think the data was there and we weren't prioritizing it because usually it's not abortion and democracy. So that's one part. The part that I think is that I do agree with Nate on is that
Issue polling is hard and issue polling is tricky. And I do agree that it's more of a problem in terms of analysis. You know, like we need to be better about how we explain the way we read issue polling and what people are actually responding to. But actually...
I think it would be great if pollsters kind of got on the same page on how they're going to word certain things. There are improvements that pollsters in general can collectively make to make these measurements more useful for us.
I don't think it's a crisis, though. I think there's room for improvement. I think that there are bad uses of issue polling, and we see that all the time with people who are like, there will be polls that say, you know, 87% of people say that they like
peace and harmony. And so does candidate X. And therefore, candidate X is going to win the election. Like that's that's bad. But in general, I think like there's room for improvement. The framing of this argument is what's throwing me off, though, more than the I think there are some good points in there. Yeah. I want to add a couple thoughts here that
jive with a lot of what you've already said. So it's almost always the case that voters say that the economy matters most to them when Gallup asks what's the most important issue. And just because the party that is sort of trusted most on the economy doesn't win doesn't mean that that poll was wrong. Exactly. Part of what we have to understand here is that
voters can do a better or worse job of differentiating the two parties on issues, depending on what the issue is. So in the 2022 election,
I still believe that the economy was the most important issue to people. However, did people go into the ballot box thinking, if party Y wins, will the economy just totally crater and I'll lose my job? And if party X wins, will I become a millionaire? Right? There's not that kind of distinction between the two parties on the economy. And
Oftentimes, in order to understand the differences, you have to be relatively keyed into policy and increasingly so. Democrats and Republicans are not talking about their differences on the economy the way they were in, say, 2012, where we were talking about tax rates for rich people and whether or not you could make your small business successful, etc., etc., etc. I mean, it's still there, but like.
voters are able to differentiate the two parties on the economy far less, to a far lesser degree, than they are on issues like abortion or democracy. And so while somebody may have...
differentiated between the two parties on abortion in 2022, that also does not mean that they care more about access to abortion than they care about their employment status or their income. It just means that they didn't think their vote in that election was going to make a big difference on that access. Ergo, trying to explain who is going to win an election through issue polling misunderstands what issue polling does. I'm not here to say, like,
throw out questions of why people are voting the way they do. Horse race polling oftentimes doesn't tell us why. And as people who care about public opinion and democracy, understanding what voters care about and what motivates them is important. If you want to be able to tell a story about an election based on issue polling, I do think you have to make changes to it. I do think you have to ask questions a different way. The experiments that The New York Times is trying are good experiments.
Does that make sense? Well said. But not because there's a crisis in issue polling, I think is what you're saying. Sure. Like, I mean, a crisis in issue polling, everything's a crisis these days. Like, you can call anything a crisis. Like, you can call anything a crisis. I mean, no, I don't think there's an...
crisis and issue polling. I also don't even know that there's a crisis in polling period. I think people would be more inclined to say that there's a crisis in horse race polling. Yeah, we may have to do a whole nother podcast on that one. Yeah, I don't think there's a crisis in horse race polling either. Like the actual crisis is more like a trust in institutions and like the lack of trust in institutions affects like the willingness of people to engage in polls or respond to pollsters. And so like that's a crisis. Like I think the fact that people don't trust
So much of so many of the organizations and civil society around them is a crisis. And we're dealing with some of the consequences in polling. But so are so many aspects of society to really, you know, pop off here. Go off, Galen. Go off. Go off. No, I think that's. No, but that's. You're right. And I think that's like it's.
It's an important conversation to have. And also, it's important to understand that there are two questions here. There's analysis and then there's polling. And that when elections analysts get things wrong, it's not always because the polling was wrong. It's because we were reading it wrong or we were looking at the wrong numbers. We have a million numbers in front of us. But to that end, let's talk a little bit about the experiment that they tried at The New York Times and talk about maybe if we think that
this is a good experiment for maybe getting closer to how people will vote based on issues. So an experiment that they already did
tried here is voters were given a choice between a generic Democrat and either a moderate or conservative Republican. And the Times did this across two separate questions, one about abortion and one about democracy. In the democracy question, one Republican tried to overturn the 2020 election. The other said we should move on from the 2020 election. The generic Democrat didn't
beat the overturn-the-election Republican by three points. But the Democrat lost to the move-on Republican by 15 points, a swing of 18 points just by changing the Republican stance on the last presidential election. Combe points out in explaining the experiment that obviously this is only on one dimension. Voters are weighing lots of different things. It's not as if in every election, you know, the only...
issue of the ballot is, did this person vote to overturn the 2022 election or what have you? But do you think this kind of not asking people, like, how important is this issue to you, but creating an experiment or a survey in which voters reveal their preferences as opposed to reveal their preferences in an environment where they're making an election decision versus just asking straight out? Like, do you think this was a good experiment? Do you think it tells us much? Yeah, I think this was a good use of polling, Galen. I'll say it.
Oh, we love to hear it. I can imagine a world in which the New York Times does this experiment with similar phrasing and framing on a lot of different issues and then presents the impacts on some sort of relative scale. And that probably tells you a lot more about how voters are weighing these concerns than just asking the straight up binary question, is this issue the most important one to you? In fact, I might say it tells you infinitely more about how they're going to vote. So I think it's a good use of polling to
It's an expensive use of polling. These sorts of experiments are not cheap, so we can't expect every pollster to do them. But yeah, it's a step in the right direction of offering more color about voter psychology, so I'm all for it. Yeah, I agree. I agree with everything we said a couple of rounds ago about experimenting is good, different ways of improving issue polling. I do think...
