Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics joins the podcast to discuss the science of polling and how to determine if a poll is legitimate, especially as we head into mid-terms. We also delve into the future of legacy media — what it means as network ratings bottom out at the same time that podcast listenership is increasing.
Tom Bevan is the co-founder and Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics. Over the last two decades under Tom’s editorial leadership, RCP has grown into one of the most widely read and well-respected independent political sites on the Internet. In addition to overseeing the editorial staff and writing regular features for RCP, Tom’s work has appeared in numerous publications and he is featured frequently as a political analyst on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC. He is also co-author with Carl Cannon of two eBooks on the 2012 Election: “The Battle Begins” and “A Time for Choosing.”
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
Welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. On today’s episode, Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics joins us to discuss the science of polling and how to determine if a poll is legitimate, especially as we head into midterms.
We’ll also delve into the future of legacy media. What does it mean when some network ratings bought them out? At the same time, podcast listenership like ours is increasing. We’re going to break that all down.
Tom Bevan is the co-founder and executive editor of Real Clear Politics. Over the last 11 years, under Tom’s editorial leadership, Real Clear Politics has grown into one of the most widely read and well-respected independent political sites on the internet.
In addition to overseeing the editorial staff and writing regular features, Tom’s work has appeared in numerous publications. He is featured frequently as a commentator on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC. He is also the co-author with Carl Cannon of two ebooks on the 2012 election, “The Battle Begins” and “A Time for Choosing.” Tom, thank you so much for joining She Thinks today.
Tom Bevan:
It’s great to be with you, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
I first actually just want to ask you about Real Clear Politics. You started this outlet 11 years ago. It has grown so much. What has the ride been like for you? Especially, as we see the ever-evolving state of media?
Tom Bevan:
Actually, we started in the 2000s. This is, believe it or not, our 22nd year.
Beverly Hallberg:
Wow.
Tom Bevan:
It was one of those things. When we started Real Clear Politics, it was before iPhones, before YouTube, before the blogosphere. Nobody even remembers what that was. But the real, “Aha,” moment for us was that … In the mid-90s, my partner and I, John McIntyre, we were political junkies. But we weren’t involved in politics or journalism professionally.
He was a trader. I was in advertising. But we recognized that it … We followed politics pretty closely. Particularly, elections. In the mid-90s was the first time when you could wake up and read what was being written in the LA Times and the New York Times on the same day.
That was the moment where we thought to ourselves, “Hey. Let’s start a site for people like us, who are passionate about politics, policy and elections, and bring all of this information into one place.” Shortly thereafter, we started the Real Clear Politics Poll Averages, which is how people really came to know us and how we broke onto the scene.
But we’ve actually been doing the same thing for over two decades, which is aggregating the best in political news opinion, commentary analysis, video clips, and obviously polling data and information … So that people can have a real sense of what’s going on in the world on a daily basis.
The great thing about RCP, I always tell people, it’s like a cheat sheet. You can just scan the page and see the numbers and the clips and the stories. You can spend five minutes, if that’s all you have. Or you can spend five hours. Digging into the cross tabs of polls, reading all of the articles, watching the video clips. It really serves dual purposes. A clearing house of political news and information.
Beverly Hallberg:
What do you think is the magic of a poll? Meaning … Often when there is a new poll out, the whole news cycle changes, because everybody’s talking about the latest poll.
When we talk about elections, of course, we’re heading into midterms. People want to know what the polls are saying. Where are we? What is it about polling that creates so much interest for people?
Tom Bevan:
Well, because it’s one of the only metrics we have to understand where a race is at any given point in time … People, I think, rightly complain that the horse race aspect of campaigns gets too much coverage. Who’s up? Who’s down? As opposed to more policy-related concerns. But people are interested. It is the scoreboard by which we measure how campaigns are doing.
But you’re right, that’s one of the reasons that we started the poll averages back in the early 2000s. It is because you’d have a poll come out that said one person … Let’s say the Democrat was up two points. And then, the next day or two days later, you’d have a poll come out that said the Republican was up two points.
Well, who is right? Well, the idea was if you aggregate that polling data together, the truth is really somewhere in between. And so, taking polls that are in the field in a contemporaneous period of time … Remember. These polls, even today, it’s still as much art as it is science.
