Tag: politics

Politics, Research,

Presley’s Path To The Governorship

Not a full post but a more than Twitter-length response to the Magnolia Tribune piece on Brandon Presley’s path to the Governorship.

1. Not everyone is a Republican or Democrat. Much of the piece is about Presley needing to prove conservatism to win Republicans. The reality is that many Mississippians are neither Democrats nor Republicans but are about living their lives and taking care of their families. They may default to one party or the other but it is not a lifelong commitment. They really don’t much like politics.

Voters do need to believe Presley shares their values and perspectives. In Mississippi that means the importance of family, church and community – values that are shared broadly. They apparently already believe Governor Reeves isn’t quite with them on those.

2. Low Name ID. The Magnolia Tribune piece noted that just over half the people in polls showing Presley ahead knew much about him and that the Reeves campaign has the money to define Presley before he defines himself. Now, that is a good reason for those who do not like Reeves to contribute to Presley. It is also a reason for the Reeves campaign to proceed with caution here. It is pretty easy to respond to nastiness from someone people don’t like. Oftentimes, you can just shrug it off.

3. Comparison with Hood. The notion here is that both are white men from NE Mississippi and that Hood had more of a political base while Presley is more likable. I don’t know either man but that all seems true. It also may be that people want someone who is not a typical politician and that Hood’s “advantages” actually weren’t. Except for the money – which is correctable.

4. The National Democrats. The Magnolia Tribune piece says national Democrats, whose views are different than most of Mississippi, will not support a candidate who, like Presley, is pro-life and socially conservative. Don’t bet on that. Those decisions are pragmatic and political, not values-based approbations. That section read as a set up for a later suggestion that national support means closet liberalism. It doesn’t. Just good investment strategy.

Three points beyond the article: The first is a problem for Presley to which I am contributing. That is, that process stories help the incumbent. If the race is about polls and strategy, it makes it harder to make the necessary points about values and issues. A contest about dueling polls and pocketbooks doesn’t help Presley.

The second point is about gender. The voters in Mississippi who are not firmly aligned to either party are disproportionately white women. They are less aligned for a variety of reasons, including that many care more about their families than about legislation and that most candidates in Mississippi don’t do a good job communicating to them. I won’t say more about that in a public space but they are a big factor here. (Hint: They find neither nastiness not ads with trucks very relatable. They also aren’t interested in process stories.)

The final point is about race, on which the Magnolia Tribune story is characteristically oblique. So, yeah, Presley needs to generate depth of enthusiasm in the African American community and grow support among white voters (and mostly white women, I suspect). Got it. Some have looked at that as two campaigns. Another losing strategy. What I hope we have here is a candidate who communicates effectively about family, church and community versus one who continues to look like politics as usual. A lot more nuance to it that will, I’m sure, unfold. But seems to me Presley starts in a pretty good place.

The midterms, prophecy, and blood sacrifice

I am just back from two weeks in Greece. A visit to the cradle of democracy and contemplation of events Before the Common Era provides perspective. Besides, Greece is beautiful and retired people get to travel in October. But so much back here is messier now than when I left.

Despite all the polls, analytics, and forecasts, I think it is unwise to be too confident that any of us know what will happen in 11 days. A lot is close; in the last few election cycles, close polling has presaged a wave in one direction or the other, and the trend the last couple weeks has not been good for the Democrats. But the past is an imperfect predictor of the future, or even of the present. I am concerned, also, that such prophecies become self-fulfilling, creating rather than measuring momentum. Past performance is a useful predictor in targeting as well, but it does seem to me a bit overdone. Upsets do happen as a result of candidates or chemistry. The first U.S. Senate race for which I polled was Paul Wellstone’s in 1990, back when I was too new and naive to understand he couldn’t win. (For those who do not remember, he did indeed win.)

So, having learned from the oracle at Delphi how to be properly ambiguous my prediction is JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL NOT LOSE GROUND NOW. The meaning of that depends on how you see justice and whether you place the comma before or after the word “not.” Thus it’s correct – if interpreted properly.

If this is a wave election, there will be blood. It seems rather likely that many will call for a blood sacrifice of the pollsters. I do not think that will work any better than the blood sacrifices of pre-classical, pre-democratic Greece. True, if you sacrifice animals or even people after an earthquake, you are unlikely to have another earthquake right away but that may well have nothing to do with the sacrifice.

Now, I have been very clear in this blog and to anyone who asks that I believe people need to change and expand their research protocols. Polling is hardly the only form of research available, it does not work the way it used to – or the way people think it does. It also looks at the aggregate, which is less useful in the internet age, encouraging aggregate media like TV and lessening the emphasis on organizing on the ground, or by internet networks. There is utility in knowing aggregate attitudes but as an early step in a strategic process which now in my view over-relies on polling.

