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As a former high school debater, when I see Vivek Ramaswamy speak, I think, I know you. I know you. If like a few different sliding doors when I was 19, I could have been, I mean, I could not have been him, but you know what I mean?
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. We have a special end of meteorological summer show planned today. It's an entire episode of good or bad uses of polling. Particularly since the first debate, there's been more attention on the polls and arguments about what to make of them. So first up, why does Vivek Ramaswamy poll so differently depending on survey methodologies?
Then, what can we actually learn from asking Republican voters who won the debate? Next, was Nikki Haley's use of polling during the debate good or bad when she said, quote, we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can't win a general election that way.
After that, what is the purpose of Democratic primary polls that include matchups like Biden versus Michelle Obama or Biden versus Ilhan Omar? We have somebody on the pod today who can speak to that directly. And after a summer when Republican presidential candidates have sometimes struggled to articulate their positions on abortion, pollster Kellyanne Conway is arguing that Republicans
Republicans need to go on offense in favor of a national 15-week abortion ban in order to win. She points to polling. Is she right?
Here to talk about all of these uses of polling are two pollsters themselves. Kristen Soltis Anderson is the co-founder of Echelon Insights. She's also got an op-ed in The New York Times today about how Republican voters view Donald Trump. Kristen, welcome back to the podcast. It's so good to have you. Thank you for having me. Also here with us is David Beiler, chief of research at Noble Predictive. Welcome back to the podcast, David. Thanks for having me.
So I have a little bit of a bone to pick with you, David. The last time you were on the podcast, you were a journalist at The Washington Post. Now you join us as a pollster. What's going on? You too good for us?
No, no. I just, you know, I was feeling restless. I wanted to change things up. It's actually funny. One thing that comes to mind, my friend Lenny Bronner, who runs the election night live model at the Post, has this riff. I'm going to give him credit for it. I don't think I've talked to him about this. But he has this riff about how like data science is actually the opposite of science.
Because you're not collecting new data. You're not like asking a hypothesis or just kind of like wringing insights out of what already exists. And I think it's a little unfair. I love data science, you know, but I wanted to add that kind of science aspect. So looked around and ended up working for Noble Predictive and I'm excited about it.
I, for one, say welcome to the dark side. It's always nice to have people cross over and realize the data production side of things is very fun, but it's also, it is very high risk, right? You begin now, there are going to be polls out there with your name on it. You better hope that they're right. In fact, we might just talk about one of those polls today, Kristen and David. So although now I feel outnumbered, it's two against one. I
I will say, if we're being totally honest here, you two do have a harder job. We get to mouth off about good or bad uses of polling all day. You have to actually go conduct those polls and risk your reputation. So I give you credit and I look forward to seeing the polling that you put out there in the world, David. And I've already appreciated the polling that Chris and you've put out in the world for a long time. I have one more question before we begin.
Long-time listeners of this podcast know that we have often debated when the seasons begin and end. This, of course, is the last podcast before Labor Day, so this is our end of meteorological summer. Are you astronomical or meteorological summer people?
I would say meteorological because once football begins, that's fall. And football is beginning. So for me, I'm okay with meteorological. All right. Jordan, my side, Kristen. How about you, David? I don't know the difference. It's hot or it's cold. Like one of the two things is happening. I don't really know. And I should know this as someone whose maiden last name is Soltis, which was constantly mispronounced as Solstice.
The solstice, the winter and summer solstices and the fall and spring equinoxes. That's the astronomical, right? Yes. So astronomical fall begins September 21st or September 22nd. So basically, do you are we still in summer? Like is summer extend through September is the question for you, David?
It's hot out. It's summer. I don't know. You live in L.A. I guess you actually have no way of telling the difference. Where things like basically like are between 68 and 84 degrees almost all year. Yeah, it's true. It's fair. No, I mean, I guess we're still in summer until I'm making this up on the fly.
Like October, right? That's when it's okay to start talking about Thanksgiving. Then you're in the fall, right? They're already selling pumpkin spice lattes at the Starbucks across from my office. Now, I'm mildly offended by that and think it's ridiculous, but...
Look, I'm governed by sports, not the sun. Meteorological, not astronomical. Yeah, I just like the clean three, three, three, you know? Well, and then another three, right? June, July, August is summer. September, October, November is fall. December, January, February is winter. And March, April, May is spring. Like, let's keep things simple. We don't have to get, like, precious about all of this. Yeah.
Okay, and with that, let's talk about Vivek Ramaswamy. So he's seen the most notable rise in the polls over the past couple of months. And as we record today, he's at 10% in our averages at 538. However, Politico did an analysis of the Republican primary polls in 538's database.
and found that Ramaswamy performs quite differently depending on the methodology of the poll. So looking at a month of service from mid-July to mid-August in online polls,
he had about 8% support. In live phone polls, he was at 3%. Now, 538 had long considered live caller phone polls to be the gold standard, but recent elections have suggested that they aren't actually more accurate. I don't think we have come to any sort of conclusions about what the new gold standard is, if there is one. But here is the question for both of you, and let's begin with Kristen.
Is breaking out Ramaswamy's polling by methodology and perhaps using that to question his actual support a good or bad use of polling? I think it is a thoughtful way to analyze things because it forces us to consider what are the ways in which asking someone who they're voting for in the Republican primary on the phone may differ from asking someone online. And you have a couple different things you can tease out here that I think are interesting. One is...
Who are you reaching through these methods, right? If you're calling people on the phone versus reaching them online, are you reaching a pool of people who are fundamentally different some way?
And then you also have mode effects. And that's, I've heard some really interesting discussion around whether asking someone on the phone, do you have phone interviewers that are botching the pronunciation of his name? Here at Echelon, we are, you know, many of us come from places outside of DC. We're all, you know, some of us are, our phone numbers have been caught up in voter files in other states. There is a voter, for instance, in Georgia who put my phone number down as her phone number. So
occasionally I will get things from Georgia, but we will frequently, when we get phone polls, discover that people's names are being mispronounced by the interviewers. I can imagine that happening very much with Vivek Ramaswamy. Or if you're asking people to volunteer a name, maybe you just volunteer Trump because it's the first thing that comes to mind, but in an online survey with all of the names there in front of you,
you are thinking about it differently. So there are a lot of things that you don't necessarily know exactly which one of them is causing it, but I don't think it's a bad use of polling to consider the ways in which different modes and different pools of people you are surveying might lead to slightly different results. Yeah, agree. Good use of polling.
What I think about with this sort of online versus telephone mode difference is in part response rates, which is what's sort of looming over all of the industry. And honestly, by extension, a lot of the political discourse, which is the fact that it's hard to reach people. And if you have one mode that's reaching people one way and one mode that's reaching people another way, and you're getting different results out of that mode, I just, I don't think that's something that you can...
ignore. Now, I don't know if we're ever going to get a test of this, right? I have no idea if Ramaswamy is going to, you know, continue to have this level of support up until an election and we can actually say, oh, the online polls were right or oh, the phone polls were right or what have you. But I think breaking it out like this is good. And I think in the graphic, if I remember correctly, this sort of asymmetry doesn't come up as strongly for other candidates. It's something that's pretty particular to him.
