On this week’s timely episode, Kristen Soltis Anderson joins to discuss the science of polling and whether or not we can trust the results, as midterms are around the corner. We also discuss the latest polling trends, especially as the digital landscape has changed so much. And finally, we look at where the different generations are lining up on specific issues and whether or not “it’s about the economy, stupid.” The results may surprise you.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a pollster, speaker, commentator, and author of The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up). She is co-founder of Echelon Insights, an opinion research and analytics firm that serves brands, trade associations, nonprofits, and political clients. Through her work at Echelon, she regularly advises corporate and government leaders on polling and messaging strategy and has become one of the foremost experts on the Millennial generation. Kristen is host of SiriusXM’s “The Trendline with Kristen Soltis Anderson” on their nonpartisan P.O.T.U.S politics channel. She has been a contributor to Fox News Channel and ABC News, and participated in election night coverage in both 2016 and 2020.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and today’s episode is especially timely. We’ll be discussing the science of polling and whether or not we can trust polling results as midterms are around the corner. We’ll also discuss the latest polling trends, especially as the digital landscape has changed so much. And finally we’ll look at where the different generations are lining up on specific issues. Is it really still about the economy? Well, the results may surprise you, and joining us to break this all down as pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson. She is also a speaker, commentator, and author of “The Selfie Vote.” She is a founding partner of Echelon Insights, an opinion research and analytics firm. Through her work at Echelon, she regularly advises corporate and government leaders on polling and messaging strategy and has become one of the foremost experts on the millennial generation. She is the host of Sirius XM, “The Trend Line” with Kristen Soltis Anderson, and she’s been a contributor to Fox News, and ABC News, and participated in election night coverage in both 2016 and 2020. This is an especially busy time for her, which is why we appreciate her joining us so much. Kristen, thanks for joining us on She Thinks today.
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Of course. Thank you so much for having me, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I’ll be remiss if we did not talk about the most important thing, and that is that not only are you an amazing business woman and amazing pollster, but you are a new mommy. Congratulations on your new baby girl. What is it like entering into midterms, arguably one of the busiest times for you and your work while raising an infant at the same time?
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Well, it’s a big challenge, but it’s a wonderful blessing. I was very fortunate to have a couple of months. I had three months where for my own company, being a small business woman, you really have to make some interesting choices about what does maternity leave look like at your own company when you are the first person to avail yourself of the policy. But of course, coming back off of leave right after Labor Day meant diving right into the deep end of all things midterm. I feel thoroughly caught up. I’m still not caught up on sleep, but I hear that I won’t be caught up on sleep for the next two decades. Just to get used to that.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yes, well you seem to be juggling it all quite well, and I think that’s very interesting. Running your own business and figuring out maternity leave for yourself probably helps your employees down the line as well when you’re able to think through that personally. But I want to talk about just where things are as we approach midterms. This is, as I was saying, a really busy time for you. For a pollster, what is the midterm season like, especially as we get so close to election day?
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Well, there’s a certain point at which you are almost too close to the election for polling to really be valuable to a client. As you approach election day polling becomes more and more useful for the media, for public consumption. But the type of projects that a pollster like me is doing for clients behind the scenes is informing strategic decisions about what your message should be, what types of voters you want to talk about. And that’s all work that’s been done in prior weeks and months. Once you reach October, once you reach late October, the train is going down the tracks and you’ve got your message lined up, you’ve got your strategy lined up, you’ve just got to execute at that point. And tracking polling in the end is really just to see, “Okay, do we need to nudge things one direction or the other? Is something not working out the way we wanted, so on and so forth.”
But you’ve mostly got your strategy in place. We get very busy around this time of year, less so with clients who want to make strategic choices about the midterms and more folks who want to be prepared to study as soon as the midterms are over, what happened. Being able to go into the field with a survey in the day or two after the polls close, and ask people did they vote? Who did they vote for? Why did they make the decision they made? Because unpacking what happened in the election is then going to inform people’s decisions about if you are in the Republican potential new majority in Congress, how do you govern? What are voters looking for. When you say you have a mandate, what kind of a mandate was that? That’s what the transition of the use of polling looks like from a month or two before the election to the period we’re in now where it’s really, really close to election day, to that post-election period of the rest of November up until Thanksgiving.