But the problems with polling should not swamp an examination of the problems with campaigning, which seems far less connected to people than in times past. And the media’s coverage of politics seems highly problematic and often destructive of the democratic process. It emphasizes polarization for the drama, forecasting and predictions for their ease, and in the process makes change, creativity, and conversation with the middle more difficult for everyone. The middle, which is bigger than some think and includes soft partisans, is increasingly non-participatory in polls and in reality, which also makes the polarization worse.

So, yes, we need better ways of doing research. But also a different attitude about listening to people and their views, more individual contact, less nationalization. And far less forecasting which does not, as far as I can see, contribute much to the dialog at all and risks creating a conversation from the top-down which alters results from the bottom-up. Besides, even if you sacrifice the pollsters, it wont affect the timing of the next earthquake.

JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL NOT LOSE GROUND NOW

Entering polling’s silly season…

Soon there will be a plethora of “horse race” polls in various races and nationally, likely showing divergent results. That is a seasonal phenomenon plus the one-two punch of the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade and the compelling hearings by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack have made the mid-terms more interesting and more contested. Plus, Republicans have nominated some truly dreadful candidates.

On the flip side, President Biden’s approval is low and the economy is perceived as weak. Last time there was a mid-term election with rising inflation (although rising less than now at that point) and a then unpopular Democratic President, the year was 1978. In that year, which almost no one under age 50 remembers, Republicans picked up three Senate seats and 15 House seats.

There are many differences between 1978 and 2022. So this year is looking interesting, but we cannot know what will happen based on polling alone, or even mostly. Here are two caveats on polling and then some things to watch for since polling isn’t going away.

The first caveat should be familiar to anyone who has followed this blog: No one is polling random samples. Polling simply doesn’t work the way it used to work. The rule for a random sample is that everyone in the population of interest – people who will vote on November 8, 2022 – has an equal chance of being included in the poll. Caller ID means no one has been able to do that since about 1990. Instead, pollsters mimic the electorate and aim for representative samples. Widely swinging turnout, extreme difficulties reaching some demographics, and response bias have made “representativeness” more and more difficult. Response bias is not unitary. It combines distrust of polls, distrust of the media, the desire to be seen as an individual not part of a labeled aggregate, the quality of the polling questions (which may cause terminations) and varying interest in politics. The response bias factor is greater among conservative voters than liberal voters but is greatest of all in the middle of the ideological spectrum, which is often the most interesting. Pollsters correct for the problems by “weighting” the data. Those weights rely on assumptions about the shape of electorate, predicated in part by mistakes of the past. There is no correction for “new” errors until after they have happened.

No poll, no matter how carefully constructed, should ever be seen as an absolute; an indication, yes, but not an absolute. If polls – even multiple polls – show Candidate A two points ahead of Candidate B, that does not mean Candidate A will win. That has nothing to do with the margin of error (which is addressed by multiple polls). It has more to do with common assumptions about turnout and perhaps new forms of response bias which we don’t know about yet. (On the other hand, if even two even semi-legitimate polls show Candidate A winning by 15 points, he or she very likely will win handily; this is all on the margins.)

Which brings me to my second caveat: Change is more often slow and incremental than sudden and dramatic. Small things happening slowly are worth attending to. Polls do not often pick these up, but deeper conversations with voters can at least create hypotheses ahead of the polls. I have found stories about how most Republicans still support Trump uninteresting. Of course they do; it is more important that the support appears less than it was. On the flip side, there is no question that many Democratic and independent women are deeply upset by the Roe v. Wade decision. The question is whether some of those who would not ordinarily vote in the midterms will turn out and vote as a consequence. Younger, lower propensity voters are not often included in polls, or not included in numbers that would allow analysis of them separately from the aggregate. In a close election, however, they could make a critical difference.

So, if you want to know what will happen, be skeptical but not dismissive of polls, be analytic about what small(ish) things may matter, and be curious about probing whether they will this time. Big upsets don’t come out of nowhere. They are also rare. But they do happen. Here are some things to watch for in polls and in the world outside them.

Small groups and sample sizes: Surprises may be produced by small groups in the electorate, like independent women, young voters, high propensity voters who stay home, low propensity voters who turn out. But an aggregate poll, even with a large sample size, cannot tell you much about groups who may be 10 percent of the electorate.

For example, the poll by Cygnal of the Georgia electorate led off the silly season. This Republican outfit put out a release on their 1200 sample Georgia poll, which included an oversample of 770 African American voters. First, they trumpeted that Republican Governor Brian Kemp led Democrat Stacey Abrams by 50 to 45 percent, which is pretty unimpressive for an incumbent Governor, actually, and they never defined their turnout assumptions which will matter a great deal in this race. Next, they declare that African American voters are not homogeneous, which really didn’t require a poll, and then declare that a quarter of African Americans under age 35 are supporting Kemp. Valid? Maybe, but maybe not. Even with a sample of 770 African American voters, how many were under age 35? I would guess maybe 150, and maybe fewer actually and upweighted to about 150. Was that small sample representative of younger African Americans? And who was the base sample of anyway, those who have voted previously or all African Americans? It may be true that Kemp is doing better than expected among younger African Americans – he has gotten a lot of press lately for not being as opposed to voting rights as other Republicans – but the conclusion, without adequate information about the sample, that this is somehow a prediction, seems a bit dubious.