And one thing that I want to just point out, you know, at Echelon, we do our national polling every month. And I think we were on the leading edge of Vivek momentum. At one point, I think he sent out a fundraising email citing one of our polls. Every time that happens, it's it's
It's often from a candidate who, you know, people around the office are like, oh, gosh, are you kidding me? But nevertheless, we were at the forefront of seeing Vivek's rise. And we wondered, is this because our national polling is very heavily based online? But I would note that the Fox News poll, which I believe is conducted over the phone, was
In August, they found Vivek in double digits as well. So I think there may have been a divergence early on, but I wonder if we'll begin to see that divergence go away now that he's got higher name ID, now that he's had his notable performance in the Republican debate, if we'll begin to see the gap between online and phone start to close.
Yeah, okay. So here's part of Politico's analysis of all of this, and they offered some theories for why Ramaswamy might be doing better in online polls. So the first is that digital and phone polls may have different demographics. Basically, people responding to live caller polls are older, there are younger people online, and that his support may be coming more from young people. The other one is more about the sort of quote-unquote who counts as older.
online and Ramaswamy being a particularly online candidate. So he's been doing a lot of earned media that caters to high interest, high intensity voters who might be overrepresented in online polls. And then lastly was the question about his name being a challenge both for the people on the phone who are giving options to pronounce and then for respondents to repeat back to pollsters.
Are any of these more or less credible to you? And given some of these possible discrepancies, which would you be inclined to trust more, online or live caller polls, Kristen? So I'm more inclined to think that it is a mode effect problem than it is different pools of people. I still think that different types of respondents is a piece of the puzzle, but the mode effect thing to me just jumps out as like, if it's only affecting Ramaswamy and not the other candidates-
that seems to be the more likely culprit. And remember- As in like name pronunciation. As in name pronunciation or asking people to recall it and volunteer it on the phone. I mean, I keep thinking back to, do you all recall the 2020-
Ann Seltzer CNN poll that was supposed to come out right on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. I sure do. I absolutely do. And then it didn't. And we leaked it or it got leaked to us and we published it. I felt so bad for her because she's, you know, honestly like the chief goddess of polling. But that that problem was caused because of just an interviewer having their screen set wrong, right? Like even though we think of phone polls as the gold standard, right?
There are people involved. There are interviewers who are not perfect. And so for me, I am, again, partisan. A lot of polling that I do is online. But I think for something like this, I lean toward thinking the online polls are not misrepresenting what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, I think this early it's worth keeping an open mind. I think all of that's plausible. I think that, you know, if there's a bunch of online polls that say something at this point in the history of survey research, you pay attention. Like there's nobody anymore who's like, ah, those online polls, right? Like we've had cycles to prove that this is a mode where we can
ascertain what's going on with public opinion. So yeah, I think honestly, keeping open mind about all of them and then also just thinking about whether or not we're ever going to have validation of what's happening is another question. This might all disappear before Iowa TBD. So are we coming to a very 538 conclusion here, which is put it in the average and just go with all of it? I mean, it's the 538 podcast. Absolutely.
All right. There we go. I love to hear it. All right. I mentioned on our last podcast that FiveThirtyEight was partnering with Ipsos and The Washington Post to conduct pre- and post-debate polling. We have the post-debate polling now, and it showed that DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and Haley had the best performances, according to Republican primary voters who watched the debate.
29% said DeSantis performed best, 26% said Ramaswamy did, and 15% said that Haley did. When allowed to pick more than one of the people on stage, a majority of respondents said all three of those people did well. There was not a majority saying that any of the other candidates on stage did well.
In overall favorability, Haley improved the most and also saw the largest increase in the percentage of voters saying they are considering her, an improvement from 30% before the debate to 47% afterwards. And for the record, I'm claiming this as a personal win for me because I said on the post-debate pod that if forced to play pundit, Haley won. Anyway, we're not litigating that.
I'm curious about all of your thoughts here. And of course, be careful because, you know, FiveThirtyEight has a dog in this fight. But was this, in general, David, we'll start with you this time, a good or bad use of polling? I think this was good. I, you know, and I'm not just saying that because I'm on the FiveThirtyEight podcast. It's... Oh, because I'm ready to do battle. I mean, if you say it's a bad, you can say it's a bad use of polling, but just get ready. No, I know, I know, I get it. No, but I actually do think it's good because...
In these debates, there's always kind of this instant theater criticism afterwards, right? Where everyone who is in media or adjacent to media has takes about who did well, who didn't, whatever. And this, I think, is helpful because it validates some of the takes and kind of invalidates others.
others, right? One thing I'm noticing here is that a lot of people said that Chris Christie did the worst in the debate. And that, I think, cuts against some of the commentary I saw. Afterwards, it was like, oh, Chris Christie had great zingers about chat GPT. It's like, okay, that's fine. But like,
Voters don't care, right? Some other things like one of the most important data points, I think, is who gained and sort of lost in terms of considering voting is that everybody gained except for Donald Trump.
Will Hurd and Suarez. And Suarez and Hurd, you know, have tiny levels of support right now. So they're kind of down more. But the idea that it was good for Trump to stay above the fray is like that's not validated when you actually ask people what's going on. So things along those lines, I think it's a helpful check.
on everybody just kind of guessing in the half hour to two hours afterwards, which is unavoidable, but it's what happens. I concur. Good use of polling. If you had done one of those snap polls the night of where you claim to have talked to 500 people who said they just watched the debate and now they were magically taking a poll, I would have deep skepticism. I tend to be...
Pretty opposed to those snap polls the night of, but I think the way you all did this as a pre and post exercise is very good. Now, granted, some of the movement you're going to see from pre and post debate is going to be small enough that we can't actually say with a ton of certainty that it's not just statistical noise, but things like
Things like the growth in consideration for Nikki Haley are large enough that it's nice to have that as a counter to what might otherwise be a data-free punditry zone that we see in the aftermath of these debates. I also like the consideration question a lot because I feel like the goal for these candidates is to
in this first debate was not necessarily to get someone to say, well, gosh, I was voting for Donald Trump, but now I'm voting for Nikki Haley. I mean, that would be nice. And there's pre and post polling from Emerson that shows Haley went from, you know, low single digits to high single digits. Okay, maybe
maybe that counts as a win. But I actually think the consideration question is better and allows for that growth to be much higher because you can win the debate without having had a lot of people at this stage of the game say, oh, now you're my candidate.
As long as you've opened minds and gotten people to give you a second look, I think you can count that as a win. So I think good use of polling, and I especially like the consideration question that you all looked at. I think that gives us the clearest picture of who, quote unquote, won and who lost. I love to hear. For folks who are watching this on YouTube right now, you can see that I'm just glowing to hear that this was such a good use of polling.