Pollsters make phone calls, and then they have to make educated guesses about the electorate and who’s going to turn out on election day. That’s become trickier and trickier as people have moved from landlines to cell phones.
It became even trickier in the age of Donald Trump. People were not telling pollsters what they really believed or weren’t answering phone calls, because they don’t trust the media. They don’t trust pollsters.
But overall, the idea was … At least, in terms of the Real Clear Politics average, that if you took all of the data and put it together and averaged it out, that you would have a more accurate representation of where a race stood at any given point in time.
It also allowed you to look at the trends over time. The polling averages have been spectacularly accurate over the last number of election cycles and has become one of the best ways to keep track of … Again, we’ll still get polls every now and then that will come out and make a big splash.
We always tell people, “Look. Don’t put too much stock in any single poll. Always look at the average.” Because that’ll give you a more measured sense, more holistic sense of where a race stands at any given point in time.
Beverly Hallberg:
I think it’s so important. Like you said, it’s the aggregate. You’re averaging out polls. When you look at polls that you even want to add into your data source … Are you looking at the sampling size? The type of questions they’re asking? How do you even determine which polls you want to add into your averages?
Tom Bevan:
We have a criteria … We don’t use any polls that are sponsored by PACs or campaign polls. We do use polls that are conducted by Republican Polling Organizations or Democratic Polling Organizations, so long as they’re not conducted on behalf of an individual campaign.
And so, we try to make sure that we know exactly what the pollster … That they have a track record. That they’re not just a fly-by-night operation that popped up. We’ve seen this in the past. Every cycle, there are one or two new pollsters that nobody’s ever heard of that are polling in swing states, and at some point trying to perhaps manipulate public opinion.
Manipulate even our averages, by producing results. And so, we have to be pretty vigilant about knowing exactly who’s polling, what they’re doing, and that they’re a reputable organization. But beyond that, if it’s a public poll taken, we’ll most likely include it in our average.
Beverly Hallberg:
You mentioned that we, with the type of polling that you’re doing and the way you aggregate it, can trust polling to be within a certain margin of error. That they’re pretty trustworthy.
But yet when we look at, let’s say, the 2016 election … Some say that pollsters famously got the presidential outcomes very wrong when it came to Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton.
Now, I think you touched on that a little bit, which is that people were afraid to talk to pollsters if they were supportive of Donald Trump. Is that the main reason why there was such a surprise on election day?
Tom Bevan:
No. Unfortunately not. Well, there are a couple things about … Prior to 2016, we’d had a couple of instances where there had been complete polling misses. Barack Obama in 2008 in New Hampshire, for example. After he won the Iowa caucuses, he went into New Hampshire. Everyone thought that he … All the polls had him winning that state by six, seven, eight points.
If you remember, Hillary Clinton was at a press conference … She got emotional. There was a guy at a rally who had a sign that said, “Iron my shirt,” or something. She ended up winning that state by a couple of points. It was a complete shock, because not a single pollster predicted her winning.
Part of the explanation for that is that there were no polls in the field in the last 48 hours of that race to capture that late swing in momentum. That’s something that we’ve seen happen a couple of times. Another race was Harry Reid in Nevada, in 2010. Everyone had Sharron Angle winning that race by a slight margin.
He ended up winning it by five or six points. So it has happened before. I think what was unique about 2016 is that the national polls were actually very accurate. More accurate than they had been in previous cycles. Our national average had Hillary Clinton winning by three points.
She won it by 2.1. Something like that. But it was some of these individual states where the individual pollsters, but also even our averages, did not predict the correct outcome. Now, part of that is not so much the polls. And I’ll give you a couple of examples.
The day before the election, we have a map. Real Clear Politics Electoral Map, which takes all of our polling averages in the various swing states. We have a map that shows whether they’re in the red column, in the blue column, or they’re considered toss-up races.
But we also had a part of that map where you click on a button and it’s called the No Toss-Up Map. And it allocates states based on where our poll averages stand at that … Even if Hillary Clinton was winning a state by 0.1% in our average, that would be allocated to her. Same thing for Donald Trump.
On the day before the 2016 Election, we had Hillary Clinton winning, but it was like 2.72% to 2.66%. We had Trump winning Florida, North Carolina … Nevada, which he didn’t win. But we also had in Pennsylvania, for example … The last poll we put into the Pennsylvania average had Donald Trump leading by one percentage point.