Turnout assumptions: I have seen very few public polls (actually I cannot recall one) that have specified assumptions about voter turnout. First, if turnout is based on self-report (reaching people at random and screening for whether they are likely to vote), the poll is likely representing turnout as both higher than it will be (there is social pressure to say likely to vote) and more Democratic (see above on response bias). If they are selecting people based on vote history from a voter file, well, fine, but then say so, and even then is the assumption that turnout patterns are like those of 2018 (which was a Democratic year) or different. In any case, if the information on weighting and turnout is absent, the poll is really hard to read in a meaningful way.

Defining independents: With deeper party polarization, looking at voters who say they are independent is an important task. The thing is, who they are is often volatile and independents are often undersampled in polls. The image is that independents are people without party predilections, but there are independents who call themselves that because neither party is sufficiently liberal or conservative enough for them. They may be independent, but they are not up for grabs. Then there are those who don’t like either party because they feel neither party represents their moderate or centrist views. They are very important, but their distaste for politics extends to a distaste for polls, and so they are often undersampled even while many of them vote. People also float in and out of calling themselves independents, depending how they are feeling about the parties which creates exaggerated volatility – unhappy Republicans may say they are independent, making the category more Republican, or vice versa. Mushing all this together independents are still generally only about 20 to 25 percent of the polling sample. See the above on sample size. A poll of 500 with roughly 100 “independents,” of multiple descriptions won’t say much about them. (Except in some places, like California, where DTS – decline to state – voters can be a constant category.)

Extrapolating from national data: There are new national polls that show the generic match up between Democrats and Republicans far closer than it was in the spring even while President Biden’s numbers are low. It’s intriguing, and hints that the midterms may be less of a victory for the Republicans than previously thought. Hints at. Intriguing. I’m on board with both of those but not (yet) with any prediction. There is no reasonable way to extrapolate the national data into a number of house seats or to any particular statewide race. First, the national data may simply represent an even greater separation between “red” and “blue” places than was true even six months ago. Most of the national polls do not provide a time series by region, plus the above comment on turnout applies. National data often inadvertently oversample the coasts because there are more phones per person on the coasts. That New York, New England, and California are approaching political apoplexy matters, but doesn’t predict what voters will do in Georgia, Ohio, Wisconsin, or Nevada.

So what to do with all this if you are interested in the election? Well, that depends on your vantage point.

If you are a candidate, go figure out how many votes you need to win the election, how many you have already effectively banked by virtue of your party label or prior base, who are the additional people by demographics, geography, and perspective you need to win, and then go plan your campaign to win them. Whether you are ahead or behind, and by a little or a lot really doesn’t matter much in doing the intellectual work of how to win. Polling can help you understand your district better, and what people there may want to know about you and your opponent, but the strategic process of what you do with that information matters a lot more than the poll per se, which is only one tool in developing your strategy.

If you are a member of the press, use the polls to guide who you talk to, what you assess, and to enlarge your view of the range of what might happen. I wish you wouldn’t report on them as much but I recognize that is a losing battle. It’s too easy to report polls. But please ponder the questions that emerge from them: Will Republican voters turnout in droves because they are upset with Biden, or will more than usual stay home because they have new doubts about the MAGA crowd? Is there something happening that will cause younger people and lower propensity Democrats to turn out, whether that is something local or national? Are the individual candidates and campaigns perceived as interesting or distinctive enough (in ways both positive or negative) to break through whatever is happening nationally? And do voters generally believe they have relevant choices in the district or state on which you are reporting, or are the candidates boring, muting any opportunities for changing turnout dynamics or partisanship?

If you are an activist, well, go get to work. Whether your candidate is ahead or behind, by a little or a lot, door-to-door canvassing to discuss the election matters and has more of a lasting impact than most anything else, even for the next election. Read the polls if you like. But don’t let predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as too often happens during the silly season.

Authenticity

Congratulations to John Fetterman on winning the Democratic nomination in Pennsylvania. And kudos to you for being declared authentic.

Being authentic has long been a positive description in politics and is increasingly rare. What is it and why has John Fetterman won the authenticity award? Check out the dictionary and it means John Fetterman is an original. Not a copy. Not like everyone else.

Well, that really shouldn’t be that special, each of us being unique individuals and all. So why is only John Fetterman special in this way?

