Today, Explained - Why do I keep getting these weird fundraising texts?

Episode Date: October 27, 2024

In this special feed drop of the new Vox podcast Explain It to Me, we answer some of the questions you have asked Vox about the election, like why you’re getting so many urgent texts asking for money.  This episode was produced by Sofi LaLonde and Carla Javier, edited by Jorge Just, fact-checked by Caitlin PenzeyMoog, engineered by Cristian Ayala and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill.  Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, we're dropping into your feed on a Sunday because we have something a little special for you. We're going to share an episode of Vox's new podcast. It's called Explain It To Me. Explain It To Me focuses on answering your questions in the style of like an old-timey call-in radio show, a thing that I love. Except it's a podcast, so even better. In fact, it's a whole franchise. There's a weekly newsletter, there's a video series. This week, we're answering a question that we got from a lot of you. What is behind all of these campaign text messages? Why are you getting so many? How did these fools get your number? We're going to let you know. We're also going to be talking a bit about the question of whether you can trust political polls.

They say the race is tight. It's too close to call. Can you believe them? Now, if you've got a question about the election or literally anything else, there have been some great ones that have nothing to do with politics. Send it over to Vox and we're going to have a team of reporters and editors look into it. You can call in with your questions at 1-800-618-8545, 1-800-618-8545. I feel like a radio DJ. Or you can email us at askvox at vox.com. I'm going to hand it over to JQ Hill. She is the host of Explain It To Me. Hi, it's JQ. Before we get into the episode, I want to ask you something. What are your election questions? We're diving into some of the ones you've already sent in today. But as we get closer and closer to November 5th, we want to know what's on your mind.

So give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or shoot us an email to askvox at vox.com. OK, here's the show. What is up with these political texts? Why are there so many? They're just kind of bonkers. I'm Jonquan Hill, and this is Explain It To Me, the hotline for all the questions you can't quite answer on your own. Today, two of your election questions.

One is about polling. Those numbers we watch with bated breath the closer and closer we get to Election Day. Who exactly are those for in the first place? And the other is about texts. You know, those texts. for somebody to do a deep dive podcast episode about these unhinged text messages and emails that we keep getting from the Democratic Party. What purpose do they serve? Who is responding to these? Why do they keep sending these out? Please, please give us some answers. Would you mind reading a couple to me? Like, are there some where you're like, girl, what is going on? Yeah.

Okay. This is goodbye. Nobody is donating to keep our Arizona ads on air. And then in bright, you know, in big font, it says, last chance, rush $10 to fund our ads. Bold Democrats. And there's a link. I think if one of my friends sent me something like that, I'd be like, girl, I'm on the way with a bottle of wine. What is happening?

Right. Like, are you OK? Like, this is goodbye? Oh, my gosh. Sister, please. Goodbye forever. We lost your data. And then it had like a little sad face.

My boss is really making me get this information by tonight. Can you help me out? Which was just like so weird. It was like, who are you? You know? What's another one you got? We're hitting the panic button. Panic is in all caps.

Donations to defeat Trump have plummeted. All caps. Have you given up? And then it sends, you know, link Democratic victory pack. I mean, like, if the point is to like, get your attention, okay, maybe that's one thing. But I have to believe that like, we're not the only like group of friends that's like sending around their most insane ones you know this can't actually work right like nobody's like clicking these links like oh thank goodness okay I'll donate you know yeah I don't know and we have so we have some theories too like about like why and like maybe like where they're coming from but like yeah tell me your theories tell me your theory yeah so the theory that i like the best or like seems most plausible is just that like some consulting

firm like got in with the dmc and it's just like look here's the strategy we send these texts and we know like the exact language and like the exact tone to use um and this is really gonna work and maybe they signed some like 10-year contract with them or something. And they're just like going crazy, sending all these texts. There's also a hypothesis about who these texts are for. My friends and I have another theory about kind of like, it's not nice, no shade to boomers, but we think maybe this works on boomers like

but also like no i obviously have boomer parents and they're i know they're not responding they don't seem bothered one way or the other by these texts but like they are not like you know that's not their way of donating money right like they they can a computer, like they send in money or whatever, somehow they do it. But I don't think it's like through the text messaging. So this is what's going to happen next. We're going to try to find you some answers. Is it okay if we give you a call back with what we find? Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. And thank you so much. We will talk to you soon. Thank you.

Thank you so much, John Quinn. It's been great. I like to tell people I invented text messaging, specifically for like nonprofits and campaigns. Are you a good texter like in your personal life? A good texter. I'm very prompt at responding to people if that is a mark of a good texter. I am a very signature like machine gun texter though. I will send 13 straight messages that are each like four words.

Oh, I do that too. It's for the effect though. You have to like. Right. Thank you. I agree. So I am a good texter in that like you very clearly hear my like tone of voice coming through and you really can like hear me in the message.

