2020 Polling in Hindsight
Someone Please Answer the Phone
Anyone casually following the 2020 election this year may have noticed a particular pattern in polling trends and election results. That pattern, in key presidential states as well as Senate races, went something like this:
Democrat ahead… Democrats still ahead... Democrat a bit ahead, days away from the election… But then: Republican wins by a fair amount.
How was so much polling inaccuracy possible again in 2020 at nearly all levels?
Episode 21 of the Purple Principle, “2020 Polling in Hindsight: Someone Please Answer the Phone,” attempts to answer that vexing question by consulting two polling experts – Dr. Natalie Jackson, Director of Research at PRRI and Dr. Brian Schaffner of Tufts University.
Dr. Jackson gives a sense of the technological challenges faced today by pollsters now that few individuals answer phones, both landline or mobile. On top of that long-standing challenge, a sizable number of bright red Republicans seem mistrustful of all pollsters and unlikely to participate even when contacted – an observation echoed by Dr. Schaffner. Plus the proliferation of polls, many of which are cherry-picked by the media, makes it difficult for high quality polls to garner attention.
Other challenges abound. Shaffner mentions that in today’s polarized environment, some respondents deliberately give dishonest answers to pollsters, often venting ideological views in the process. It also appears that a “non-trivial” number of voters in many states split their ticket in 2020, marking the Pro-Biden (or anti-Trump) box up top but hedging against Democratic control down-ballot. And the Latino community, once viewed as a likely Democratic monolith, exhibited far greater political diversity in 2020.
For indie-minded Purple Principle listeners, Dr. Jackson confirms that studying the independent position on candidates and topics often predicts which way the American majority will swing. And she notes the somewhat encouraging fact that even in our polarized age, a good third of Republicans and Democrats diverge from the party line on many key issues.
What’s a pollster to do in a polarized age with a mistrustful slice of the electorate and a shifting political landscape? No simple answers but a lot of helpful insights and information in Episode 21 for those who puzzled over the 2020 polling outcome disconnect.
Source Notes
Brian Schaffner, Department of Political Science, Tufts University
Changing Attitudes on Same-Sex Marriage, Pew Research Center
Increasing Support for Religiously Based Service Refusals, PRRI
National Council on Public Polls Analysis Of Final 2012 Pre-Election Polls
Spiral of silence. Encyclopedia Britannica.
Danielle Kurtzelben (11/19/20). “Why Were The Polls Off? Pollsters Have Some Early Theories.” NPR.
New Hampshire Secretary Of State: General Election Results 2020.
Parker Richards (11/3/18). “Republican Governors in New England Defy the Blue Wave.” The Atlantic.
Dhrumil Mehta (6/19/18). “Separating Families At The Border Is Really Unpopular.” FiveThirtyEight.
Transcript
Brian Schaffner:
There is a chunk of this country that is pretty distrustful of the news media, of academic institutions, of the kinds of organizations that run polls.
Robert Pease (Host):
That’s Brian Schaffner, an expert on U.S. politics and polling at Tufts University. He’s with us today to discuss the inaccuracies of 2020 election polling. This is The Purple Principle, and I’m Robert Pease.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
And I’m Emily Crocetti. Like everyone out there, we have a lot of questions about polling in the 2020 U.S. election. Like why was it so off target in so many races at so many levels?
Robert Pease (Host):
But a lot has happened since the election, Emily.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
Definitely way too much if you ask me.
Robert Pease (Host):
So for listeners who may have forgotten just how inaccurate polling was in this 2020 election, consider the Presidential polls in that huge electoral prize known as Texas.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
A similar pattern occurred in half a dozen Senate races thought to be trending blue, such as the heavily funded Susan Collins-Sara Gideon race in the state of Main.
Robert Pease (Host):
Has polling itself become impossible in our polarized age? Or is it other factors making a big mess of survey accuracy?