Beverly Hallberg:
I think it’s been really interesting since this summer there has been what seems to be a change in where the public is, and maybe it was just a faulty assumption about where they were in August. There were a lot of talks about Democrats gaining traction on Republicans, specifically with the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision. And that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. In your polling, where is this issue of what is being called women’s rights? Obviously under the issue of abortion, in comparison to how women specifically think about issues related to the economy.
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
The reality was in my view always that something like pocketbook issues was going to be the top issue. At the end of the day, people are filling up their gas tanks, they’re going to the grocery store. This is an issue that is very present and very personal for people constantly. Now, that’s not to say that an issue like abortion is not very personal, very emotional with a lot of people holding very deeply held views. But just in terms of your day to day average voter, what they are encountering in their lives, the challenges and the hurdles that each and every morning they’ve got to get up and deal with, something like the state of the economy is just very often going to rise to the top. And that’s what we’re tending to see in the polls.
Now, it’s commonly the case that pundits like me will be asked, “Well, what was the issue that decided the election?” And I’d always encourage people not to think of it as just an either-or. Voters don’t walk into the voting booth and go, “Let me think through a series of different issues and which party I agree with more on each of them. And then give each party a bunch of different points. And then whoever gets the most points wins and they get my vote.” It does not work like that.
And even if you say an issue like the economy is your most important issue, if you fundamentally distrust a candidate, if you feel like overall a party might be good on the economy, but they’re not looking out for people like you otherwise, you might be more reluctant to pull the lever for them. There’s a lot that’s going on there. Before Republicans, because they’re the party out of power, they’ve already got the wind at their backs, the history and fundamentals are all with them. The fact that voters trust Republicans more on the economy and that the economy is in such rough shape is only adding to that dynamic.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I’ve wondered just about the polling that you do, as you were saying, working with clients, figuring out what messages work well. Obviously when it comes to polling and trusting polling, so much is about the questions that are asked because depending on how it’s phrased, people can have a wide variety of opinions on something. What is your motto? What is the science that you all use in asking people specific questions?
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
I think one of the best things that you can do as a pollster is present people with a meaningful contrast between two sides of an issue. Rather than just saying, “Here’s a statement, do you agree with it or disagree with it?” Because sometimes people, they like to just say, “Sure, I guess that sounds fine.” And then you could get a false reading. There’s something called acquiescence bias in a survey, where people just, they like to say yes to stuff.
And that’s how you can wind up with two questions that seem very contradictory and you wind up with 60, 70% of people saying yes to both. It’s like, “well wait a minute, what happened there?” But if you actually present a fair contrast, here is a fair representation of what the left believes on an issue, and here is a fair representation of what the right believes on an issue. If you present both sides, then you’re helping the respondent out a little bit by doing a bit of the work for them. And then when they’re giving you that gut answer, it’s more informed by what the actual debate looks like. I much prefer questions that offer people a choice between two options rather than just saying, “Ah, well do you agree or disagree with this one statement?”
The other thing that I never quite love doing is you have these questions like top issue, which one issue is the most important to you in the election? But as I just said, most voters aren’t just making a decision on one issue. It could be that for them, something like the economy as well as something like immigration and crime are a top issue. And if all I’m doing is collecting what’s your number one, I might be missing that there’s really a constituency of swing voters out there who are worried about something like the border. If you ask a question that lets people have a little bit more freedom in how they respond, maybe you’re letting them pick two or three, maybe you’re asking for each issue, how important is this? Is this extremely important, very important, somewhat important, not that important. You ask for each issue. You can highlight some of that that you might lose if all you’re saying is just pick one issue.
Beverly Hallberg:
And we know that the country has become more polarized, I’m sure polling proves that as well or at least shows that as well. Have you found that people are reluctant to talk to pollsters? Where is the readiness to talk to a pollster? Maybe we’ll even find some interesting results on election day where exit polling maybe fewer people are willing to speak. What have you found to be the case?