Okay, next question. And this use of polling is from DeSantis Boosters. They've pointed to this poll as evidence that DeSantis won. Looking at the data that we set out, is that a good use of polling?
I think it's fine. I mean, when people ask who won and lost the debate, it's not like there's a panel of judges or even like a set criteria. Right. I think winning or losing depends on what your overall strategy is and how well things went. And you can see when you're looking at some of these best worst questions that some of this is a reflection of how Republican voters felt about these people going into the debate.
So you have some cases like Nikki Haley, where she seems like she's gained ground and had more people considering her. You know, DeSantis, even though he's flailed a little bit, he still is in second place. If he had some gigantic worst number on the best worst question, that would be really bad for him. You would expect for him to have a decent amount of best because a decent amount of Republicans like him going in. So I think it's fine because there's...
There's no like, you know, final truth about who won or lost. So why not have it be a free for all where every candidate gets to define success? But yeah, it's literally your responsibility as a presidential campaign to claim that you won the debate, even if you are Asa Hutchinson. Right, exactly. I mean,
So can I characterize this as an eh use of polling? Yes.
Ron DeSantis comes out as the candidate with the highest percentage of people saying they are considering him. 67% of GOP debate watchers say, I am considering Ron DeSantis. And that's higher than Donald Trump at 61% on that question. It's higher than Haley. It's higher than Ramaswamy. But the growth isn't very high. He already started pretty high.
And that's just looking at GOP debate watchers, which is not the same as GOP primary voters. And of course, if you are a GOP primary voter who says,
Trump's my guy. I'm all in on Donald Trump. I don't want to see what these other clowns are doing. Or I like Donald Trump. I may be open-minded, but I want to wait for the field to narrow down. You are probably less likely to be the kind of person who is shopping around and looking for someone else. And so this pool of debate watchers, this is my problem with snap polling in general, is that they're already –
primed to be the kinds of people who are looking for an option besides Donald Trump. And when you just look at that consideration question among GOP primary voters, Donald Trump is still clearly the frontrunner at 64%, Ron DeSantis at 51%. So that's why I say it's an eh use of polling, right? He is certainly the one with the highest ceiling among debate watchers. I think you want among Republican primary voters to be growing your share and
Unclear to me how much he has done. Yeah. And let's actually put some numbers to that. So almost 13 million people watched the Republican primary debate. Of course, not every one of those people who watched is necessarily a Republican primary voter. Those are pretty good ratings. That's 50 percent more than folks who watched the first Democratic primary debate back in 2019.
And I'll also say that in this poll, we, of course, asked folks, did you watch the debate in order to include them or not in some of these responses? And 67% of Republican primary voters did not watch any part of the debate. So I guess the question here is, I don't know if this is a good or bad use of polling question, but like, does any of this matter?
So let me throw in why this, another good use of polling on your part. And I don't know who of your team added this, but in the Ipsos poll that was done for FiveThirtyEight and the Washington Post, not only did you all ask questions
Did you watch the Republican primary debate? But you also then, of those who said they didn't, you asked what they did. And I think it's a good reminder that most people are not political junkies, right? Two-thirds of Republican primary voters didn't watch this. And of those who didn't watch it, only
Only 7% said, oh, you know what I was actually doing is I was focused on watching this Tucker Carlson interview of Donald Trump. People were watching TV. They were spending time with family members. They were sleeping. They were doing other housework. They were doing lots of other things. And I just appreciate that you all asked this question. And so I think it's a good reminder to the political junkies that are out there is the vast majority of voters are not watching this as closely as
as you and I are. And number two, we found this in focus group that I did for the New York Times that we released a little over a week ago, where we asked Republican primary voters, would they punish Donald Trump for skipping the first debate? And a lot of
said no, even if they were considering shopping around, because they kind of viewed Donald Trump as like the reigning champion who gets a first round buy to come back to football again. Like he gets to skip the first round of the playoffs because he's already the frontrunner. So let these other folks sort it out, let the field narrow, and then they think Donald Trump should come back for the debates. So I
So I think right now the debates do matter. Certainly if you're Nikki Haley, I'll bet she's got a lot of big donors that are giving her a second look for sure. I don't think it doesn't matter, but it is also just important to remember most voters are not following this as obsessively as we are.
Yeah. And I would add that it's sometimes helpful to get a little bit like annoyingly meta about what is the debate itself, right? Because we have this small chunk of the population that watches the debate and is like tuned in, is interested and so on and so forth. And then you have people who watch the post-debate coverage the next morning because they're political junkies, but they like, you know, had to go to a thing the previous night.
And then you get the people who get it in just sort of their daily news consumption. And you have this sort of weird cascading thing where the events of the debate itself is only one small part of what's happening. So I think this is super helpful for figuring out what happened in the event itself. And then I think what you also want to do is like a week later, look and see if preferences have moved. Look and see if media coverage has moved, right? Are we getting one of those like,
crazy self-reinforcing cycles that, you know, shoots Ramaswamy up or something like that. Are we not? What's happening? So I think kind of thinking of the debate as like a week-long debate-a-palooza that touches, you know, people to different depths is kind of helpful.
Yeah. In a way, if you waited a couple of days, you could even ask the question of, OK, if you didn't watch the debate, according to what you've heard, who do you think won? But, Kristen, I do also want to just emphasize what you said about people being normal people who don't pay so much attention to this stuff. You know, like I was in Milwaukee and I was in Milwaukee for almost a week.
And a lot of there are a lot of people who gather to protest or support or spin journalists or whatever, like in the vicinity of the debate. And you talk to those people and it's true. I mean, it's truly, truly, truly canned answers that you could not imagine hearing from normal people like the pre-debate polling that we did showed us that.
50% of Republican voters did not know who Vivek Ramaswamy was. So if you have like a big Vivek Ramaswamy welcome event at the debate, the people that you're going to find there are very outside of the norm and probably aren't going to give you quotes that are very representative of Republican voters. So we went sort of to the northern suburbs of Milwaukee for a piece that I was working on. Folks can see it online if they want.
to Cedarburg, Wisconsin, which is in Ozaukee County, which is part of the Wow counties, which famously have been a bedrock of support for Republican voters, but have shifted to the left during the Trump era.
And we were just out talking to folks and people who told me themselves that they watch Fox News, they vote in Republican primaries, had maybe heard of one or two candidates other than Donald Trump. So for even people who are clearly partisan, I'm not talking about even independents here, and like a lot of independents are probably more political than they would like to let on, but like
We're talking about people who are Republican, have voted in Republican primaries in the past, voted in the general election for Trump, but really didn't know who was running. And so it is early days. People spend a lot of time doing normal things like hate.
And also in August, people are at the beach, people are at cabins, people are eating dinner with their families, working, sleeping, like you said, watching TV. Like there's a million other things that people are doing. And I think it's really good to keep in mind that voters aren't like us. In fact, if you're listening to this podcast, voters are probably not like you either. Just think about how far away we are from actual votes being cast.