Our final average in Pennsylvania was under two points. It was 1.5% or 1.6%. The same thing was true in Michigan, for example. And so, I think one of the problems with 2016 wasn’t so much that the polls … There were some polling errors. Particularly, in Wisconsin. But if you looked at it, it wasn’t so much the polls as it was the pundits.
Every single person … All these reputable people from Sam Wang at Princeton University to David Plouffe, former Obama Campaign Manager, were on TV in the two weeks leading up to the election saying, “This is a 100% lock for Hillary Clinton. There’s no way she’s going to lose this race. I’ll bet my life on it.” All of that stuff everywhere you looked. It was the consensus.
It was the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton was going to win that race. But if you actually looked at the data, the race was a lot closer than that. And if you looked at other metrics like the Generic Congressional Ballot … You saw a Republican surge in the final two weeks of the 2016 race, which should have given people an indication that something was going on.
We also had all sorts of anecdotal data, anecdotal stories about Trump rallies and Trump voters here and there. What happened was the media and the pundits filtered out all of the data points that didn’t agree with their preconceived narrative that Hillary Clinton was absolutely going to win this race.
And so, there were some issues with polling. One of the biggest ones was the education gap. The electorate really spun on its head. For the first time, we saw voters with high school degrees or less swing … Who were primarily rural, but also some suburban … Swing dramatically away from Democrats and into Donald Trump’s corner.
We had folks who had college-educated or beyond PhDs and the like move from Republicans to Democrats. But that was one of the things. Because pollsters were still modeling off of the traditional electorate. They did not capture … That was just one example of something that they missed. It surprised a lot of pollsters on election day, the turn out. Particularly, among that education demographic.
Beverly Hallberg:
I think it’s such an interesting time for polling, for politics. Because as you were just saying, the standards that we’re used to aren’t necessarily where people are today. There’s the era of Donald Trump and how that threw everything up in the air. More moderate, working-class Democrats moving to voting for him, which wasn’t traditional of them voting for a Republican president.
But even now, we have the whole era of COVID. How we have inflation that’s gone up, people not working … We have so many things that aren’t the norm. Do you find that it’s a really exciting time for those who work in polling? Because it is hard to predict. Because so many things have changed in such a short amount of time.
Tom Bevan:
Well, I have long been a defender of pollsters. They’ve done their best to adapt to changing circumstances. I mentioned people moving from landlines to cell lines, trying to incorporate online polls, which is obviously where things are headed.
However, I do think that after 2016, when pollsters took a look at what went wrong and what they could do better … They didn’t really do a very good job in 2020. Some of the same mistakes were made. A lot of people will say, “Well, the pollsters got it wrong again in 2020.” That’s not actually true.
If you want to be specific and precise, there were a group of pollsters that got it wrong. They were typically the academic-based pollsters. From places like Quinnipiac University and others, and all of the so-called blue chip media polls.
There were a group of pollsters however, like Trafalgar, who is a Republican pollster who was one of the only pollsters to get it right in 2016. Other polling groups like Insider Advantage and Susquehanna that actually did very well in terms of their polling for 2020.
I think we’re at a period of time, a moment in time, where you’ve got some folks who did understand the electorate during the Donald Trump era and do a pretty good job of modeling turnout and coming up with accurate results … Where you had another group of pollsters that could not figure it out.
And so, the question moving forward. Particularly, right now in this first midterm where Donald Trump is not on the ballot. But he’s clearly a factor … He’s out there. He’s endorsing candidates and the like. It’ll be interesting to see how pollsters do this midterm. And then, obviously in 2024, either with him on the ballot or without him on the ballot.
Beverly Hallberg:
Let’s talk about where the polls are showing things today. I want to first start with President Joe Biden. He’s had polling that shows he has a very low approval rating in the low 40s even when you take the averages.
Not doing well. This is not good in your first year as president. What do you make of the polling that we’re seeing so far? What does it say?
Tom Bevan:
Well, he’s had a rough first year, obviously. You saw Biden enjoy a honeymoon period in the first few months of his administration. Even issues that were clearly not helpful to his administration, like the immigration situation at the border, which had reached crisis levels … It wasn’t really impacting him.
We started to see … Obviously, COVID was moving in the right direction. But during the summer, even after Biden had declared victory against the pandemic in July … The withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, you can see, was a tipping point.