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Well, there are three things that the polling industry is facing that are causing polls to have potentially lower response rates and less engagement. The first is, when you are conducting a poll, are you contacting everybody in the first place or are you systematically missing people just not contacting them? This was a really big problem in the 2012 election. You had pollsters systematically missing voters who were cell phone only voters. Back then, you still had a lot of polls done using a landline telephone. And if you were only calling landlines, then you were getting almost two Republican of a sample. And you overstated Mitt Romney’s likelihood of winning.
By the time you got to the 2016 election, that was no longer the case. You had plenty of cell phones being counted in polls, then the problem was that you were had voters who didn’t have college degrees, who were less likely to be contacted in polls at that point. And then you had that missing group affecting the results in the opposite direction. Nowadays, pollsters think they have solved most of those problems. We do surveys that involve online as well as telephone, as well as text message. We’re reaching people a lot of different ways, hopefully not leaving anyone out. Now the real problem is how do you get people to talk to us? We know how to reach you, but will you pick up and talk to us? And then furthermore, even if someone picks up and talks to you, how do you know that the questions you’re asking are actually getting a real answer from them that tells you where things are going.
I remember doing an interview with Donald Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrisio at one point, and he had a really insightful thing to say, which was they found in a lot of their polling it wasn’t that people were saying they were voting necessarily for one candidate or another. They said they were unsure, but when you asked them what their top issues were, they said they were worried about immigration, they were worried about crime, they wanted to see something done, they wanted to see a border wall built. Well, that is all code for you might be more likely to vote for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton if that’s the issues that matter to you in the positions you hold. Even if they weren’t coming right out and saying it on the who are you voting for question, you could discern it from other things. That’s one of the tricks that pollsters are having to use to try to better understand where people are at if people are reluctant to answer very direct questions about controversial issues.
Beverly Hallberg:
And when you talk to young voters, what has been the technology that they tend to use most when it comes to polling? Are they willing to talk to you and is that just through the internet and trying to reach them there?
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Text messaging in what we would call text to web, I think is going to be a huge piece of the puzzle of how we reach younger voters. Landlines really don’t reach that many people. It’s expensive to call a landline, but it’s very hard to get someone on the phone. Cell phones are unbelievably expensive to call. It’s a real challenge to get enough phone calls made. Text to web, you can send out a mass text message to people who are on your list of voters and then it directs them to a survey. You’ve got to keep that survey pretty short because most people’s attention span is not going to let you ask them 20 minutes worth of questions. And that’s the way we think is the best for trying to engage a new generation in polling, a generation who trying to get them to talk to a live person on the telephone would be a real struggle.
Beverly Hallberg:
And as far as campaigns go, obviously campaigns hire pollsters, they look at a wide variety of factors. How early on in a campaign, and maybe it is even before a campaign starts, is there polling that is done prior to see if this is even a candidate who is viable? And what is that process that a polling company has with a candidate as the election process continues?
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Initially, if a candidate is considering running, the first thing they might do is conduct a viability study, which is basically a very short survey that probably doesn’t even have a huge sample size. At that point to your campaign probably doesn’t have a huge budget. You’re looking to do this relatively inexpensively, and it basically just goes out and asks things like, “What do people think about the incumbent? How many people have ever heard of your candidate?” You just have a couple of questions, but then you can go back and say, “Look, the incumbent in this district is only at 46% approval. They’re below 50%. They could be vulnerable. Whether in a primary or a general.”
You can also go back and say, “Yeah, you’re less well known than two or three of the other people you’d be competing against, but those other people you’re competing against have a very negative image. And you get to start with a blank slate, and there’s an opportunity. Or sometimes you have to go back to someone and say, “It really doesn’t look like there’s a ton of a pathway here. There’s already someone who seems to have the field locked up. You’d really need a miracle in X, Y, and Z.”