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
We’ll get some insight on that from Dr. Brian Schaffner and our other featured guest, Dr. Natalie Jackson, Director of Research at PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute.
Natalie Jackson:
And we kind of hit this impasse where I'm sure that my sources are correct, the other person is sure that their sources are correct, and polling does get wrapped up in that.
Robert Pease (Host):
Join us today as we fall a little deeper into the 2020 polling matrix.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
But first, let’s learn a bit about Natalie Jackson and her efforts to gauge public opinion on all kinds of thorny issues. I asked what led her to become a pollster in the first place.
Natalie Jackson:
I ended up in polling kind of accidentally. I finished my undergrad degree really quickly. I finished it in three years and so I was kind of sitting around going, what am I going to do with my life? Nobody wants to hire a 20-year old. And so I ended up applying to PhD programs. They assigned me as a research assistant to the in-house survey research lab at the University of Oklahoma. So by the time I finished my PhD, I had about five years of experience in the survey research field.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
And so now you're at PRRI, could you talk a little bit about what that organization is and the subjects that you choose to call around?
Natalie Jackson:
Sure. So PRRI is a nonprofit nonpartisan organization. We do research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy, which inherently involves politics, writ large. Our funding structure is that we are grant based. We get grants from organizations to do surveys on specific topics. One of our key areas that we do a lot of surveying around is LGBTQ rights. We also do a lot around immigration, kind of the hot button issues that really tend to be divisive in society.
Robert Pease (Host):
Could you give us an example of when you were doing some polling on an issue and got an early sense of shift in public opinion?
Natalie Jackson:
The same-sex marriage question is the single best example of public opinion just completely upending itself within about 10 or 15 years. It's really quite remarkable. We’re used to public opinion moving over time. We're not used to it completely reversing itself within a decade, you know, and in 2006, 2007, only about a third of Americans were in favor of allowing same-sex marriage. By 2015, 2016, that's two thirds for it, and only a third are against it. So both the policy space and public opinion move very, very quickly on that topic. What we typically see is a trend that we've seen on religiously based service refusals. And we do see about 60% of Americans oppose that, they don't think that small business owners should be able to do that. But we've watched over the last five years, we've seen opinion, that opposition, tick downward, that kind of sustained slow movement over a few years is generally how opinion shifts work.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
I definitely think a lot of people in my generation forget, or don't realize, that gay marriage was not legalized throughout the country until 2015.
Natalie Jackson:
It's easy to forget, even though I'm an old millennial (with the scare quotes around old), you know, it's easy for me to forget and I was in my twenties then.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
How do you gather the information from the people that you are polling? What's your process?
Natalie Jackson:
Technology has really upended how we contact people and as well as how people are willing to be contacted. Through the 80s and 90s, and really most of the early 2000s, the standard way to do a survey was to call people's telephones. Everybody just answered the phone when it rang, it was kind of amazing. And so, you know, that allowed for pretty simple mechanisms of, you could get the phone numbers easily, you could call people, they answered. That era is completely gone. Nobody answers their phones anymore. Most of what we're doing now is online, and online polling is a whole grab bag of lots of different methods of contacting people, of getting them to answer questions. The methods that we use at PRRI are what we call probability-based and what that means is that not just anybody can sign up to take the survey. The recruiters have actually gone out and found people either by doing phone calls or by doing mail invitations. So that's how we do most of our work.
Robert Pease (Host):
So not an easy thing to begin with, polling a huge diverse country.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
Then people stopped answering their phones.
Robert Pease (Host):
But that’s not such a new thing. And the polling seemed pretty accurate back, say, in the 2012 election, even in the off-year 2018 election. So what was it about 2020?
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
Not to mention similar problems with 2016.
Robert Pease (Host):
Let’s hear from Brian Schaffner on that. He’s a Professor of Civics at Tufts University and author of the book Campaign Finance and Political Polarization. I asked him why the polling profession has some clearly good and not so good years.