I have long believed that voters seeing individual candidate personality is critical to the candidate winning. Voters seem pretty good at getting a read on what candidates are about personally. In focus groups, I have asked questions about what a candidate would be like on a first date, whether, as a neighbor, they would look after your house when you are gone, and other questions to get at what the “guy” is like. People answer these questions easily. They do have that kind of read on people – even people running for office. Candidates who would be too polite or too grabby on that first date, or who, as neighbors, won’t pick up your mail, are less likely to win regardless of their issue positions. Even if campaign ads and messages declare them to be a fighter, if as a neighbor you can’t call on them in an emergency, you are clearly not buying they fight for you.

Now, plenty of ads describe candidates as growing up barefoot and poor, or the child of a single mother, or in some other way overcoming the odds just like most people have. But, would they feed your cat when you are away for the weekend?

In the olden days of polling (like in the 1990s), pollsters told candidates what people were worried about and then, on an individual basis, tried to connect what people were concerned about with the candidate’s thinking. In the modern era of independent expenditures, half the time the pollster hasn’t met the candidate, much less derived a sense of what makes them unique – as a person as well as politically. The result is too much messaging is pat regurgitated shit like how people deserve X, or at least how some people deserve X, and how the candidate knows they deserve whatever because he/she has also overcome odds. (The overuse of the word deserve is a pet peeve; it is fundamentally about entitlement and not respectful of what people earn.)

Not all candidates have visible tattoos, dislike suits and wear shorts and hoodies like Fetterman. He does provide more to work with than most. But every candidate has some attitudes that don’t fit the mold, or some aspects of their thinking that are original, or a real story about how they became interested in politics, or about how they are a good neighbor (told better by the neighbor, I suspect).

So, as the 2022 cycle gets going, if you want candidates to be deemed “authentic,” suggest they say some things in a way only they would say them. Messages and ads taken from common talking points will just produce an image that your candidate is a typical politician. And, believe me, those guys are never fun on a first date and while some might say they will feed your cat, they will get busy and forget and your cat may starve.

Now, in many cases, both the candidates would let the cat starve. Then people make a partisan choice between two cat-killers. Probably not a good year though for Democratic cat-killers. Even if they grew up poor and overcame the odds and therefore know what you deserve.

Its not about abortion (alone)

The leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision produced a torrent of texts and emails from friends and former colleagues many of whom had worked in the political sphere to advance women and women’s rights for their entire adult lives. That a legal right won 50 years ago and considered settled law since could be so readily erased was upsetting personally, politically, and professionally to many women. Assuming the decision holds – and the very politicized Supreme Court could modify it for legal or extra-legal reasons – the upset will last a long time; until, frankly, it is undone.

I concur with those who believe the decision may mobilize younger voters in November. No one wants to lose rights their grandparents had and while younger voters have long been dubious that this could be taken away, now they know there are no permanent victories.

Democrats must also meet the messaging challenges. A lot today seemed off the mark on that front. Abortion will be an issue in November but it wont be the only one. Voters are indeed more focused on inflation and their immediate economic realities than on the loss of their rights. For the roughly 50 percent of voters who own stock, things cost more while they have less. For the 50 percent who don’t own stock, things cost more and they didn’t have much to begin with. The message that “Democrats deliver” doesn’t resonate with either group.

“Whack-a-mole” messaging is not the answer: If you care about abortion rights, we are going to fix it; if you care about voting rights, hey, we’re on it; if you care about inflation; its getting better (not that anyone can tell). And then there is COVID which apparently isn’t quite done with us. Mission accomplished is not a good message when, well, it isn’t. It seems unfocused, at best, to list the litany of problems we are trying to address. No one wins whack-a-mole. It just times out.

So what to do? It is hard as the party that is at least nominally in power to run against the party that isn’t. It can sound whiny and partisan. We can, however, run against a worldview that undergirds much of what is wrong.

The enemy is a power-hungry minority that wants to impose their views and their interests on everyone else. It is a worldview that power means you get to decide. In that worldview people get to keep power because they have it. They use it to cheat. They use it to steal. And they use it to take away from the rest of us.

Not all Republicans subscribe to the world view, although the wimps who are unwilling to stand up to it don’t get an exemption. And I recognize there are a few Democrats who are of the “because I said so” school themselves. They should cut that shit out – if you can’t explain how your view or policy is consonant with my views or my interests you won’t convince me of it. Asserting my ignorance makes you part of the problem.

Strong messaging requires modification in our presentation of ourselves as well as aggressive opposition to those who take power for their own sakes. On our side, (1) we need to listen and reflect what we hear (and listening is not the exclusive province of pollsters). Reflect on what people are saying about their own lives – it is tough out here. Tell us how it happened and how you are addressing it. (2). The message should be about voters not about Democrats – Democrats deliver just says we are self-aggrandizing and out of touch with someone who doesn’t believe they have been delivered to. (3). Trim the ideological statements way back. (Yes, I do believe the worldview I am describing is about white male supremacy but describe it as acts of greed, arrogance, and corruption: say what it is not why it is.)