Then once a campaign starts, you want to do a survey that is a pretty deep analysis with a large sample size that tries to understand, what are the voter groups that are going to matter? Who are those real undecided voters? Who are the ones that are up for grabs and what are the messages that move them? That’s going to be bigger sample, longer questionnaire. And then as the campaign goes on, you’ll do tracking studies, check-ins just to see is the stuff that we’re doing, is it working? Are we moving the numbers? And if we’re not, is there a change we need to make strategically, change our message, et cetera. That’s what those surveys would be used for.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I want to take a brief moment to talk to you, our listeners. You may know the Independent Women’s Forum is the leading national women’s organization dedicated to enhancing people’s freedom, opportunities, and wellbeing. But did you know that we are also here to bring you women and men on the go, the news? You can listen to our High Noon podcast, an intellectual download featuring conversations that make free society possible. Hear guests like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin discuss the more controversial subjects of the day, or join us for happy hour with At the Bar where hosts, Inez Stepman and Jennifer Braceras chat on the latest issues at the intersection of law, politics, and culture. You can listen to past episodes at iwf.org or search for High Noon or At the Bar in your favorite podcast app.
Now, Kristin, as I mentioned in your bio, you are the author of “The Selfie Vote.” That was looking at millennials. I want to talk a little bit about the next generation, Generation Z. Where are they lining up on some of the most important issues of the day? One of the things I’ve wondered especially, as we’ve seen, President Biden and other Democrats talk so much about some of the more social issues like the transgender issue right now, is that where we’re seeing Generation Z line up?
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Generation Z for the most part has views that look a lot like the Millennial generations. When I wrote “The Selfie Vote,” I wrote it as a bit of a warning to the right that there were many issues, not just social and cultural, but also economic, where younger voters were leaning a bit more to the left. They had been hearing more of that message that markets were bad, that capitalism was bad, that government was the answer, and they’d been espousing more progressive social views. And it was a warning flag to conservatives that, “Hey, you either need to start winning over some of these arguments or at least preparing yourself for a generation that has some different views on a couple of these things.”
From what we know about Generation Z, and that is largely those born in the late nineties or later, that they tend to have views that are also reasonably progressive, but their style of how they approach politics I think is fundamentally different than millennials. For millennials, we came of age, either late Bush administration, Obama administration, we are beginning to see polarization unfold, but there was still a little bit of this, “Let’s try to bridge across the aisle. Let’s try to be pragmatic. Let’s try to find solutions” approach. Generation Z has really come up in an age of absolute outright political combat. The Trump presidency and now the Biden presidency where it is just the percentage of Americans who believe the other side isn’t just wrong, but is outright trying to destroy America is so high.
And for Generation Z, they don’t just think about politics as a thing that they might do once every other November where they cast a vote. For them, they’re looking more for employers that are espousing values that align with theirs, whether it’s on issues like the environment or gender, that they want to see politics pervade a lot of facets of their life that I think for many older Americans, they say, “Gosh, I don’t want to be thinking about politics when I’m at the grocery store trying to decide what type of potato chips I want to buy.” But for Generation Z, they’re more inclined to take those political values with them everywhere they go.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are turning out to vote in huge numbers. It’s still much more likely the case that an older voter will [inaudible] younger voter, but Generation Z is just very much less interested in saying, “Hey, how do we find common ground with the other side? And how do we do something pragmatic that works,” and are much more likely to say, “I think the other side is out of bounds.” That’s why you see these free speech issues popping up on campus so much. And that’s why you see so many in the older generations really grappling with and almost afraid of Generation Z when they show up as employees or students who have you in their organizations. Navigating these generational gaps is a real challenge in a lot of places.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, since you mentioned employment, I’ve thought it’s interesting, a recent article that came out that talked about emojis and that Generation Z said, or many of them said, that the thumbs up emoji was offensive to them. And I think a lot for Generation X, or maybe even some millennials, but definitely boomers, they look at that and they think that that’s crazy. And I’ve also thought also in terms of corporate America, they do a lot of the diversity and inclusion training. And I’ve thought about it from a corporate standpoint, what is the benefit to the corporation? Do you think corporate America is bending over backwards to try to gain attraction from Generation Z because so many businesses are struggling to find enough employees to support their work?