The primary debate process is so different even than for the general election, right? By the time you get to the general election and the Commission on Presidential Debates gets with all the networks and they decide when they're having these debates, you've usually got a couple of weeks until the election, right? So it's a reasonable expectation that a voter who wants to participate in the process should probably be tuned in at that point.
But we are not six weeks. We are six months plus away from any of these people actually having their name on a real ballot. So it is a perfectly rational choice for other folks who are normal. But maybe
And maybe politically engaged to nevertheless say like, I want to let this field narrow down. Talk to me when you're down to like four people. When you're down to four people, then I will pay attention. That is a perfectly rational decision to make. No, in my head, the division is like,
silly season, stupid season, serious season for primaries. We're in silly season right now where everyone's just kind of grasping for news events. And we've had one debate, but just kind of everyone's running around the state fair or whatever. I think kind of stupid season is where everyone's stress level has gone up, but still nothing else is happening. Everyone meaning everyone who works professionally in politics, but still nothing is happening. You're not having major dropouts, major events. And
any movements of the polls that are predictive. And then you have serious season, which is, you know, much closer to the election itself. So we, yeah, that's how I think of it in my head. I have a lot more defined thoughts on this than I do about like when summer and fall and winter are, but that's, that's, uh, we're definitely at the close of silly season. It's, it's,
it's not a lot of stuff's going to happen still. It's okay for people not to be tuned in. Wait. So now I need to know the Iowa caucuses are January 15th. When does serious season begin? Oh, like probably, I don't know, a month before that. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks for ruining my winter holiday, Iowa caucuses. Um,
I want to motor because we do have a lot to discuss, but there was one final data point that really caught my attention in this post-debate polling, which was how polarizing Ramaswamy was. You know, a lot of folks said that he did quite well, but amongst Republicans who watched the debate, his unfavorable numbers grew from 13% to 32%.
Does that tell us something about his long-term appeal to Republican voters or that he has some sort of ceiling? What can we learn from that data? I think there are two possible explanations. One is that Vivek Ramaswamy very much hews to the Donald Trump position on almost everything. And so if you were one of those people who tuned into the debate, shopping around for an alternative to Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy is...
only an alternative to Donald Trump in that he is not the exact same human being, but he's not really turning the page in terms of policies. So if you want Donald Trump, aren't you just going to pick Donald Trump? Like go for the high octane original formula. So that's part of what I think could be driving it is that the audience of people who watch the debate, if you were watching because you think Trump's fine, but I'm open to alternatives, then
Why would the guy just saying all the Trumpy stuff be the one you'd gravitate toward? But the other thing I think may be driving this, and this is so hard for me to set aside my own personal feelings, but as a former high school debater, when I see Vivek Ramaswamy speak, I think, I know you. I know you.
If like a few different sliding doors when I was 19, I could have been, I mean, I could not have been him, but you know what I mean? Josh Barrow wrote a fabulous newsletter about this where he basically says like Vivek Ramaswamy is what would have happened if I hadn't like learned to suppress a couple of my like
negative traits when I was in college, like if I had just taken the guardrails off. And so I feel like there's a certain type of hyper-engaged political observer who looks at Vivek Ramaswamy and sees right through it and says, I know enough about this guy to know that he says a different thing to every audience he talks to.
But at the same time, if you just tuned into the debate for the first time having never heard of him before, he is very eloquent and you can see how someone might have been dazzled by him. So it's hard for me to separate out my own like
Ugh, I know you. I'm an ex-high school debater. Like, I've seen your schtick before thing from my analysis here, but I think that's why he's like the salt and vinegar potato chips of this debate, right? Like, you either love it or you're like, why would you like this? Yeah, no, agreed. I did actually quiz bowl in high school, and this is how we saw all high school debaters. But no, I definitely, I feel like I've met the personality. So I
I don't know. Again, I don't actually think that he is trying to be president of the United States because he has not yet explained why he and not Donald Trump should be the president of the United States. So it seems clear to me he's running for cabinet. I highly doubt that he will be on the ballot in Iowa, but I could be wrong. All right. Let's move on to a polling based argument that was used during the debate.
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During the debate, Nikki Haley made this appeal to viewers. Quote, So first and foremost, Kristen, is this a good or bad use of polling in the sense that it's true that Donald Trump is the most disliked politician in America?
The first half of what she said is true. The second half of what she said is debatable. And I have a piece at the New York Times that went up Monday about how Republican voters don't buy that. In an otherwise strong debate performance, that was one of the lines that Haley delivered that got kind of a mixed reaction from the crowd. The fact is that Republican voters do not writ large believe that Donald Trump is the electoral poison that
pundits like us might sometimes say he is. And they have good reason for believing that, right? When you look at the latest New York Times-Siena poll, Trump and Biden were very evenly matched. So I feel like whenever Republican politicians are trying to argue, vote for me, because if you vote for Donald Trump, you're guaranteed to lose to Biden. Republican voters right now
don't think that. The losses of the midterms have faded from view, and they just no longer think that Donald Trump is an absolute failed proposition. Wait, Kristen. But most Republican voters aren't looking at the Times-Siena College polling. So why are folks so confident in Trump's electability? And also contrast this with Democrats' sense in 2020 that
oh my goodness, it's going to be so hard for a Democrat to win. We'll just pick whoever's most electable. This is miserable. Like, you know, choose the electable candidate, not the person whose policy preferences you agree with, etc.
Well, at least from the perspective of Republican voters, one, they view Biden as extremely weak. They look at the 2024 election and they go, this guy is not going to be able to just stay in his basement. He will not have a pandemic to blame it on. They think that he has stumbled, but both actually stumbled and verbally stumbled. And in terms of his policies, they think the economy is not doing well in their view. And so they just think
How can any rational swing voter look at Biden and Vice President Harris and go, please give me four more years of this? Now, the irony, of course, is that Democratic voters feel the same way about their side, right? They look and they go, how can you possibly have a swing voter that looks at this guy that's facing four criminal indictments? We know what having him as president was like. We all saw January 6th. How can you possibly imagine that a swing voter would go for this guy? So both sides are supremely convinced that.
that no swing voter could possibly disagree with them on who the clearly best candidate is. And it is leading Republicans to dismiss these electability arguments. One final data point for you on this. CBS is polling with YouGov that came out about a week ago.
They asked Republican voters, do you think that each of the following candidates is a long shot against Biden, might beat Biden, or would like be a lock against Biden? And Donald Trump, 61% of Republican voters thought that Donald Trump was like a lock to beat Biden. And the closest anyone else came was Ron DeSantis at 35%. Like, it's not even like they think, oh, all of these guys would be a lock against Biden. I mean, they do think that Biden is definitely beatable.