Brian Schaffner:
Yeah, it's a great question actually. And, you know, I wish I had a clear and conclusive answer and I don't think we necessarily have one at this point, but I think we have some ideas about what might be wrong. And, you know, we've been dealing with this as you for the past few election cycles. Actually, in 2018, the polling was pretty good, but in 2016, and of course we all know that it was off as well. And you know, one thing we think we're dealing with is that we're dealing with having a harder time getting people to respond to surveys, and we're trying to adjust for that by weighting our surveys on various metrics. And so, for example, in this election cycle, everyone added education weights to their weighting scheme to try and make sure we had enough non-college whites, which we were low on in 2016, this time around that didn't fix the issues. And I think there's a broader problem here, which might be the fact that there is a chunk of this country that is pretty distrustful of the news media, of academic institutions, of the kinds of organizations that run polls. And those people also tend to be strong supporters of Donald Trump. And if we're not getting those individuals into our samples, you know, even all the adjustments we make does not fully fix our polls to make them reflect reality.
Robert Pease (Host):
Okay. So we had a previous guest from UNH, Dr. Andrew Smith, and he talked about the spiral of silence, which seems to refer to people who would not answer pollsters questions accurately, because they were concerned about looking bad to the person asking the question. But what you're saying is different people will just not respond to the polls.
Brian Schaffner:
I think it's not merely a case of what some have called the shy Trump voter syndrome, where people are not willing to admit that they voted for Trump. I mean, that doesn't explain why we are off with Susan Collins in Maine, for example, or why we're off in lots of other Senate races, where it wouldn't necessarily be embarrassing to say that you were voting for a Republican Senate candidate.
Robert Pease (Host):
Is there any easy fix for that?
Brian Schaffner:
You know, I think it's a really hard problem. We can adjust for those when we know what the population value of various statistics are. So, you know, we know from the census what percentage of our samples should be non-college educated whites. But, you know, there's not necessarily a good measure out there of who is someone who is very distrustful of the media. We don't know what the population value for that is.
Robert Pease (Host):
I see. So, in one of your research papers, you had talked about, I think it's called “Expressive Responding.” Is that at work here, where people are actually confronted with facts and push back, expressing their ideology rather than to the data?
Brian Schaffner:
I think that is definitely related. So, you know, when people who answer these polls, sometimes they basically are treating it somewhat as a game. And so when we ask them questions about various topics, like, “do you believe in this conspiracy theory,” or, “if you met a Democrat or a Republican on the street, you know, would you trip that person or something, do bodily harm to that person?” We get such alarmingly high figures that people who say that they would do these things, we don't really observe that in real life. And so one thing that's happening on these surveys is that people are essentially using the survey as a way to express that they don't like the other side, but they're not necessarily answering the questions honestly.
Robert Pease (Host):
Let’s dig in a little more on the question of accuracy. You mentioned the national level was fairly accurate. But there were certain key swing states, such as Ohio, Florida, Texas, and others that were pretty far off target. Were they all experiencing the same phenomenon?
Brian Schaffner:
Actually, one of the stories that came out of 2016 was that the national polls weren't that bad compared to the national popular vote outcome, but it was the state polls that were really bad. In 2020, I think if you look at the polls that came out in the last couple of weeks, most showed by not by seven or eight percentage points, and it's going to end up being something closer to like four or five percentage points. So actually the national polls, I think this year, that we made have been actually worse than they were in 2016, and that then extends to various states. So in Georgia, I think the polls were basically right on the mark, but then you saw polls out of Wisconsin that were showing something like an eight to ten percentage point victory for Biden. And that was decided by less than a percentage point.
Robert Pease (Host):
Let's talk a little bit about the Senate level. You'd mentioned Susan Collins, but that's really only one of four or five or six examples where many respected organizations had rated these Senate races as tossups. You think about Joni Ernst in Iowa, certainly Susan Collins, who was outspent by a huge margin, and possibly even Lindsey Graham also outspent. So is it possible that the media is conflating the amount of money spent against a candidate with the polling numbers?