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
I do think corporate America is very focused on, how do I keep my workforce happy, particularly if my workforce is a younger Generation Z workforce. How do I keep those new consumers deciding that they want to purchase my products and services? And I think in some cases that it’s good. Look, I’m fine with companies deciding that they think that younger consumers, younger employees are important and deserve to have their voice heard. I want to listen to them. But where things go astray is, let’s take the example you just gave of, in truth, a extremely small percentage of Generation Z would say, “I think the thumbs up emoji is offensive,” that stories like that wind up getting generated because there are a handful of people on social media who say it, and then other people say, “Well, that’s ridiculous and outrageous,” but suddenly it makes its way through the media ecosphere and you have a 65 year old CEO going, “Oh, wait a minute. Oh no, do I need to do a training in house on what emojis we can and cannot use?”
And I think that lack of communication between the generations means sometimes these really extreme voices from Generation Z get outsize influence, because this is not the case that everyone in Generation Z has a crazy view like you can’t use the thumbs up emoji. I will just flat out say, that would be crazy, right? But most of them do just want to put their heads down, get the job done, that they’re not looking for their employer to be a political activist. They would like, however, for their values to be a espoused at work, they would like their workplace to be a tolerant place for people, all feel welcome, et cetera.
But I think that some of the problem is that because you have a very loud group, if a very small group, of activists within Generation Z and the older generation doesn’t know how to deal with them and just wants to keep them happy or make them go away, sometimes tries to make concessions to them, it doesn’t actually ever make them go away. It doesn’t actually ever make them happy. It just exacerbates the challenge. And I think that’s a trap that a lot of CEOs and executives find themselves in.
Beverly Hallberg:
Where does Generation Z line up on economic issues? These are the top trending issues for the majority of Americans. Where do younger generations fall in that?
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Younger generations are more likely to think that all sorts of institutions are not really working, and whether that’s the market economy and so on and so forth, they’re just more open to the idea of, “Gosh, there’s got to be a different way to do things.” But the good news is that does not mean that they think a centrally planned economy or socialism is the way to go. I know a lot of times I will see polling headlines pop across my Twitter feed that will say 60% of young voters love socialism. And whenever I dig into the numbers, it usually never really means that, there are questions one about whether young people, when you say socialism, what they think that means.
I’ve done focus groups where some people just think it means we all work together. Some people have said, “Does that mean we’re using more social media to solve problems?” When young people are saying in a poll, “I like socialism,” they are not all operating off of the same definition that you or I, Beverly, maybe operating off of. But it does also mean that those who are advocates of free markets and limited government, we have our work cut out for us because young people do not automatically hear capitalism, free markets, [inaudible 00:23:33] and think that equals prosperity, because for them, it’s not necessarily been the case that they feel their generation has experienced great prosperity in their lifetimes.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, final question for you before you go. Very curious what election day is like for you and the following day since that’s when you’re getting all the exit polling in.
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Election day itself is somewhat quiet. There’s no polling to be done at that point. You’re just waiting. I’ve heard Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report describe it almost like Christmas Eve. You’re waiting to open the presents and see what’s inside. “Gosh, what will be inside the Pennsylvania Senate race? Which candidate is going to come out the winner?” And election day itself tends to be a little sleepier. I will be busy because I will be on CNN as a commentator over the course of those days. It’ll be a little busy on that front. But from the polling side, suddenly it’s just time to sit back and wait for actual results rather than poll results to come in.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, it’ll be interesting to see. I’m especially looking forward to the suburban women vote this year just to see where that falls. I think COVID has done so much to just disrupt the apple cart, so to speak. And I think there’s a lot that we don’t know and I’m excited to find out and we so appreciate all your insight on these issues. Kristen Soltis Anderson with Echelon Insights, thank you for joining us on She Thinks.
Kristen Soltis Anderson:
Thank you so much.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. An investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. Please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That is iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or a review. It does help, and we’d love it if you shared this episode so your friends can know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.