When we sound a little more like regular people and less like politicians, it is time to go after those who have used the money we put in to spur the economy in corrupt ways or not at all. Here’s one example (https://mississippitoday.org/the-backchannel/) of misspent federal funds but there are a dozen states that aren’t spending their federal stimulus funds. The story is that there is corruption stopping a lot of what Democrats are doing. There is corruption in state governments, at big drug companies, in anti-trust violations, and at the Supreme Court. It is all about greed and power. It is not about progress and people. We are for progress and people. They are for themselves in ways that are greedy and corrupt. Don’t start with the conclusion, but do tell the stories for which that is the (unstated) but self-evident conclusion.

Then there is perhaps the most corrupt thing of all – the conspiracy on the part of people in the White House and the U.S. Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. And those aware of the corruption who stood by and did nothing or defended it out of fear of those who are corrupt. That is part of the same worldview that people with power get to keep it and be damned to the rest of us. Donald Trump, with his own deep roots in greed and corruption, made corruption fashionable for his cronies.

There are Republicans who have stood up. They include Members of Congress, state and local election officials, and judges. Go after the corruption not the party name. Republicanism isn’t inherently corrupt. But a whole lot of them became so under Trump.

As for Trump himself, he is a very painful and visible symptom but he is not the whole disease. Even if he goes into remission, there is still a need to fight the notion that power is there to advance the views and interests of the powerful. Power does corrupt and it has done so quite absolutely in some quarters.

The Supreme Court is politicizing women’s health and taking away women’s and family’s rights to make decisions because they believe power means imposing their viewpoint on the rest of us. Its not for our good; its not advancing the protections in the Constitution; its simply an exercise of power for its own sake. That is wrong. That is corrupt. It is the same mindset as people who stormed the capitol because they wanted to.

There is nothing new in “might makes right.” But saying we want to “protect democracy” is like saying “we oppose kratocracy;” Tell the story of corruption instead. People will understand it. At the moment they are concerned it applies both to Democrats who say they deliver and to Republicans who say they care. The story of what’s true, however, is often the story they will find more credible.

The Press, the poll, and the Governor

So, for those who aren’t from Mississippi, here is the state of play: The state is about to overtake Louisiana, if it hasn’t already, as the number one COVID hotspot. Our Republican Governor, Tate Reeves, has been very clear that he will not issue a statewide mask mandate including in schools, although he does (kinda) encourage vaccinations and allow local mandates. Then there is Dr. Dobbs, our telegenic and media savvy State Health Officer who encourages mask-wearing, sporting one at press conferences while standing right next to the naked-faced Governor.

Some of the state press are going ballistic on Reeves. I appreciate our more progressive press – they make it a lot easier to know what’s going on. They clearly care about the crisis we are in – and, perhaps, care more than the Governor does. I fear, however, that they are giving him the upper hand. Some elements of that:

1. Readers of this blog know I get frustrated by bad polling. That is no less true when it is making a point I agree with. Trumpeting an opt-in poll, with a non-representative sample https://www.sunherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253462859.html really doesn’t help your credibility.

2. Reeves impresses me as very smart. He seems generally well informed but is making ideological decisions I disagree with. He is unwilling to take federal money if it requires even a small state expenditure; he doesn’t believe the state should mandate individual behavior; and he sees his job as running the mechanics of the government rather than leading people toward better behavior. He basically articulated all of those policy-laden precepts in his last press conference but because he also said one of you was “virtue-signaling” you gave him a free pass on the rest. Perhaps you took his bait?

3. Y’all seem to love Dr. Dobbs, and he does speak for the science and is far better than the Governor at demonstrating empathy. But it also appears to me like a well-orchestrated dance. He is a state employee – appointed by the Board of Health, although most of its members were appointed or re-appointed by Reeves. Dr. Dobbs took a good long while to address the equity issues in vaccine distribution, and his dance with the Governor serves to limit political opposition to Reeves. Looking at them as some kind of yin and yang, fails to lift up other political voices that may be critical of Reeves. Rely on Dobbs for the science, by all means, but maybe give a few column inches to political opposition as well – like the Mayors, supervisors, and school board Presidents who might just tell you Reeves is making their jobs harder.

The bottom line for me as a reader is that there is a lot I would like to know that I am not hearing about. Reeves is not the worst Republican Governor – a toss up between his colleagues in Florida and Texas in my view. But he is also using the polarization of the moment to avoid discussion of some basic issues of governance. While there is a squabble about virtue signaling, he is failing to use resources available to him, and defining state government responsibilities as narrowly as he can. If he believes in local decision-making, how do local leaders respond to those policies? At least one enquiring mind would like to know…

Looking at the wrong problem

So, I just got off the phone with an old friend who is on the communications side of political consulting. My friend is apparently giving my former polling colleagues a rough time and apparently so are others – “suggestions” that are not feasible, organizations that are assigning them letter grades as they would to school children, clients dismissing the need for research at all.