Brian Schaffner:
Yeah. I think there's a piece of that for sure. I think one thing that often happens is that you get, you know, in South Carolina, you sort of look at how much money is being spent on the race. And you see that as an indication that this is competitive. So part of this is sort of selection bias in terms of what reporters are attracted to. And they're not very interested in a poll that shows, you know, that Lindsey Graham is going to win his Senate race by 10 points, but they're really interested in a poll that shows that he's within two points in that race and that's what they focus on instead.
Robert Pease (Host):
So is it possible or is there any indication that because the feeling was that Biden was going to win, people changed their votes from Democrat to Republican at the Senate level as a hedge or a balance against tax increases or some other issue?
Brian Schaffner:
I honestly haven't had a chance to dig into the data yet to look at how much split ticket voting we see in our data. But it's pretty clear that was happening. And in Maine, for example, Biden wins Maine fairly comfortably, and Susan Collins wins, which means a non-trivial percentage of Mainers voted for Biden for president, and then voted for Susan Collins for Senator. And you know, these might be people who are traditionally Republicans, but have been turned off by Trump. But you don't necessarily just want to give Democrats the key to the federal government. And so they see this split ticket vote as a way of balancing government. And it doesn't take that many people who are doing this kind of strategic split ticket voting to actually have a really big effect on what the outcomes are.
Robert Pease (Host):
Well, you mentioned you spent some time in New Hampshire where we are based, and New Hampshire I believe was the only state in which the legislature swung from Democrat to Republican and re elected a Republican governor while voting for Democrats at Congress, Senate, and the presidential level. So a very split ticket. How do you explain a state like that?
Brian Schaffner:
Yeah, I think New England Republicans, the New England state Republican parties are really fascinating case studies because they are becoming so distinct from the national Republican party in a lot of ways. I mean, you see the wild popularity of Charlie Baker in Massachusetts, of Scott in Vermont, of Chris Sununu in New Hampshire, and you know, the success of Republicans at the state level in these states. And I think part of the story is the ability of those Republicans to kind of create a brand that is distinct from Trump.
Robert Pease (Host):
We are, you know, confused about the swings also at the House of Representatives level nationally. Because there you have so few competitive races and the feeling was there would be a, let's say a 10 seat gain for the Democrats and that's wildly off. It looks like it's going to be a 10 seat gain for Republicans. So, is that in fact probably the most inaccurate prediction of the polls this year?
Brian Schaffner:
Yeah, it may very well be. I think how polling is always difficult because we don't do a lot of polling within congressional districts. And so we kind of rely on a national estimate of how people are going to vote in their House races. And then we kind of try to translate that into what that would mean in terms of how many seats the party would win. That's already a difficult thing to do. I think if you're a pollster and you're looking at Biden's gonna win by eight to ten points in the national vote, then I think a ten seat gain in the House makes sense. If you knew that Biden was going to win by four points, then that prediction wouldn't look as reasonable.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
So not much real polling is actually done for all those House races. Did not realize that.
Robert Pease (Host):
Yet you read articles all the time predicting which way the House may swing. In fact, I feel like we’re already starting to see them for 2022.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
Please, let’s just take one day off between divisive elections, and maybe just… govern for a moment.
Robert Pease (Host):
Impossible. Partisan zombies never sleep. But the other interesting point there was the observation about New England Republicans. Not as numerous as they used to be, but still a different breed.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
But what about the issues at play behind these 2020 split results? As it turned out, there was no huge blue wave in the House and state legislatures. But Democrats did regain the White House and a wee bit of control in the Senate.
Robert Pease (Host):
I asked Brian Schaffner about the big issues in this campaign, starting with calls to defund the police. Could they have backfired on Democrats in some of those purple states?