Not only was that issue a problem for him, and people didn’t think he handled that well, but it really eroded his brand across the board. In terms of people thinking that he was competent to do his job, that he was honest, that he was trustworthy, that he cared about people like me.
All of those questions, which had been part of his core brand and his strength during the campaign, just got washed away by Afghanistan. He’s never really recovered. We’ve seen the supply chain issues. We’ve seen inflation.
And so, the question for the Biden Administration, as they try and regain their footing, and they’re resetting, and they’re trying to figure things out … Can he recover to the point where he can gain some of that trust back?
Because as you mentioned right now, he’s at 41.3% in our Real Clear Politics average today … Actually, yesterday. But today also, I think. The first time that his job approval rating has fallen below where President Trump was at this point in time.
Four years ago on today, Donald Trump’s approval rating was higher than Joe Biden’s was at this point in time. They’ve got a lot of work to do. If he were to stay at that number moving into the midterms, it would be really not good for the Democrats. They would suffer greatly. Both in the House and in the Senate.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I think it’s interesting that they have struggled so much. Of course, there are certain things that are out of his hands. You mentioned Afghanistan. But even one of the areas I think of is some of the focal points that he has had.
Whether that’s voting rights that he wants to focus on, them struggling to define what inflation is. Does it exist? Is it transitory? Is it a problem? Is it here to stay? They’re struggling with their narrative on so much of this.
Is this because he is trying to toe that line of keeping the progressive base happy? Maybe not listening to the pollsters enough and what people really want him to do as president?
Tom Bevan:
I definitely think there’s a situation where the priorities of the administration are mismatched. They’ll deny that, of course. But look … Every single poll, in overwhelming numbers, the number one issue on the minds of voters is inflation and the economy.
The Biden administration will say a couple things. The president mentions inflation. He empathizes they’re working on it. They’re using what tools they have in their toolkit. The problem is that, in politics, perception is reality. And the perception, at least among voters, is that the administration is not treating that issue with the urgency that they are treating it with.
Instead, he’s off talking about voting rights. He’s talking about January 6th. He’s talking about these other issues that again for the American people are not as big of a concern … And this has been a pattern. When inflation first came up … First, the administration, they dismissed it. “It’s not happening.”
Then, it was “Well, it’s transitory. It’s not going to last. It’ll be fine.” The messaging on this has been bad from the start. Instead of getting ahead of it and really saying, “Hey, this is a problem. We’re going to work on this. We’re going to appoint a task force or an Inflation Czar or somebody.”
Giving a signal to the public that they were taking it seriously, that it was their top issue as well … It didn’t happen. As a result, they’re suffering politically now. They’re sort of behind the eight ball and trying to dig themselves out.
The other thing too, and this is true of any administration, they want to trumpet the good news. There is good news in the economy. They’re talking about more jobs created last year than any time in American history. The unemployment rate is so low …
Beverly Hallberg:
Wage growth. Wages going up.
Tom Bevan:
Yeah. But unfortunately, that is coming off again as almost an alternate reality for people. Because people don’t feel like the economy is great. They don’t feel like it’s getting better.
And so, when the administration just goes out there and touts these numbers, which is … Obviously, they’re right and what they want to do is to present the best case they can. The public is looking at them and thinking, “You don’t get it.” Politically, it’s a problem.
Beverly Hallberg:
I think it is too. I think anytime that you go to the store and there are shelves empty … Anytime you go to the pump and your gas costs over $3 a gallon, if not more, depending on what state you’re in … Those are the real-world consequences of policies that lead to this.
And I do think there’s been that tone-deaf aspect to this administration. Even in reference to crime. I’m wondering if they’re going to come around on the crime issue, because Americans do care about that.
But I want to turn our attention a little bit to something that you were talking about earlier. Media … You mentioned earlier about the 2016 election in relation to pundits. There was this silo mentality among pundits that Hillary Clinton for sure was going to win the 2016 election.
Of course, she didn’t. I want to talk about legacy media and where it is today. You often are commenting on the various cable networks. CNN has had a lot of upheaval and turmoil. Specifically, this month you had Jeff Zucker who had to step down, because he was not forthcoming about a relationship that he had.
CNN has really struggled. Where is legacy media? Do you think that the majority of the American people do trust cable outlets? Where is that from a polling standpoint on where the American people are?