Now, I have been pretty clear in these pages that I think polling as a methodology no longer works the way people think. It is a rougher measure and can leave important groups out of the equation. It has value but it also has serious limits: It is far less useful than it used to be for prognosticating close elections. Low response rates allows greater risk of response bias and, as a result, sampling is more complex.

Polling risks leaving out constituencies that may be critical to winning – voters who are anti-establishment (or anti elite) and see it as an elite or establishment tool, and those who just don’t relate to the political frame as employed. Except perhaps for this last one, none of this is the fault of pollsters, and imposing the extant political frame on swing and low propensity voters who aren’t interested in it is hardly an error unique to pollsters. The Washington political frames to which many voters do not relate is a shared Washington responsibility.

Here’s what I think are actually the remedies to better political research by campaigns:

1. More upfront strategic thinking about how to win. There is a plethora of information available for any district or state, including prior election results, demographics and analytics, and two (or more) real candidates with unique strengths and weaknesses. After studying all that, what are the hypothetical ways to win that you need to test? (Chances are there are better methods than polling for choosing which is most likely.)

2. Better analytics and better integration of them strategically. Political analytics got better and better from 2006 through 2012. Then its practitioners started competing on cost and cutting corners on what they did statistically. At the same time, people seemed to think it was a good idea to separate analytics from the process of campaigning so it was an independent look and not integrated into the campaign process. Both of these developments were unfortunate in my view. Cutting corners made analytics less valuable as a predictor and the separation from campaigns meant than campaigns did not have the capacity to ask for a sophisticated statistical look at the challenges that were on the table strategically. It’s time to go back to the future on analytics – an invaluable tool that should be guided strategically.

3. Tailored research that answers the strategic questions on the table. In close elections, winning is often on the margins. Hypothetically, maybe your candidate can win if you can move 6 percent more of Latino voters, or lose a particular suburban community by a little less, or find a way to blame the incumbent for the serious infrastructure problems in a community that usually votes for that person’s party. Strategic analysis and analytics can help you develop these options. There are experiments you can conduct to say which one(s) might help put your candidate over the top. And a poll of voters in the aggregate wont tell you which one will work anyway.

4. Integration of field data into research. Almost any good campaign has a field program in which people go talk to individual voters, including those who are swing voters and lower propensity voters. I don’t want to mess up the open ended nature of these conversations, which is part of what makes them valuable, but there are ways of capturing quantitative information from them – and that is about the only way you really will hear from genuinely non-partisan and non-political voters, and those who vote irregularly. You have to start the field program earlier, but that is generally a valuable thing to do for other reasons.

So, yes, there are new challenges in political research. The biggest problem in polling is that you can no longer talk to people at random because they don’t respond at random. Careful polling makes that less of a problem and sloppy polling makes it worse but it is not feasible to eliminate the problem. The problem is the result of caller ID, telemarketing, political polarization, and changing modes of communication. The pollsters did not create the problem.

Generally, pollsters are analytic and political thinkers with a penchant for numbers. Those skills sets are important in the mix of campaign skills. Conversation about methodology is useful. Creativity on how to answer strategic questions is essential. Increasingly, the presence of advanced statistical skills on the team is important. Beating up on the pollsters won’t help to find new and better ways to conduct research.

Polling is Leaving Out Poor People

Those who follow such matters already know that pollsters under-sampled white, non-college voters in 2016. Then, in 2020, Trump voters exhibited greater than average response bias as they were less likely than others in their demographic to respond to polls.

The problems with polling are not only about Trump voters, or about election projection for that matter. The core problem is that some people are less likely to respond to polls. Pollsters “correct” for this by up-weighting those who do respond – counting their responses extra and assuming the respondents represent their demographic. Some groups who are not Trump voters but consistently require up-weighting are low income people, people in minority communities, lower propensity voters, and young people.

Low income people and lower propensity voters (groups that overlap significantly) have always been harder to poll. Some of the difference is behavioral. Low income people are often less available – more likely to work nights, to move frequently, or to use a burner phone without any listing. They may also associate polls with the government, or the media, or other elites – the establishment if you will – and have little interest in unnecessary interaction with those (which is likely part of the problem with Trump voters).

Question wording is also often a problem. If people are asked to choose among response alternatives that do not reflect their views or concerns, they are more likely to terminate the interview. Many polls on COVID vaccination do not include cost as a barrier, assuming that people know the vaccine is free although free health care is outside the experience of most people, particularly those who are lower income.

Pollsters’ increasing use of online panels may be making the problem of getting a representative sample of low income people worse. Such panels are recruited in advance and demographically “balanced” to represent the population.

The first problem is that rather than eliminating response biases they are simply injecting bias earlier in the process as the panel consists of people who have agreed in advance to be polled.