But it's a combination of them both really liking Donald Trump and kind of dismissing the idea that anyone would possibly want four more years of Biden that is leading to this decision making. So what we're saying here is Trump wins the electability argument in Republican voters' mind. Right now, the electability argument has not benefited Trump's adversaries the way I think they thought it would. And I think it's also, you know, the other...
important thing here is that a lot of Republican voters do think that Trump won the 2020 election. They're incorrect about that, but they think that. And so the usual calculus that happens when you have a first term president where, oh, you know, that person let us down and they lost and they conceded and yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. There was no there was no second Carter nomination or subsequent H.W. Bush nomination. Right. That whole calculus that usually happens kind of got stifled.
stopped up. So if, you know, I think in a lot of the political science literature, they, you know, kind of, I think, oversimplify it to say that basically parties nominate candidates who the voters like ideologically and think can win. And if you look at the current polling for Donald Trump and Republicans, it's check and check, right? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, so are we concluding here that Nikki Haley's use of polling is a bad use of polling? Because for the record, actually, I fact-checked the first part of what she said, too. And looking at the candidates who are currently running, I think it's actually Mike Pence who is the most unpopular. Oh, Mike Pence.
So here's, you know, FiveThirtyTracks, the favorability of the Republican candidates running along with Biden and Harris as well. So Chris Christie, his net favorability is negative 25. Mike Pence, his net favorability is negative 28. So and then, of course, for reference, Donald Trump is.
is negative 16. Joe Biden is negative 12. Is there an argument to be made that she's right if you're not looking at net favorability, but you're just looking at the unfavorable numbers? Because there is no sentient being in the United States that does not know who Donald Trump is. Even the people who are sleeping and walking their dogs during debates, they know who Donald Trump is because they watched Home Alone 2. Okay, so that's a good question. Unfavorable is 56% for Trump.
For Christy, it's 49%. And for Mike Pence, it is 57%. Oh, okay. So Mike Pence still barely wins it. But you are right to fact check my fact check. And it's pretty much tied. But anyway, okay, put all that aside because she was making a vibes-based argument, perhaps. And then the question is,
For the second half, Republican voters aren't buying it. As folks who study political science, polling, et cetera, does she have a point? Are the other options on stage more electable in a general election? I'm not talking about perceptions of voters. I'm talking about actually. Yeah.
I think it is an open question. And here's why. On the one hand, my initial instinct watching that Republican debate was to watch someone like Nikki Haley and go, oh, man, if I was a Democrat, I'd be so nervous about having to run against her. Right. Like, given that people are so dissatisfied with Biden, I feel like someone like her would just clean his clock. Right.
But then I realized, like, is this a mindset that is stuck in like a 2012, 2013 kind of universe? I was going to say, that's in that Rodney vibes. Right, like is this?
Is this actually like going back to the past? Whereas Donald Trump has some voters out there who they don't care about politics. They don't care about any of this stuff except him. And does he have enough of a coalition that he turns out that's unique to him that none of these other folks could replicate that maybe he does have something? Now, that can be completely counteracted by the way that he uniquely activates the Democratic base or turns off swing voters for sure.
And to reference another New York Times focus group I did, I spoke to 11 Biden voters who said that they were disappointed in how his presidency was going. They reported disapproving of him on the job approval question. And I asked them, and for most of the focus group, they said, oh, we think Biden's not going to make it till 2028. We don't think he's a strong leader. We don't think he cares about the issues we want. But then at the end, I said, well, are any of you going to switch your vote to someone like a Donald Trump or another Republican? And they were like, oh,
No, no, gosh, no. So I do think there's an element of like, we're so polarized that it's possible that Donald Trump just doesn't run that differently than generic Republican. Yeah, I think it's a both and. If you look at past cycles and you look at the sort of
early spread of how well this candidate compares and this candidate compares in the matchups or whatever we're in an era where it's like it's pretty tight but I think there are differences um my sense is I you know I get into sometimes with this stuff I get into my head where I'm thinking about all the like you know strengths and weaknesses different candidates and blah blah blah blah blah blah but I think when I pull back and I try just like not to overthink it it's like
Trump has criminal indictments. He has some negatives that are, you know, pretty much totally unique to him. I'm not sure that there is a magic that he has that, you know, outweighs all of the massive negatives that we can put all these clear numbers to. I think I lean more towards the idea that
other candidates are likely more electable. Maybe not all of them that are on the stage. You can go through person by person and figure it out, but I lean more towards that angle. Yeah. It's tricky because we have seen something of a coalitional realignment during the Trump era. And so it's a trade-off either way. Do I think Nikki Haley would perform better amongst the
high education, wealthier suburbs around Atlanta or Dallas or Phoenix or what have you where Biden and Democrats in general have picked up support over the past 10 years? Yes. Do I think she would do worse amongst non-college educated white voters? Probably. So I don't know. And of course, there are
Far fewer college-educated voters in America than there are non-college-educated voters in America. Just a little over a third of Americans have a college degree for reference. But people with a college degree, you know, show up at higher rates. So there's some offset there. And yeah, I don't know. It's a tradeoff and I don't know how it would net out. So I think you're all right to be like, I don't know. I'm very on guard against what I would call like 2015 brain. Yeah.
There was – I tweeted something and then I deleted it very quickly, not because it was offensive or ill thought out, but I just thought, I don't know if anybody is actually going to get this reference. But there's that shot of the Back to the Future car where they're like setting the different like current time, destination time, and like the destination time for one was like October of 2015, and I was like –
Current mood. My brain is like going back to October of 2015, watching this debate unfold as people are arguing about, oh gosh, it's actually the Republican Party that's running up the debt and this is bad. And I'm like, oh, I remember this. This has taken me back. It's taken me back. But I think we should ask, to what extent do the normal rules of politics that got blown up in 2015 and 2016, are any of them applying again or are they gone forever? Yeah.
Well, they seem to apply to Democrats in 2020. So that's part of why you're hesitant to just throw them out altogether. But only time will tell, folks. Only time will tell. We got to move on. And in moving on, we are going... We've already put a 538 poll under the magnifying glass. Now, David, let's ask some tough questions about one of your polls. So...
Noble Predictive Insights released a poll earlier this month asking about hypothetical matchups against Biden in a Democratic primary. The potential challengers that you all asked about, David, included folks like Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr., who are, of course, actually running, but also Michelle Obama, who, according to all intel, has no interest in the job, Ilhan Omar, who cannot constitutionally be president because she was born in Somalia, and then some people who would never challenge Biden, like Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton.
This got modest backlash on Twitter with Omar herself pointing out that she can't be president and questioning the value of polls like this. So, David...