Tom Bevan:
No, they don’t. We just had a poll come out from, I think, IBD/TIPP earlier this week saying, “Look. The collapse in trust in the media just continues unabated.” It’s been going on for a while now.
And I think part of the problem with the media and why the media has suffered is because … I think a lot of people understood that there was a liberal bias in the media. It’s just the way stories were framed and that was that.
Beverly Hallberg:
Sure.
Tom Bevan:
That was the case for a long, long time. But the contrast between how the media treated President Obama for eight years with this glowing coverage and he would walk out and say he was scandal-free. When he was asked about scandal season, “I just read about it in the paper like you guys.” It was very passive.
And then, along comes Trump. Literally, from the day he took office, the media declared war on him. Essentially, became part of the quote unquote, “resistance.” I think the contrast of the behavior between those two presidents really set off something in the American people to say, “Wait a minute. This has gone beyond your garden-variety liberal bias into activism.”
Obviously, MSNBC, who portrayed themselves as a left-wing network … That wasn’t as much of a shock as it was to folks who were viewing CNN, and seeing them as more of a middle of the road neutral arbiter. Suddenly, you’ve got Jim Acosta preening at White House press briefings and writing books about the daily struggle that he’s under.
It was just absurd. And so, for that reason, you saw trust in the media just absolutely collapse. And it hasn’t recovered. I don’t think it’s going to recover, unfortunately … Trust in a variety of institutions has collapsed across the board. Whether you’re talking about the government or the Supreme Court. You name it. Education systems. Religion.
This is something Gallup’s been tracking for decades. And I think it has accelerated during the last few years, with the advent of cable news in the 90s, social media in the last 10 or so years. But the legacy media … Because there has never been any accountability or reform. No introspection.
Not only when they get something wrong, like the 2016 election. But also, again, this idea that they’ve been pushing a certain agenda even when they are shown to be just absolutely wrong. Take the case of the Covington Catholic kids. Or Brett Kavanaugh.
You could go down the list of all the stories where the media absolutely jumped to conclusions, went with stories that were flat-out falsehoods. And there were no repercussions for that. They just move on as if nothing happens.
I think there were plenty of folks out there, who may have been casual news consumers and not really noticed this prior, but suddenly were like, “This just doesn’t seem right. If I were to do that in my day-to-day life or my business, I’d be fired. I’d be reprimanded. I’d be suspended.” Something would happen to me, but nothing happens to these people. It just continues on and on.
Beverly Hallberg:
Something I’ve wondered about as far as the polling goes … We’ve seen the situation with Joe Rogan. And there have been a lot of issues about him interviewing different people with different perspectives and whether or not he should be censored because of that.
Whether it’s IWF or other groups that value the free market and free expression, free speech, we care about interviewing people with lots of different perspectives. Where is the American public on this?
Is this an age thing? Where it’s people who are Generation X to Boomers who are for thorough engaging discussion and debate, and it’s the younger generations that think if you disagree with something that it should be censored? Where are we on that? That’s an area that does concern me.
Tom Bevan:
No, I agree. I was just having a conversation with someone the other day and said that. That’s actually the most disturbing part of this, even more than the activist media which took place under Donald Trump.
The idea that big tech and other media organizations are flat-out censoring arguments. Disappearing stories, omitting, not covering … That’s a real problem. That’s something that I think is a real threat to our First Amendment rights and journalism and media in general.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so … Go ahead.
Tom Bevan:
I was just going to say, one of the things that Joe Rogan had said in his video that he released the other day, which is the crux of the issue. At least, for me. He said, “When people decry misinformation … First of all, who gets to declare what is misinformation and what’s not?”
It’s so true. Things that were declared misinformation and you would get banned for saying six months ago are now completely acceptable. And in a lot of cases, seen as likely. For example, he mentioned the idea that you’d be vaccinated, that you could catch and pass the virus. Or the lab leak theory, which again was verboten for a long time.
If you mentioned it, you were thought of as a crank. Media went out of their way to absolutely marginalize anybody who thought that was a thing. The way that alternate treatments like hydroxychloroquine and others, ivermectin, were treated by the media. To cloth masks. On and on and on.
Who gets to declare what’s misinformation? Something that people say is misinformation today could be accepted opinion … Or at least within the reasonable spectrum of discourse, a week from now, a month from now, a year from now. And so, that to me is the crux of the issue.
