The Ten News Election Special- Polling! Minisode #2

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The Ten News: Election Special Minisode #2

The 2nd Minisode in the countdown to election day.

❓What is polling and why is it an important part of an election?

🍟 Will Ryan's snack room poll give him a good result?

🎧 Farrah Bostic, host of the podcast Crosstabs, answers our call to help break down what is fact or fiction about polling.

Resources

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cross-tabs/id1725891109

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Transcript:

INT. TEN NEWS STUDIO 

RYAN: Hey Pamalam, I’m taking a snack room poll: would you prefer more savory snacks or more sweet snacks in the snack room? 

PAM: Oooh, I’d prefer… more savory. Maybe some more chips–

RYAN: Copy that!

PAM: That’s it? Just a one question poll?

RYAN: Yup. Hey Kap, I’m taking a one question snack room poll: How many peanut butter cookies should I eat today?

KAP: Ummmm, Ry, I don’t think you’re polling correctly…

RYAN: I think I know how to ask people questions and use that data to predict things–

PAM: –yeah, I think we’re gonna have to take a closer look at polling. I’m Pamela Kirkland.

RYAN: And I’m Ryan Willard. It’s Tuesday, October 15th.

PAM: We are The Ten News and this is an Election Special Report!

INT. TEN NEWS STUDIO

RYAN: Kap, 100% of the people I polled think we deserve more chips in the snack room. 

KAP: I’m still not convinced…

RYAN: Back me up here Pam!

PAM: I see what you’re going for Ry, but maybe we should talk to a polling expert to break down exactly what polling is and how we use them.

KAP: Oh, I know someone… lemme facetime her. 

<SFX facetime call>

Hey Farrah, I'm getting a little confused with all the election polls that I'm seeing in the news. I was hoping you could help us out today. Can you tell the tenors who you are and where your polling wisdom comes from?

Farrah: Yeah. So my name is Farrah Bostic. I live in New York. I work for myself.

Farrah: Actually, I've [00:00:30] run my own company for about a dozen years. I do market research. Mainly I do what's known as qualitative research, where I'm actually talking to people in conversation, not unlike this, uh, about their lives and about their favorite things to drink or their favorite pair of shoes or, what kind of car they want to get, those kinds of things.

Farrah: And so I've been doing this market research work now for about 20 years. And, uh, this year, after annoying My husband and my [00:01:00] mother with my commentary about why you can compare some kinds of surveys and you can't compare other kinds of surveys, I started a show called Crosstabs where I interview pollsters and political strategists and political scientists and political psychologists about how polling works and what it can do and what it can't do. Okay, and today you're going to help us out by breaking down fact or fiction with polling. But before we get into it, can you explain a little bit for our listeners who have heard the [00:01:30] term polling, what that actually means and how it works?

Farrah: Yeah, so basically a poll is a questionnaire. It's a, it's a survey. They're a, they're a survey.

Farrah: type of survey that we do around, uh, elections typically, or about political opinions or opinions about policy. In the old days, yes, they would knock on doors. Nowadays it's a combination of a lot of ways. We call people on the phone still. Uh, we also send people text messages, asking them to click [00:02:00] on a link to take a survey.

Farrah: Uh, or you might get an email inviting you to a survey. And sometimes you may still get a postcard in the mail inviting you to participate in a survey either by phone or online.And why is this helpful? What are the pollsters trying to do?

Farrah: So I think there are a few things. One is there's a genuine desire to understand what people, voters, the electorate think about politics and policy and the candidates they have to choose from in an election.

Farrah: Um, and you know, I interviewed someone who is a [00:02:30] reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Aaron Zitner, who talked a lot about doing this over time allows you to understand how people's attitudes change. And so you really get to kind of get this ongoing glimpse into how the country is evolving or changing, how its attitudes are changing, how its behavior is changing, and what's driving that change.

Farrah: So that's, That's one part of it that I actually think is the most exciting part of polling. It's just understanding people. The other side of it is they want to be able to predict what's going to happen. And the reason they want to [00:03:00] predict what's going to happen is we all think that's very exciting.

Farrah: And people like to click on those stories and read those stories. And some people even like to place bets on the election based on, uh, what people think is going to happen when we actually get to election day.

 TRACY: Okay, great. Now we're going to move into a fun segment that we do in the show, which is called fact or fiction. Because, uh, there's a lot of things that are said about polling and it's time for us to break this down and figure out what is true and what is not. So starting off. Fact or fiction. Polls are always accurate. 

Farrah: Fiction. So, polls try to be accurate, but I think one of the things to keep in mind about polls is that if you ask a pollster, they will use [00:03:30] the same phrase every time. A poll is just a snapshot in time. So, it's how you're feeling today. I was thinking about what's a good example of our ability to predict what we're going to do tomorrow.

Farrah: And the example that popped into my head, uh, I don't know why, probably because it's the time of year, was school pictures. I don't know if you had this experience where you knew exactly what you wanted to wear and how you were going to do your hair and all of that. And then you wake up on the morning of school pictures and you realize it's hot and you can't wear that cool [00:04:00] sweater you got for back to school.

Farrah: Or, you know, you decided what you wanted to wear tomorrow and you wake, wake up in the morning and just don't want to. So we're not really very good at accurately predicting what we're going to do tomorrow or a month from now or six months from now. And so that's one of the reasons why polls aren't always accurate.