I want to hear your defense. Was this a good or bad use of polling? It was a great, excellent use of polling. Couldn't be better? Was it a perfect use of polling? Immaculate use of polling. So first off, I wish I could take credit for this. This was published before I started work at Noble. So I can't take full credit, but I wish I could. I think the way to think about this is that
A lot of questions about primaries don't actually measure real elections in the first place, right? So everyone obsesses about national Republican presidential primary polls when the fact is
probably about like half of the Republican electorate, maybe more, maybe less, will actually vote in the primary. If it follows the trends of previous, you know, elections, it'll get closed up before this primary season's over. If you, you know, and even in the case that, you know, it's a long protracted primary and, you know, it goes through and every state votes, the current people that we are polling in national Republican primary polls are
they're not going to have this slate of candidates. It'll be whittled down to like two or three by the time it gets to most voters, right? And my point in saying this is that I think that we can learn from polls without being like total, utter purists about what it is we're measuring.
I think this type of polling is actually more useful than a simple head to head between Biden and RFK Jr. Right. Because a simple head to head between Biden and RFK Jr. just tell us tells us that there's Kennedy name recognition and that's it. Right. What this is essentially asking is various flavors of Democrats
Who do you like? Who don't you like? What brands kind of work? Not abstract questions about candidates' qualities or their age or whatever. It's these specific people compared to Biden. What do you think? Do you like them? Do you not? And you get some things that I think are
Fairly useful, like you get confirmation, Marianne Williamson, Bill de Blasio, not great brands. Right. And my reading of this and you can have different readings of it, but my reading of it is that there's still a lot of affinity for people who have some sort of proximity to Obama world.
Right. Other than Joe Biden, Michelle Obama is the closest person to Barack Obama's brand in America. Right. And she's the only way I think Michelle Obama is closer to Barack Obama's brand than Joe Biden. Right. I mean, oh, yeah. Sorry. Did I say that wrong? That's what I meant. Beats out a president vice president relationship. Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, I don't know. I'm not married, but like I'm just I'm just guessing. Yeah.
Sorry, man. I meant to say that Michelle Obama is the closest. She does the best in any of these polls. Biden is the next closest person to the Obama brand. He's also the sitting president. He beats everybody else. Buttigieg is kind of Obama-ish. Like you can go through and think through it. That's how I think through the results. You can have a different interpretation, but it's...
It's like it's the difference between asking somebody what kind of foods do you ideally want to eat? And they say healthy, fresh and great. And then you say, do you want a hamburger? And then somebody picks a hamburger, right? Like you're asking people about concrete options. And I think there's value in that.
Kristen, do you want to weigh in here? I have a couple of thoughts myself, but I'll let you go first. I have no place to criticize this type of polling, considering that my firm in June put out a survey that tested Donald Trump versus Joe Biden versus Taylor Swift.
We also tested Donald Trump versus Joe Biden versus TV producer Andy Cohen. More useful was Trump versus Joe Biden versus Cornel West. But we also in a Democratic primary tested who would you choose between Joe Biden and Matthew McConaughey. So again, I am in no position to say that this is a bad use of polling. And I'm just curious from your perspective, what did you learn from that kind of polling?
I think what we learned there was, let's take the Biden versus McConaughey one. So we know a lot of people know who Matthew McConaughey is. He generally has really high favorability ratings. What we kind of wanted to understand was like, given an alternative to Joe Biden, who is someone that people generally kind of like. So
So not someone like RFK Jr., who's super polarizing and frankly, but loved more by Republicans and Democrats at this point. Like how weak is Joe Biden's standing actually? Now, I don't think that Matthew McConaughey is necessarily a great stand in for Gavin Newsom, but I think that's what makes this potentially kind of interesting, right, is against someone who is generally somewhat unobjectionable if not
deeply inexperienced, like how would that go? And Joe Biden beat McConaughey 77 to 14. So there's your answer. What about the Biden-Trump-Taylor Swift poll? That's what I want to know. Trump 43, Biden 41, Taylor Swift 7, unsure was 9. That about tracks with the percentage of Americans who identify as gay. So I'll, you know, I'll take it. I joke, I joke. I'm sure there are lots of, you know,
18-year-olds who would also vote for Taylor Swift over either of the two. But so here's my question, because the conclusion that you came to was something along the lines of the fringier, more left-leaning candidates perform poorly, the more sort of Obama establishment-y types do well, like Hillary Clinton doesn't do too poorly. And
etc. But the actual popular folks on the left, like say Bernie Sanders or maybe even AOC, and like I'm not saying AOC is broadly popular, but popular amongst Democrats, didn't get an opportunity to go head to head against Biden. It's only like we already know, come on, Bill de Blasio, Ilhan Omar, we know that those are like the least popular. They are leftists, but they're also the least popular Democrats out there. So if we actually wanted an answer to the question on a sort of, you know, centrist, leftist spectrum,
we needed to include different candidates, right? I would love to see the numbers for Sanders and the other ones that you named. When I'm in my meeting where we're looking at questions for the next one, that's something that I'm going to bring up. I think that's fair. My general approach to all of this is that, you know, I think what I'm arguing is that these sort of broad multi-candidate things are not something that we should turn our nose up at because we can learn a lot from them. My other question is,
When because usually 538's approach here is like ask the question that you want to know the answer to. Right. Don't kind of do this roundabout indirect sort of you can just ask, do you like what's what's Biden's favorability? What's Ilhan Omar's favorability? What's Bill de Blasio's favorability or Marianne Williamson's favorability?
So, you know, when as a pollster, is it better? Because I think maybe there are cases where this is the case, because sometimes when you ask a question to directly, I mean, this is the case with sort of views on race oftentimes. When you ask a question to directly, you don't necessarily get honest responses because people know what you're asking about and feel uncomfortable answering. I don't know if this is one of those cases, but as pollsters, when...
when is it appropriate to ask indirectly?
I think it's good to ask something indirectly when asking the direct questions are leaving you with mysteries to be solved. So like, let's take the Democratic primary. When you ask people, do you wish that Joe Biden was running for president in 2024? Or do you wish, would you like to see Joe Biden or someone else be the Democratic nominee in 2024? And you see that someone else number be pretty high or that number of, yes, I want him to run again, be pretty low.
But then you do these ballot tests and you see that actually against like these rando candidates, you know, Joe Biden's like cleaning their clock. OK, so I would like to know what are the conditions under which he would actually be facing a threat?
Is it if he suddenly was facing a threat from Matthew McConaughey? Is it if he was suddenly facing a threat from Gavin Newsom? Or given that asking even just a head-to-head of like Joe Biden versus Gavin Newsom might not give us a lot because a lot of people don't know who Gavin Newsom is. So it can be hard, but I think sometimes asking these indirect questions is good if the direct questions have left you with a mystery to be solved. Yeah, and I would add to that that sometimes you can kind of
do questions that get at something differently that reveal the divides. So what I'm looking at with this is I'm thinking through, okay, Joe Biden versus Pete Buttigieg. I would imagine that they both have extremely high favorability numbers amongst Democrats. I don't have Buttigieg's like off the top of my head, right? But you know, if you're just looking at both of them and they're sky high, yes, we like this guy. When you're asking, okay, who's more popular?