Second, online panels eliminate some low income people from polling samples entirely. In 2019, 86.6 percent of households had some form of internet access, including 72 percent with smart phones. But the percent varies by state, ethnicity, and income, according to the ACS https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_702.60.asp which has been clear about the problems in needing to weight census data in 2020 given the low response rates of low income people https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/research-matters/2020/09/pandemic-affect-survey-response.html.

Finally, if panel recruitment is by phone or mail, it may be skipping those who are more transient or who do not respond to such calls for all the reasons described above. And even with pre-recruitment, most panels are up-weighting low income people because they are not responding at the same rate as other panelists even when the recruitment is more balanced.

Does the exclusion of low income people from polls matter? Superficially it may not matter very much to political campaign strategists because they are interested in likely voters and willingness to be polled and vote propensity are related (per Pew Research studies). However, the relative absence of low income voters may misinform the campaign about what is on people’s minds, especially in lower income states and districts. If the campaign is considering investment in organizing low income communities, the exclusion reduces the potential for that strategy.

Not-for-profit organizations that wish to provide services to low income people should be very careful about relying on polls. Research has shown large response biases in health care research (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-05677-6), for example. Collecting data on site or in person may be far more valuable, and personal interviews are becoming feasible once again.

Most of the publicly released polls on issues like COVID vaccination are reporting data by income. In some cases, the income categories are cruder than they should be (e.g. below $40K as the lowest). In virtually all public surveys, the data are weighted but information on the degree of weighting applied is unavailable. If, as in Mississippi, nearly 20 percent of the population of interest is below the poverty line, how many were interviewed in a sample of 500 before weighting? If there were only 50, that wasn’t a meaningful sample from which to weight.

Every consumer of polls should know what the unweighted data looks like. And every consumer of polls should be a little skeptical of results in groups that required significant weighting or were unbalanced demographically without it. If your interest is in a group that is up-weighted, like lower income people, you may have learned less than you think.

None of this should suggest that such polls are without value. But they shouldn’t be seen as all encompassing. There is no substitute for conversation, and articles like these https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/health/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-white-republican.html may be more useful and informative than some of the published online panel data in understanding what lower income communities are thinking and feeling on issues of concern.

There are other groups who are under – or over- represented in polls. Under sampling low income people seems both egregious and important at this time. But, as I have written before, the core problems on sampling call for new research methodologies as well as for greater care by pollsters and greater caution from those who consume data.

Two States of Mississippi

Earlier this month I offered some reflections on Mississippi and why I am here. There are many things about the state and about living here that I love – the music, story telling, hospitality, and food – several of which derive from the cultural heritage of African Americans. The statewide politics and leadership sadden me all the more as a result of what I love about living here.

Just this week the Jesuit Social Research Institute of Loyola University published a new report on Mississippi (http://www.loyno.edu/jsri/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/StateOfWorkingMS2020.pdf). Here the most common job title is “cashier” and the median household income is one third lower than the national median – and less than half the median income in Massachusetts. Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the nation, more than 10 percent of its people have no health insurance whatsoever. The state is 50th in education attainment, in part because so many young people with college degrees leave the state.

Just about the same time this report was released, Governor Tate Reeves gave his State of the State address.  Since he couldn’t point to much success, he praised the state’s resilience. The few straws of improvement at which the Governor did grasp, do not stand up well to a fact check (https://mississippitoday.org/2021/01/26/fact-check-gov-tate-reeves-2021-state-of-the-state-address/).  The Governor’s main policy initiative was to call for ending the state’s income tax, which would effectively reduce Mississippi’s already low investment in its people.

How did we get here? To some degree, the problems of Mississippi reflect the problems of the south, but more so. The south was left with a decimated economy after the Civil War. The federal government truncated Reconstruction after the election of 1876 (the same election Senator Ted Cruz referenced in the lead-up to violence at the Capitol). The end of Reconstruction meant the military no longer monitored Mississippi elections. The white minority then led violent efforts to suppress the black majority and deprive them of the right to determine the future of the state. White violence against black people was worse in Mississippi than elsewhere because it had a black majority, which was more threatening than the black minority in other states.

The south did not benefit from the Gilded Age of the second industrial revolution as it still had a primarily agricultural economy and lacked the natural resources to make steel or the infrastructure for manufacturing. And the federal government and big business allowed the economy to languish and invested instead in the west.

Some southern states thrived in the latter half of the 20th Century and since then through state and local investment – the Research Triangle in North Carolina, the Atlanta airport, Historic Charleston, in South Carolina, as examples. In contrast, Mississippi had slow growth throughout the 20th century (https://www.macrotrends.net/states/mississippi/population). Its population did not quite double while the national population quadrupled. Mississippi’s GNP growth rate is barely half the national average as it turns out that population growth is good for the economy and vice versa.