But the machine gun thing definitely, definitely bothers some people. They're like, oh my God, I just got out of a meeting and I have 40 notifications from you. What is going on? This is Lloyd Kotler. He's the founder of Banter Messaging, a company that helps progressive causes with text strategies. He's not the one begging you for money via text, but he does know the SMS marketing landscape really well and has been in the game for a while. I got started in text marketing in 2009, 2010, working in the game for a while. I got started in text marketing in like 2009, 2010, working in the

immigrant rights space. So we were working on passing comprehensive immigration reform and then later the DREAM Act. And, you know, kind of our like core constituency wasn't sitting at a computer all day, right? And had to figure out how to like reach people that were the United Farm Workers or home care workers, stuff like that. And text was a really natural solution. So this cycle, it seems like everyone and their mom is getting campaign texts. Why do you think they're a good tool for campaigns? It's, well, a couple of things, right? Email has certainly declined a bit. Facebook has

made it a lot harder for nonprofits and campaigns to reach people. TikTok, you know, doesn't do political advertising at all. Some of those other channels that people used to rely on have definitely gone down. And texting is just like a really easy, cheap way to reach people. Also for campaigns, it's a really easy place to like dump a ton of money into at the end of the campaign when you're like, we have all this extra money. What do we do with it? Right at that point, like you can't buy more TV ads. You can't buy more, you know, direct mail pieces. But you can definitely buy more texts like right up through election day.

So, you know, for campaigns, it's a good place where they can like spend a bunch of money that they have to. Lloyd didn't have the hard numbers on this, so we looked around to see what we could find. One person we talked to was Josh Nelson. He's the CEO of a progressive SMS texting firm called Civic Shout. He said that in 2022, both political parties sent over 15 billion texts. That's 50 messages per cell phone in the U.S. And there aren't really any estimates yet this go-round, but if he had to make an educated guess, it could be between 20 and 30 billion texts this election cycle. So how did we end up with billions of these text messages?

I asked Lloyd what he thinks. Yeah, it used to be in-house, like, pretty much across the board. It's gotten away in the past few years from conversational to just, like, very transactional, right? Pretty much folks are only using it as, like, cold donation asks. They're not really doing, just the campaign i want to speak just to the campaign side there yeah um are not doing you know kind of like voter outreach or stuff like that right when like the bernie campaign and the hillary campaign really started doing this kind of like one-to-one texting stuff it was about voting right yeah we can't reach these people in other ways let's like text them about voting that kind? It was like, we can't reach these people in other ways. Let's like text them

about voting, that kind of stuff. And then later somebody was just like, well, why don't we also text people about donations? And then that just kind of became the whole thing. And how exactly do they get your data in the first place? There are a few different ways ranging from like banal to like nefarious. So the kind of most basic way is, right, they're just buying your data. They're just getting it from, you know, another campaign or another PAC or another agency who sell donor data, you know, campaign to campaign, this kind of regular course of business. Next kind of level is they're doing data appends. So, you know, they got your email because you,

you know, signed up for something or they had your email when the candidate ran, you know, six years ago, but you never gave them more info and they just kind of do, you know, a data append and get, you know, additional info on you. And then they start texting you from the phone number they got, which may or may not be accurate, right? Which is why a lot of people get messages that are like not or addressed to somebody else that's not them. They can get it from the voter file. So they can totally just like pull the data from the voter file if it's there. And then kind of the most nefarious way would be scraping FEC data, which is like very illegal, but only if you get caught, right?

Like how would anybody know? So that's kind of the most nefarious way to do it. I want to get into the tone of the texts that people are receiving this year. Why does the tone feel so different? Why does it feel like an unhinged group chat? It just feels that way. Yes, it just feels that way.

I think because of like the state of the world, right? Where just like everything feels a little more like that now, right? But like even as far of the world, right? Where just like everything feels a little more like that now, right? But like even as far back as 2018, right? I mean, we were seeing some like truly unhinged messaging, you know, the things Trump was gonna do if you didn't donate $5 immediately, right? I mean, people are just like exasperated by it,

I think a little more now than they were back then. And like, it's catching up now where people are just like, this is wild stuff. Yeah. Why are some texts, you know, that tone is sort of that like, urgent, or I will get fired and it will be your fault, and others are relatively normal? Is there any philosophy or reasoning or do some organizations lean toward one way versus another what is going on with that yeah you see the most unhinged stuff generally from like the most scammy organizations and packs right like you'll see folks that like don't care about their reputation

because nobody's ever heard of them before and they'll never hear of them again, right? Like they're just trying to maximize the haul. So like they're going to use the scammiest marketing tactics that exist, right? They're not inventing anything new. Scammy marketing tactics have always, you know, existed. They're just like exploiting it through this channel, you know, in those cases, right? And that's your real, you know,

like gross agencies who work for scam packs, right? Folks who are really, you know, like, gross agencies who work for scam packs, right? Folks who are really, you know, detrimental to the ecosystem. Yeah, this scam packs, where does that money, is the money actually going to campaigns? No, no, that's the scam, right? It's going to, like, there's a couple of varieties of it. One scheme, right, is like I have a scam pack. That scam pack is paying my marketing company to do all of the marketing for this scam pack. Oh. Right?