You're not going to get that out of a favorability rating. Maybe you put them in a head-to-head matchup instead. You kind of ask different questions to get different things. Uh-huh. And for the, I mean, look, I found this poll interesting. I, you know, I took a little bit of issue with it. I think it was still a good use of polling. I support, I support. And ultimately, we wouldn't have this data if you didn't ask this, that Michelle Obama would beat Joe Biden in a Democratic primary by 12 points. Yeah.
I would be curious what it's like to be someone like Michelle Obama, who half of the country would just like absolutely lose their shit to have you run for president. And you have absolutely zero interest in doing so. The status that few people have. Yeah, mostly it's the other way around. You're dying to be president and no one knows who the hell you are. Anyway, so we have one final good or bad use of polling segment to do. And this is an interesting one.
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The day after the debate, pollster and former counselor to President Trump Kellyanne Conway wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post along with Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and it was titled, quote, If they want to win, Republicans need to go on offense on abortion.
It noted the difficulty that Republicans have had staking out a popular position on abortion post-Dobbs. And the piece claims that a national ban on abortion at 15 weeks is popular with a majority of Americans. It also encourages Republicans to be, quote, peacocks on the Dobbs decision as opposed to ostriches. They say it's time for Republicans to talk about it everywhere. Now, Kristen, they make a polling-based argument in this piece, so...
Is it a good or bad use of polling? If they want to win, do Republicans need to go on offense on abortion and talk about it everywhere? I think it is definitely the case that Republicans need to do something different than they're doing now because they are getting absolutely destroyed on the issue. You have seen this at the ballot box in these special elections, in states where it has come up. The current strategy is not working for the GOP.
I think what Kellyanne writes is interesting insofar as it is challenging pro-life politicians to have something to say, which I think is important. I think to the extent that Republicans who are pro-life kind of duck and dodge, it allows them to be defined by a term like ban when, for instance, as Kellyanne used, she uses the phrase limit, right? Yeah.
not to get too frank Luntz about it, but like voters will react differently to those two different terms. A ban at 15 weeks is probably going to poll a little differently than a limit at 15 weeks where you expressly have exceptions, et cetera, et cetera. And so there's, I think the reason why this might not be a great use of polling is only in so far as
polling around abortion is really complicated. There are some things that are very clear. The percentage of Americans who believe that they wish Roe versus Wade was still the Supreme Court precedent is a clear majority. And not only has that not changed, but that has increased since the overturning of Roe. At the same time, I think she has a point where if you have a position, say, I would like to limit abortion at 15 weeks and
weeks to with exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. I mean, if you ask voters, you know, at 15 weeks, if I type that in right now, I get whattoexpect.com or Baby Center, and they will say, your baby is the size of an apple. Your baby is the size of a pear at 15 weeks. I mean, that's a really tough moral situation for a lot of voters to think about. And I think that's why you see so many polls, you know,
you do see majorities, if slim majorities, saying, yeah, actually 15 weeks with these exceptions sounds reasonable to me. So I think what Kellyanne's trying to do here is use polling to shake Republicans who have tried to just completely dodge this issue and say, you can't dodge it anymore. You have to actually have a position. And number two, you should actually challenge Democrats on their position. They do get a pass on sort of eliding, OK, do you think there should be any limits? And if so, where?
So I don't think she's wrong about that. But I do think that if abortion is not an issue in your race, actively choosing to make it a big issue in your race is not something I would necessarily recommend. I think rather than, you know, she frames this as Republicans should go on offense. I don't know that I think of it as going on offense, but I think Republicans need to do a much better job of defense than they have been doing thus far. All right. I have thoughts on this, but David, I'm going to let you go first.
Yeah. So when I was reading this, I thought back to COVID and I thought back to immigration because the thing about abortion is that there's a long history of politicians taking stances of people fighting over this. And what I would really want to know is when a Republican politician says 15 week ban or 15 week limit, do voters hear that?
And that's the final thing or and that's my opening bid. And we're going to bid this down, down, down, down, down. Right. Because if voters hear that second thing, that's that's not going to work great. That's not going to go well. I generally buy and believe the polling that says that there's, you know, a majority of people who think that abortions, you know, after the first trimester or 15 weeks or, you know, bands around this thing.
region, that there's support for that, right? I think that that's statistic on its face. 56% of voters support a national abortion limit of 15 weeks isn't necessarily wrong. My question is, is that what people hear as the actual GOP position? And then the other quibble I have with this is that be a peacock and not an ostrich about recent gains for life,
I think that it's going to be a little bit of a line to walk to say 15 weeks, this is our position, but also look at all these more restrictive laws that have been passed and we're going to be a peacock about that at the same time. There's a tension there that I think this doesn't necessarily get into. All right. So we're going to have some conflict here. We're going to make it fun.
So I thought this was actually one of the worst uses of polling that I have ever brought on the podcast as an example.
And to be clear, when Gallup polls, do you think abortion should be legal in the first trimester, the second trimester, the third trimester, you get somewhere in the range of two-thirds of Americans saying it should be legal in the first trimester and then less than majority in the second trimester. And you can extrapolate that to mean that Americans would support a limit or a ban after 15 weeks, given that 15 weeks is more or less the first trimester. However...
The poll that Kellyanne Conway refers to in this op-ed is just nuts. So, you know, I was looking, I got the op-ed and I was trying to find the actual poll and it ended up being a sort of matryoshka doll of bad uses of polling. So if you click the link in the post piece, it takes you to a write-up of a signal poll, which is a GOP-aligned private pollster.
In the write-up, it says 56% of voters support a federal abortion limit of 15 weeks, including a plurality of Democrats, 23% opposed, 21% unsure. Now, the actual polling question is not that easy to find, but when you do sort of download the total results...
Here's how the question actually goes in the poll. Do you support a federal 15-week ban on abortions with an exception for rape, incest, and life of the mother, or support allowing abortion up until the point of birth? The options are 15-week abortion ban with exceptions or abortion up until birth. You can choose the modifiers of definitely or probably, but you can only choose one of those two things.
So from the perspective of survey design, is that a good use of polling? I would not have phrased the question that way. That is forcing a false choice. And sometimes it's appropriate to ask a question where you present a respondent with two things and you say, even if you don't agree completely with either, which one do you agree with more? This doesn't seem like the moment I would have done that.
Yeah. The other thing is that there are other surveys that have examples of different ways to break this up. You just mentioned the Gallup trimester polling that breaks this up into trimesters and basically gets you to the same argument, right? It gets you to the same place and you don't force that choice. So I also would have written that differently. Yeah.
We're being really diplomatic. Okay. I don't have to be diplomatic, so I'll just go ahead and say bad use of polling. But this gets at a broader question, which troubles both Democrats and, in this case, Republicans, which is both parties clearly have policies that are on the wrong side of public opinion when you look at the general public. For Democrats, it's things like immigration or crime. For Republicans, it's very clearly, in this case, abortion issues.