Farrah: Accurate. It's a snapshot in time. It's how I'm feeling today. And then the other thing I would say is polls aren't actually voting, like you're not actually voting for a candidate. So it's [00:04:30] kind of a place for you to express how you're feeling about things, what you think you might do. Even kind of sometimes we have, we have people who say something to get it.

Farrah: a rise out of the pollster. Sometimes they're doing it to, um, to just sort of perform an opinion they don't really have. There's a lot of reasons why, why that would be the case. And then there are a million other reasons why polls aren't always accurate. Um, but historically, the closest we've ever really got is about two points plus or minus the final result.

Farrah: And [00:05:00] we've never gotten closer than that on average.

 Can you explain margin of error? I hear it all the time with the polls.

Farrah: Mhm. The primary focus of the margin of error is actually about the people in the poll and is driven by how many people we surveyed.

Farrah: So if we ask a lot of people, in general, the margin of error gets smaller because the assumption is the more people we ask, the more representative of everyone's opinions Transcribed They will be, uh, when the sample is quite small, the margin of error goes up [00:05:30] because we think that they're not as representative of everybody as we'd like them to be.

Farrah: And if you think about the kinds of polls you see in the news, frequently they're polling about a thousand people, which sounds like a lot of people, except that there are 330 million people in the United States. So a thousand people is always going to be less representative than you'd like. The thing to keep in mind when you see margin of error in the newspaper or on the news Is whatever number they've given you you should actually double that in your mind

Okay. Next up. Fact or fiction. How questions   are asked in a poll can change the outcome.

Farrah: This is a fact. Um, there are a lot of different  ways that pollsters ask these questions. In general, for political polling, for the public pollsters, especially for the particularly reputable ones who have good track records of being within, let's say, four points of the final result, they tend to ask the same questions the same way over time

TRACY: Interesting. So someone doing a snack poll and asking different questions each time would not be doing it the correct way? Someone named Ryan, for example?  Okay, back to fact or fiction. This is a big one. Polls can impact how people vote.  

And here's a big one. Fact or fiction. Polls can impact how people vote.

Farrah: So this is something that is, uh, is actually kind of hard to answer. Uh, there's some evidence that it can, that in fact, uh, when we look back at the 2016 election.

Farrah: And. This one, this one gets a little tricky because it's not solely about the polls themselves, it's also about what's known as forecasts, where people try to, uh, estimate the likelihood, based on the polling and other factors, that one candidate or [00:07:00] another will win the election. Uh, but in, in 2016, there were some, some forecasters who were basically saying it was a 90 percent chance that Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election.

Farrah: And there is some. Evidence to suggest that that led people to feel that they didn't need to vote because it was so in the bag so clear that Clinton was going to win that they didn't need to actually turn out and vote, and that that may have actually been enough to swing a state here or there when you think about race.[00:07:30]

Farrah: In the end, these candidates these days are winning by, you know, 50, 000 votes across a couple of states, very small margins. Yeah, exactly.

Farrah: There is some evidence to that effect. It's sort of small effects. But these days, given how close the races are, especially in the United States, small effects may make a big difference.

This has been really helpful for me. And for our tenors who have been listening and want to look at the polls and know which ones are reputable and doing all the [00:08:00] right things, what would you recommend?

Farrah: So there's actually a really good resource that most of the news organizations and polling aggregators use, which is actually 538. They have put together a poll ranking and you can just Google 538 poll ranking, uh, or pollster ranking. And they will, they present all of that to you in a list and they'll explain all of the ways that they assemble their rankings.

Farrah: So a lot of that is about past performance, how close they got in previous elections. The other thing to look for when you look at these polls is whether they publish how they do what they do. It's called the methodology section. It's usually buried at the bottom of the article. Um, and it sometimes looks a little scary to read cause it'll often have a lot of numbers in it or refer to things that you haven't heard of before, but for the most part, it's pretty easy to understand.

Farrah: And it's, it's worth if you're curious about polls and how they work. actually going through it and reading those. But the 538 pollster ratings are pretty good.

Farrah thanks so much for taking my call. Anything else?

Farrah: I think the only thing I would say is the, the polls are. supposed to be representative of what people really think. And they are supposed to be in their kind of best highest use a way of communicating what we all think to the people who will represent us in government.

Farrah: And so, you know, I think that they are really important. But I think just as important is all the other stuff that we do to express ourselves in the political sphere. And you don't have to be a registered voter to do this. You can make signs, write letters, write postcards, knock on doors, get your parents to go volunteer for causes that they care about and candidates that they support.

Farrah: Um, and getting yourself just sort of informed about how all of this works is also a really important part of participating in our elections and in democracy.

Tracy:  Absolutely. Thanks, Farrah. This was really helpful. Alright, talk to you later.  

 Ryan, Pam, isn't she great?  And if you want to hear more from Farrah, you can check out our podcast, Crosstabs.I'm going to link to it in our show notes. 

PAM: Wow, that was great. Now we know why polls are used, that it’s important to check the sample size and methodology of the poll, and asking the same question over time can show you how attitudes have changed.

RYAN: Yea, and I’ve realized that I may have been doing my polling incorrectly… so instead, I’ve decided that we should just get more savory AND sweet snacks. 

PAM: Um, ok, let’s wrap and we can go to the store. That’s all for today. And a reminder, our regular Ten Things You Need to Know will drop on Thursday. 

This is the Ten News. I’m Pamela Kirkland. 

RYAN: And I’m Ryan Willard, thanks for listening to this Election Special Report.