Brian Schaffner:
I think it's a really hard thing and not even that it's too soon, but I think it's really hard to unpack that at all. Which is not to say that we shouldn't try to figure that out. But if you go back and look at the presidential polling during the time of Black Lives Matter, it didn't really move much. But at the same time, this whole “defund the police” movement does play into this notion that Republicans definitely wanted to push, which is that the core of the Democratic party is kind of extremist. You know, it was very clear that Trump didn't want to run against Biden. He ran his entire general election campaign using exactly the same rhetoric he would have used if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee, and that's who he wanted to run against, he wanted to run against Bernie Sanders. And Biden outperformed Democratic House candidates, and one of the reasons that he did that is that swing voters are moderate. That does suggest that in some of these competitive House districts, rhetoric like “defund the police,” but maybe not just “defund the police,” help to sort of paint those candidates as extremists and lead voters to try to balance the way that they were voting.
Robert Pease (Host):
So, any other issues that you think are in that category, where the Democrats handed Republicans effective messaging?
Brian Schaffner:
One is probably the Green New Deal. I think Republicans have been trying to label that as a socialist policy for years. And so the term itself is very polarizing now. Another interesting issue, by the way, is immigration. And I think, you know, Biden has generally been fairly moderate on immigration. But swing voters actually have these sorts of positions that are an interesting mix, because they are with Republicans on border security, but they're also with Democrats on a sort of a policy that allows people who are already here to gain citizenship.
Robert Pease (Host):
Right? So talking about people who have an interesting mix of positions. We've been hearing from the Democratic side that the demographics of the Hispanic vote will eventually put them in the majority, but in this election we see a very split Hispanic vote. In let's say Miami, voting more for Trump, and in Arizona voting more for Biden. So do you think polling has a challenge there, or are they starting to differentiate that group?
Brian Schaffner:
Yeah, that's a great question. Polling Latinos is definitely a challenge. The biggest thing is, you know, most Latinos in the United States don't actually feel a particularly strong pan-ethnic identity with the Latino or Hispanic term. They actually feel more of an identity with their country of origin. Latinos who are from Mexico vote and behave very differently in politics than those who are from Cuba or Central America. So if you, for example, are polling in Florida and you don't in your sample of Latinos and your poll doesn't have enough Cubans then, you know, you might have overstated how well Biden was doing among Latinos in that state.
Robert Pease (Host):
So if you could make one change to the way we elect people in this country to try and put the center back together, or at least slow down the falling apart of things, what do you think would be at least partially effective?
Brian Schaffner:
Oh, that's a great question. I guess there's lots of reforms to think about. If I were to make one change, it would be to get rid of party primaries. That really does seem to encourage a lot of extremism, because most Republicans and most Democrats are running in districts where they don't really have to worry about the general election. The election they're really worried about is the primary. And, you know, why are various Republicans calling out the Republican secretary of State in Georgia? It's because of how they think it's gonna affect their next primary campaign. And I think having an alternative to the way that we do primaries would be a really important change.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
Aagh, the polarizing primaries! We’ve had a lot of smart people point to that one. Charles Wheelan of Unite America; former Congressman Jason Altmire.
Robert Pease (Host):
And we’re already seeing battle lines drawn for some 2022 primaries, such as the targeting of Liz Cheney in Wyoming by Trump loyalists.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
Isn’t politics uplifting?
Robert Pease (Host):
Not often. But before we begin to even think about 2022, let’s hear from Natalie Jackson on polling weaknesses in 2020.
Natalie Jackson:
The over optimism about a blue wave was up and down the board. The kind of interesting piece that pollsters are scratching our heads about a bit is that 2018 polling that was working on the Senate and House races did pretty well. And then 2020 kind of was not. We're wondering a bit if there's some impact of just having Trump on the ballot anywhere. Not that Trump himself makes things harder to poll, but that Trump himself on the ballot makes the environment different in ways that we're not picking up in the polls.
Robert Pease (Host):
We're wondering what kind of a challenge polarization presents to pollsters in terms of people being more emotional on these subjects, and also the fact that unfortunately a lot of independents, unaffiliated voters, are very turned off by politics and therefore kind of tuned out.