Voter suppression efforts continue as Mississippi was the only state where there was no option for no-contact voting during the pandemic and, just today, the House Apportionment and Elections Committee voted for a purge of the voter rolls. Mississippi is almost 40 percent black, but no African American has represented the State of Mississippi since Blanche K. Bruce left the U.S. Senate in 1881. If there is voter fraud, it’s pretty clearly not from black people.

I don’t believe the state’s leadership wants economic growth. New people would change the politics so current leadership has a stake in the status quo. Taxes are low here now, with no real upper bracket, which voters virtually everywhere support. There is no tax on retirement income regardless of the amount. The only high tax is the tax on groceries, which at 7 percent is the highest in the country. If low taxes and lack of investment were a successful growth strategy, Mississippi would be booming.

The second paragraph of the JSRI report reads: “Mississippi is among the states with the highest unemployment, poverty, and uninsured rates and the lowest wages, education spending, and educational attainment. Such statistics are a recipe for poor statewide economic development and long-term hardship for workers and families even before the health and economic onslaught of COVID-19.” The report ends with a series of recommendations that have the potential to transform the state and grow its economy through investment in its people and its infrastructure.

After 150 years of the same policies, it might be worth exploring a little change – perhaps investing in the people who make the state so special. Otherwise, while the state may remain a good place to retire, Mississippians shouldn’t expect their kids to stay where there is little opportunity for growth.

P.S. Earlier this week, my friend Debbie Weil interviewed me for her podcast. She asked great questions about polling, politics, and living in Mississippi. Do check it out: https://gapyearforgrownups.simplecast.com/episodes/diane-feldman

Georgia, the mob, and Mississippi

The picture of the horrific mob that attacked the United States Capitol – encouraged by the President of the United States – will be the indelible after image of his presidency. There is irony in mob violence the same week in which the Democrats won the Senate and Georgia elected its first black Senator, the scholarly minister of Dr. Martin Luther King’s church. Among the underpinnings of the Trump presidency is a late growl of white supremacy as the demographics of the country change. The old still clings to power over the new but it gave way to change in Georgia.

Senators-elect Warnock and Ossoff won because Georgia grew and changed, and with the leadership of Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project and the African American community. The Georgia win also traces back to Mayor Maynard Jackson. Atlanta’s first African American Mayor, Jackson helped build Atlanta as a mecca for the black middle class by spurring minority contracting. He invested in the airport, creating tremendous growth for the whole region. ATL wasn’t always the biggest airport in the world. Maynard Jackson did that. And Atlanta grew and prospered and Georgia with it. That would happen in other southern states if they elected more people like Maynard Jackson.

The peaceful transition of power in Georgia this week is such a stark contrast to what happened in Washington.

Which brings me to Mississippi. Mississippi was majority black until the 1940s and now has a larger percent black population than any other state. It has also historically had the most concentrated racial violence in the country and even now seems to have the fewest progressive white people (although there are lots of progressive white people here, and strong and dedicated African American leaders).

If you are unclear how to reconcile those things, ask the mob. Like the Trump mob, there are too many white people in Mississippi who feel threatened by the notion that it might become a black state. So one of our two Senators and three out of our four members of the House voted not to certify a 7-million vote win by President-elect Biden. That same crowd, while crowing about voter fraud, approves of the state’s ongoing voter suppression techniques. Mississippi was the only state in the country that had no option for no-contact voting during the pandemic. We have among the worst schools and health care following a myth that investing in those things would somehow help the black minority more than the white majority.

So if I feel this way, why am I here? I love the state – the peace and quiet, the rural nature, the warm winters, and large parts of the culture, which is arguably rooted more in West Africa than Western Europe.

People here love southern food, including grits which have their origins in Native American hominy and West African fufu. Fried chicken has some claim to Scottish ancestry because the Scottish fried their chicken in fat but batter dipped fried chicken is West African. So are greens. Mississippi had “Birthplace of America’s Music” on its license plates for years, and it is: the rich traditions of gospel and blues music, often with West African syncopation; then combined with Appalachian hill country music (accompanied by banjos – a West African instrument) gave birth to rock and roll.

There are more extraordinary writers from Mississippi than most anywhere else – from Richard Wright, to William Faulkner; Eudora Welty to Jessmyn Ward. One reason is that the state gives them so much to write about but also the rich storytelling tradition of the South flourishes and it, too, has its roots in West Africa.

Mississippi is already black. But instead of Maynard Jackson, we have elected leaders who vote with the mob.

Demographics are on the side of progressive change in America – and in Mississippi. But demographics are not destiny. We have not seen the last of reactionary governance. Not all the people who voted for Trump are part of the white supremacist backlash – economic stagnation and the elitism of Democrats also contributed – but it could all happen again. Georgia is the hopeful sign. With a little help, other southern states will follow. And, like the poet said, America can be America again.