And you oftentimes hear liberals and progressives say, you know, no, we need to talk about it. We need to make our argument. People would agree with us if we just went out and clearly stated our position. You know, I think there's been a debate on this about immigration, for example, where some folks will say Democrats just don't talk about immigration. You're not popular on the issue. Whereas progressives will say, no, you've got to make the case. This is about humanity and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so both parties struggle with this. Like the activists and the people who work professionally in politics will oftentimes say, you got to go out and talk about it and you got to defend our positions because our position is right. And then there's other folks who maybe work in politics or pay attention to polling who are like, I don't know, you probably shouldn't really talk about that because you're losing on it. Who's right?
I think on this issue, saying nothing is not an option because the other side is going to make it an issue. So you have to have something to say. With that said, I don't think you have to make it the centerpiece of what you are going to say. And I think it is absolutely the case that the pro-life movement was caught completely flat-footed with the overturning of Roe and did not have...
any sort of message groundwork to persuade Americans that in a post-Roe world, here is the compassionate way to balance the rights of mothers with the rights of unborn children. Like, I think that there was just an abdication of figuring out how to navigate that world. And whether it was because they really didn't think that world would ever come to pass or not is secondary. But I think right now the polling is so shows it is so aligned against Republican on that issue of trust. And I think that's
To David's point, which party do you trust more to handle this issue? Even if you are taking a position that is kind of median, popular-ish position asked in a reputable fashion,
there is still the messenger problem. And I do think that Republicans have lost credibility on this issue. If you ask which party do you trust more to handle it, Republicans will not win on that. You need to just, you can't just ignore the issue entirely and hope that will get better because this issue is not going anywhere. But I would not advocate making it a centerpiece of your message. Yeah, I agree. And I think that you need to step carefully. I
Because when you compare it to other issues, there is such a long and well-defined past on abortion for both parties, right? Like COVID in the 2020 election.
you kind of got a blank slate, right? Like it's this completely new thing. Nobody had thought about pandemics before, whatever, whatever, you know, there was a lot of freedom to pick positions because, you know, it's not like that was part of your existing brand. Right. And on immigration, the issue that was like big in the election before that 2016, you had some mix within the parties of what different people thought. And you had this sort of, you know, freedom. I think whatever Republicans do on a,
It has to be careful and sort of, you know, address the preexisting perceptions, because I would think that those are going to be stronger than they are on other issues. I mean, sometimes what you see with successful politicians is they just pivot or steal the opposition's position. Right. I mean,
You've seen this with the Biden administration on immigration, adopting Trump-era policies in order to limit asylum seekers, things that during the 2020 campaign didn't.
Biden would have never said that he was interested in. But when faced with sort of souring poll numbers on handling of immigration and increased concern on the issue, he just pivoted. I mean, I think Bill Clinton is probably the most famous for stealing his opposition's ideas and making himself more popular as a result. And also, frankly, Trump stealing Democrats' positions on things like Social Security and, you know, Medicare and,
frankly, like the debt and deficit and infrastructure. So like, do you think there is a future where or is it too well trod territory, Republicans have too well defined of a position here, that Republicans actually pivot and say, you know what, we have a different position on abortion now?
I think it's unlikely that Republicans change their position on the issue writ large. Like, I don't think you're going to see, say, a pro-choice plank get put into the GOP platform. But I do think, and I have seen this in some— I mean, maybe 15 weeks is a pivot, even. I don't know. For sure. And I'm sure there are pro-life groups out there that would look at that and say that is woefully inadequate. Again, if we're talking about a fetus that is the size of a pear or an apple, I mean, if you believe that life begins at the beginning—
how is that acceptable? So I fully believe there will still be a lot of contentiousness within the right on this. But at the same time, I have seen issues like abortion kind of almost fall down the issue importance list, even for social conservatives. You saw this in the debate last week, that Mike Pence is kind of banking on his purity on this issue being the thing that will make voters look at
him instead of, say, a Nikki Haley or someone like that. And I think that's a dangerous gamble for him because I think he misreads the way that even evangelical voters these days now prioritize other sorts of culture war battles over the abortion battle. Yeah, I think that's that's
All correct. I think that one possible future for the GOP is that you have some sort of pivot where something other than, you know, something more like a 15 week ban becomes more of a consensus position. It's possible that we get there. I just I think it's harder to get there than it is to pivot on something like.
Social Security on something like any of the other issues that you named, since abortion is very central to a lot of different levels of people on both parties. I mean,
You can even run the same thought experiment, right? Like, OK, so Biden, you know, he changed his tune on immigration when that was going poorly for him. If Biden changed its position on abortion, I think there would be a lot more backlash, right? Like, I think there's something about this issue that's a little bit harder to move than your garden variety thing, or at least a little bit more delicate to move. Does that make any sense?
Well, it's also the case that it's easier for people in different parties to move on different things. For example, Biden could move on immigration. Democrats, liberals in general, don't prioritize immigration on the issue priority list.
Trump cannot move on immigration. You know, when you poll Republican voters, immigration is up there alongside the economy as like number two. And so if Trump moves on immigration, he gets a lot of backlash because it is such a priority. Now, there are other issues on which, for example, Joe Biden can't change on climate change. You know, it's probably easier for a Republican to change on climate change because Republicans just don't really care. I mean, I don't know what may
Maybe there is a policy position a Republican candidate could take that would get voters disinterested. But I think for the most part, whether you say you believe in it or you don't believe in it, you want to do something about it or you don't want to do something about it, Republican voters are waiting for the part of the debate or the speech or whatever where you're talking about, you know, wokeism and
immigration and education or whatever, maybe the economy inflation. So does that make sense from that perspective? Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly why I think that an issue like abortion, now that it has been sort of
made secondary to other kind of culture war issues is why there could be a little bit of movement here. But it's also coming in the face of like this incredible polarization on the issue where pro-life Democrats no longer really exist and pro-choice Republicans have become something of an endangered species as well, not totally gone. And especially post-Roe, that's all flexible. But I don't see Republicans suddenly becoming a pro-choice party.
Yeah, yeah, I think I think you can. Republicans, I think have room to soften, but I think it's going to be delicate and it's going to be kind of a dance. Yeah. All right. Well, we've made it to the end of our good or bad use of polling.
Palooza pull good or bad, bad use of Pola Palooza. I don't know, whatever. Uh, thank you so much for joining me. I hope you had fun. I hope, uh, I don't know. You learned something. You worked out your thoughts on some of the questions we asked. Um, I really appreciate it. Thanks you guys. Thanks for having us. Thanks. Yeah.
And a housekeeping note before we leave, our next podcast will very likely come out next Wednesday. We're going to be off for Labor Day as usual, but I am heading off on vacation this evening, so getting a podcast out on Tuesday might be tight. Either way, more importantly, do as the normal people do according to our polling and enjoy the long weekend.
And with that, my name is Galen Druk. Cameron Tretavian is in the control room and on editing. 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 tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.