Natalie Jackson:
There's certainly a big discussion about this happening after the election. The 2020 polling generally overestimates the proportion of the vote that Joe Biden would get, especially in some states, it was overestimated nationally. But it was also overestimated in some of the individual key states, which resulted in the election looking a lot closer than many people thought it was going to be. Part of the discussion around why that happened is, does a certain type of Trump supporter answer polls if they don't trust the establishment, they don't trust institutions? Why would they trust pollsters to answer the polls? So all of that to say, I think the effect of polarization on the survey field at large has kind of been, are we representing everyone? And how do we make sure that we word things and we conduct our surveys in a way that's not slanted to one side or the other? And that's actually getting a little bit more difficult. As you know, as polarization increases, groups are claiming specific terminology.
Robert Pease (Host):
Well, following up on that, if there is this percentage of voters who are mistrustful of experts and think of pollsters as a form of expertise, are you not better off creating a model rather than doing polls?
Natalie Jackson:
Certainly people do those models. They build those models. By the way, those models were not terribly effective for 2020 because the economic indicators, which usually correspond with an incumbent getting reelected, looked pretty good. But what's interesting to remember is that no group is a monolith. Joe Biden has 90 something percent favorability among Democrats. It's not 100. yYou know, Trump he's mostly been in the eighties; on policy issues that gets even murkier. You know, it's rare for us to look at any one policy issue where more than about 80% of partisans align on the respective sides. You do have your outliers, of course. But you also have things that surprise you. What proportion of Republicans do you think favor family separation policies at the border?
Robert Pease (Host):
I think a minority, I would imagine.
Natalie Jackson:
Okay. You're right. There are places where the parties are more in line, and family separation is obviously one of them.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
But if you pose it like that, if you pose it as do you family separation, I feel like most humans will say no, but if you pose it as, do you favor border security, most humans will say yes.
Natalie Jackson:
You're exactly right. You know, for most immigration policies, we do find that strong divide: Republicans by and large favor the border wall, Democrats don't. But like I said, even with those it's like 60 something percent, and 60 something percent, you know, you still have a good quarter to a third of the parties in a lot of these policy areas that diverge from where the party position is.
Robert Pease (Host):
Most of our audience are independents. That has been, you know, give or take, a growing number of Americans over the last 20 or 30 years with some ebb and flow. So how are pollsters adapting to that larger number of less predictable people?
Natalie Jackson:
What we do is we ask people, do you consider yourself Republican, Independent, or Democrat? And we take them at their word. What we usually find is that where the average falls, of all Americans is generally where independents are. With some of these policies that are more easily swung to one side, such as family separation, 70-80% of Independents are opposed to that. With the border wall, it's 50-60%. So how I look at Independents is kind of, okay, we have Republicans here, Democrats here, who's the tiebreaker, you know, who's giving us the information on which direction the public is actually going to swing. And that's that middle cluster of Independents.
Robert Pease (Host):
Well, in this election cycle, there were a couple of very tentative steps towards a third party candidate with some name recognition: Howard Schultz, early on; Justin Amash. It seemed like both of them were landed on by a huge number of people shortly thereafter, and they didn't run. So you had low numbers for the Green Party, and I think for the Libertarian party. Once you factor that in, doesn't that help explain the large numbers for both major candidates?
Natalie Jackson:
It does. The turnout was extremely large anyway, and would have broken records regardless, you know, even if third-party candidates had gotten what, say what they did in 2016, which was a little bit of an over-performing year, we still would have had record-breaking turnout for both of the major party candidates. It was just that substantial.
Robert Pease (Host):
So, Joe Biden doesn't have to thank Howard Schultz and Justin Amash.
Natalie Jackson:
He's probably not going to, no.