One caveat, small caveat here is that I wonder if there's a little bit of fighting the last battle here, given that democracy and abortion were the big issues in 2022. I think there's still maybe a question of like, it's hard to know what the big issues in 2024 will be. And it's just, you can't know what you can't know, right? And so that's going to be a tricky thing that like, we could ask these questions about abortion and democracy of 2024. But if it turns out that the
abortion and democracy of 2024 are, you know, like inflation and immigration, then we still might not be able to tell the narrative correctly. But I think this has definitely headed down the right path. And I think there is also a way that we can
include a more diverse set of policy positions. I talked to Lynn Vavreck, who's a political scientist, uh, on the podcast a couple months ago, and she and John Sides in their research present voters with a slate of policy positions. So it will be like, which world would you rather live in? One in which, uh,
The minimum wage increases to X amount. Abortion is illegal after 15 weeks and we build a wall at the border or a world in which there's the opposite. Minimum wage stays the same. Abortion is legal throughout the pregnancy and there's no wall at the southern border. So that will give you some revealed
of how important the minimum wage is versus other things that are there. And you obviously can mix around the different policies, and that can also potentially help come to some conclusions and help maybe reveal the issues that are most salient without relying on the narrative from the last election, right? Mm-hmm. Yep, totally. I think we'll talk about issue polling again. We have talked about it before. Are there any other...
Because like, there's a lot of different ways to approach this. You can talk about wording. And I think especially wording becomes important when pollsters are trying to do the type of polling where they're like, okay, do Americans support the Affordable Care Act? You know, you can word a question about the Affordable Care Act literally, like literally a million different ways. Are there any other aspects of issue polling that folks want to shout out here before we move on with the promise that we will come back to issue polling within the next year?
Yeah. If you're offering me the ability to put on my wannabe political scientist hat, Galen, I'm going to go for it. Play mama. What I'll say is there's a long history
in political science, in survey research of what the academics call non-attitudes. This essentially boils down to the fact that most people don't know a lot about many different issues. If a stranger calls them on the phone and asks them to give an opinion about some minutia of a policy or political debate in Washington,
Even if it's a big issue, if the question is narrow, then the idea, at least in the research, is that they make something up. They answer randomly. More recent research is a little more optimistic than this. It's not that they're making stuff up. It's that they have different information at the forefront of their brain that makes them answer questions differently. So if you ask them the same question over time and they respond differently, it's not because they're making something up. It's because they have different information that they're drawing on.
They're sampling different information or opinions from their head to give you a stranger. If you're looking at these issue polling experiments through that lens, then they're not really fixing the fundamental issue, which is that we are trying to ask, you know, a random sample of Americans a lot of questions about a lot of different issues at once. And they just don't know a lot about them. So these sorts of experiments, question-worthy experiments,
are not going to really solve that. One way to mitigate this is to use something called deliberative polling, in which you get a random sample of Americans, you ask them questions about politics up front, and then you give them a bunch of information.
You expose them to nonpartisan information about an issue. You expose them to elite opinion about an issue. And then you pull them again and you see if they change their minds. That's one way to go about this because you're sort of solving the lack of information. You're, of course, solving it because that's in quotes because you don't really know how much information people are
are receiving or accepting. You don't know if there's external validity here. You don't know if it's going to predict how they actually vote or how they feel in the real world. But yeah, the bigger point here is this has been a problem for a really long time. Stumbling upon the fact that issue polling is really hard in the year 2023 is like sort of using Stone Age technology. This is a really old issue.
Maybe to change that metaphor a little bit, trying to use issue polling to understand how someone is going to react to a political event is like using a screwdriver to nail in a board. I don't know, something like this. It's just not a tool that's fit for purpose, right? Because of...
A long history of issues. All right. Well, we'll keep the conversation going. But for now, let's leave things there. Thank you, Leah Elliott and Nathaniel. Thanks. Thanks, Galen. Thanks for letting me rant, Galen. And likewise, thanks for letting me rant. All right. And to round out the show, here's another installment of our Pollapalooza segment where we share some recent polling that caught our eye.
The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference, or COP28, started this past Thursday, hosted by the United Arab Emirates in Dubai. The summit has a big agenda, but notably both President Biden and President Xi Jinping will not be there.
Here in the U.S., according to a survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 56% of voters think global warming should be a high or very high priority for the president and Congress. Back to that issue polling we've been talking about. Though only 2% of Americans say it's the most important problem facing democracy.
the nation, according to Gallup. According to Pew, 31% say we should phase out fossil fuels altogether, while 68% say we should use a mix of fossil and renewable energy.
George Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives last Friday in a resolution that passed by 311 votes to 114. His removal from Congress is in line with the will of his constituents. A Marist University poll conducted in mid-November asked if Santos should resign or serve out the rest of his term, and 76% of voters said he should resign, including 82% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans. Of course, he did not
resign, but we did not find a poll that asked voters if he should be expelled. Rosalyn Carter, wife of the 39th president Jimmy Carter, was laid to rest last week in her home state of Georgia. She and Jimmy Carter were married for 77 years, the longest married couple in presidential history. The week following her passing, YouGov conducted a poll to determine how Americans rated the last 10 presidents
and their first ladies. Rosalind Carter had the highest marks for a first lady, with 46% rating her outstanding or above average. Again, this was conducted after her passing, so that may have something to do with the high marks. Michelle Obama was in close second with 45%. The survey also found that first ladies have not escaped the effects of political polarization whatsoever.
with the more recent first ladies marking amongst the most politically divisive. All right, that's it for Polapalooza this week. My name is Galen Droop. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or wherever you get your podcasts, or better yet,
tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.