To see people that are pushing so hard … I’m not sure it’s a generational thing, to be honest with you. I think there are plenty of younger Americans across the age spectrum that believe in free speech. Obviously, there are plenty of them who believe in cancel culture and censorship and think that misinformation is a problem.
But I’m not sure it’s so much a generational issue as it is more of an ideological issue. Part of this, again, not to be beat a dead horse … A lot of these things, at least the initial stages, come back to Trump. Because if Trump said it, then the media was immediately against it.
He mentioned the lab leak theory. It had to be discredited. He mentioned hydroxychloroquine. It had to be discredited. In a different time and place … Under a different president, perhaps we wouldn’t have seen the same reaction.
But here we are with President Biden after a year in office, and there is still this push to censor. Particularly, as it relates to COVID and vaccines and vaccine mandates. It’s a real problem.
Beverly Hallberg:
Final question I have for you. I have some of the same concerns about legacy media. I’ve worked in media for 20 years. I’ve valued the institution, but like you have been concerned about the way things are covered or not covered or how issues are … They want to silence people.
But I think that the silver lining in all of this is to see the rise of something like a podcast, where you do have so many people listening to them. I even think it’s hilarious that people try to shut down Joe Rogan, thinking that they have more sway than he does.
Or that a musician thinks that Spotify is going to take down Joe Rogan, because of their own songs that are on Spotify. Do you think that these other ways to have conversations, to get information, the more new media aspect is actually something that is encouraging even as you see it?
Tom Bevan:
I do. By the way, people who think that if Spotify dropped Joe Rogan that he would just simply go away are just living in a dream world. He would just set up his own media company and produce his podcast and still get 11 million. Probably, get 20 million people to listen at that point.
It has been interesting being part of watching the media landscape change over the last two decades. Because on one hand, there have been pluses and minuses. One of the pluses is suddenly you’ve had this fragmentation, disintegration, whatever you want to call it of these legacy media outlets.
Now, there are so many different outlets. There are so many different platforms where you can go and get information, that you couldn’t or wouldn’t get before. That’s great. One of the downsides to that though is that people are … As we’ve gotten more tribal, especially with the advent of social media, we’ve reinforced our own information bubbles.
And so, we may be getting our information from different places. That’s good. But we’re only getting it from those places suddenly, which is why we often feel like the blue team and the red team are operating in the two completely separate universes.
Look at the same set of facts, come to completely different conclusions about what just happened and what it means moving forward. It’s actually pretty astonishing. And in that sense, I think, frightening … That we can can’t even agree on what the facts are anymore.
But I do think it’s been a tough time for journalists. A lot of newsrooms have shut down and laid people off and all that. But at the same time, in some ways, it’s exciting. If you want to get into journalism, the barriers to entry now are so low. You can start a Substack. You can start, you can start writing on Medium.
And if you’re good and you’re writing interesting things, then you’ll get noticed. Maybe you will get picked up by a bigger outlet or maybe you’ll get enough subscribers to make it your full-time living. There are upsides and downsides to what’s gone on, the way that media landscape has changed.
Tom Bevan:
The other thing too is … The last thing I’ll say is we live in the most complex media environment in the history of humankind. As it’s gotten more complex, it’s become harder for consumers to figure out what the heck is going on. I think, as a result of that, it’s become more incumbent upon the consumer to be vigilant and do the work to find information.
Not just read one publication. You’ve got to read something that comes from the left and something that comes from the right. You’ve got to search out. You can’t just rely on your friends sending you stuff from Facebook. It’s a complex media environment. It’s only going to get more complex, as we talk about misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes and the like.
There are some dangers out there. But again, if you’re a news consumer, it’s up to you to make sure that you’re seeing the full spectrum and getting as much information as you can. Making decisions based on the information that you’re gathering.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, the question I often get from people is, “Where can I go to just get straight news?” I do point people to Real Clear Politics. Yes, you have the commentary side, but you have the straight news side as well. People can get information there.
In the roughly two decades that you’ve been in operation, not 11 years like I mistakenly said earlier, you guys have really weathered the change in the media landscape really well. I appreciate your polling information too. Thank you so much for your work and also for joining us on She Thinks today.
Tom Bevan:
Absolutely. Thanks.
Beverly Hallberg:
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