Robert Pease (Host):
So a question about the quality of polls and also the huge number of them, you had a great line in your USA Today piece about people refreshing the 538 website every 5.38 seconds. And it's kind of head-scratching, that website includes so many polls, including some that they rate as being very unreliable. Why include them if they're unreliable? And how does that make the job of a more serious quality pollster more difficult?
Natalie Jackson:
That's a huge issue. You know, the internet age has allowed just anyone to post a poll and get attention for it, and the thinking goes back to the 90s, and even to some degree the early 2000s, we had media playing a gatekeeper function. And if you didn't meet the standards of most media with your poll, you weren't going to get any airtime. And so you just didn't have this issue of pollsters coming out of the woodwork everywhere that you've never heard of until an election comes around. But when you give a platform to pollsters that you say, I don't think these people are very good at what they do, but we're going to throw them in the model anyway, you're lending an air of credibility to it even.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
What do you think the most dangerous fallacy is by the public when it comes to polling?
Natalie Jackson:
That's a great question because there's so many. I think the biggest fallacy in polling is also the biggest one we face society-wide today. And the reason that I am still concerned about the state of our country for the foreseeable future is that people don't believe in one set of facts anymore. Depending on what sources you listen to and get your news from, you can believe in very different things. And, it's hard to debate with people who say, “but your sources are lying to you,” and I want to say, “but your sources are lying to you.” And we kind of hit this impasse where I'm sure that my sources are correct. The other person is sure that their sources are correct, and polling does get wrapped up in that.
Robert Pease (Host):
Well, Emily. A lot learned today about the challenges of polling in our partisan age. Very tough job made tougher by the media and a growing group on the right mistrustful of all experts.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
And all the lower quality polls that still get a lot of air and screen time.
Robert Pease (Host):
But Natalie Jackson did say that even Democrats and Republicans are not 100% in line with their party’s candidates or issues. And that Independents are a really good bellwether for opinion shifts in the country.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
So we’d like to hear the opinions of our indie-minded listeners as we begin constructing Season 2 episodes. What topics would you like covered? What guests would you like to hear from? What can independent Americans do to bridge the partisan gap in our country?
Robert Pease (Host):
Just log onto our new and improved website and leave us an audio message about topics, guests, or plain old feedback. Next episode, though, we will wrap up Season 1 of The Purple Principle with a look back at some of the really great insights from our featured guests, beginning with Charles Wheelan of Unite America in Episode 3.
Charles Wheelan (previously recorded audio):
Now, big data allows us to gerrymander better than we used to, which means more safe seats, which means the primaries matter more. They're more expensive races. Who do you get the money from? The people who are the most extreme. Every single force is pushing us apart.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
Abigail Marsh of Georgetown in “Heard from the Herd.”
Abigail Marsh (previously recorded audio):
You think, like a herd of muskox, when they believe they're being threatened by wolves, they cluster themselves together in a very tight way. Threat does that to any social species that you cluster together with those who are like you in an attempt to ward off the threat.
Robert Pease (Host):
And Shane Mauss from our Science and Comedy episode.
Shane Mauss (previously recorded audio):
And the idea that one individual checks off all of your boxes has always seemed crazy to me; the idea that because I think one way about abortion, I need to think this certain way about the economy. And I need to think this certain way about freedom of religion and this certain way about drugs.
Emily Crocetti (reporter):
And other great guests and commentary as well. At the same time, Rob and I will reveal some of our own biases in producing The Purple Principle.
Robert Pease (Host):
That’s right. We’re going to come clean. So please stay tuned into The Purple Principle as we air the dirty laundry before rounding the corner into Season 2. Thanks today to our special guests, Natalie Jackson, Director of Research at PRRI, and Brian Schaffner of Tufts University. We hope you have a better sense of the challenges and shortcomings of polling. This is Robert Pease for the Purple Principle team: Emily Crocetti, staff reporter; Kevin A. Kline, audio engineer; Emily Holloway, research and fact-checking; Johnnie Dowling, research; and original music composed by Ryan Adair Rooney.