And like you're just spending on like overhead and stuff like that. They're not spending money on candidates. They're not, you know, doing the kind of things we would expect, you know, from a pack in that sense. Who's being targeted by these ads? Is it anyone with a phone number or is it like registered voters? Is it swing states? Because I will say, and I'm starting to feel a little left out, I have not gotten these unhinged text messages and everyone complains about them. And I'm like, wow, I can't even get a text back from a scam pack. You're going to regret saying that.

You're going to put that into the universe. I'm going to be inundated. Right? No, so, I mean, primarily, especially for the scammiest, you know, kind of messages, the targets are unfortunately older people who are most likely to fall for it, who get tricked into, you know, recurring donations or their life savings or like, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it's the grossest, you know, it's really the grossest. Then like the second level of, you know, kind of spray and pray,

yeah, it's just the voter file, right? It's just, you know, we're going to grab everybody off the voter file and start texting that way. And then kind of like the third tier down is like, you donated to another campaign, right? And that campaign like sold your info to, you know, this campaign that's now reaching out or to the agency that works on behalf of, you know, the PAC that you've never heard of or something like that. They can sell your information, which feels, I don't know, that feels legally sticky. It should be.

I mean, the real gross part is that the agency will, you know, obviously work on behalf of multiple clients and, like, facilitate the sale of the data between their own, you know, clients. So you're getting from the same agency, right, like, eight identical messages from eight different candidates

because they're just, you know, kind of copying and pasting their stuff over and sending it to you over and over. Okay, so now we have a better sense of how this whole text fundraising universe operates, but does it actually get results? That's after the break. software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained,

ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained,ards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from the ACLU. The ACLU knows exactly what threats a second Donald Trump term presents. And they are ready with a battle-tested playbook. The ACLU took legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times.

And they will do it again to protect immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. It's Explain It To Me, and today we're answering Anne's question and finding out why so many of us keep getting fundraising texts. Lloyd gave us the lay of the land, but are people actually bringing in cash through all these messages? Yeah, kind of fortunately and unfortunately, right?

It's like unfortunate that like these kind of unhinged crazy messages like actually do work, right? You know, I mean, like they really do get significant return, right? And that's partially because texting is so cheap, right? You know, I mean, like, they really do get significant return, right? And that's partially because texting is so cheap, right? Each text is, you know, a couple of pennies, right? So it is, the return is really high. But like, a well-done text marketing program is also like extremely, you know, successful, right? Can be really, really good at fundraising at, you know, all your other kind of organizational priorities. Is this a partisan thing? Anne, who is our question asker, she's been getting a lot of left-leaning ones, but are Republicans also getting these unhinged text messages? Yes. Like, they're getting equally unhinged messages, but, like, it's much less about a guilt trip on their side,

and it's much more about, like, you know, red meat culture war kind of stuff, right? And you know who also is a big Republican voting bloc is old people, right? Yeah. It is absolutely bipartisan issue that you'd think something like that, right, that, like, really could unite everybody to be like,

let's get behind some legislation here, right? But, like, lawmakers are not in the habit of, like, taking away their own re-election money, right? And so trying to convince them to, like, turn off a spigot that provides them with, like, a lot of campaign cash is really, really difficult. Yeah, because I guess on one hand, there are these scammy packs that are, you know, just paying for their own salaries with the money they're taking in. But it would also impact, you know, the legitimate ones that are funding these really expensive campaigns. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, even somebody like Katie Porter, right, who's like a consumer advocate and her whole brand is, you know, being a consumer advocate. She sold her data, you know, towards the end of the primary campaign to keep in the race. If we can't get Katie Porter to do it, then like, you know, trying to get a majority of, you know, reps and senators to pass a bill like that is, you know, a really Herculean task.

Okay, I want to read you some of the texts that Anne and her friends have gotten this year and get your thoughts. Okay, I'm going to try to do a dramatic reading. Before Kamala Harris hits the DNC stage tonight, can you confirm you're voting for Kamala Harris? And then a few days later, we've asked six times if you support Kamala Harris, but you never completed the poll. And then there's a frowny face, but it's like not an emoji. It's like a colon and a parentheses. Reply via your personal link. And then there's a link.

Yeah. You'd think like, okay, you've asked six times. I'm not going to answer. But like, it's honestly, the whole thing is so automated. Like, you'd think a person would be legitimately embarrassed, like sending that kind of message, right? Like, I would be legitimately embarrassed, like writing that message, asking somebody to approve it. It's like double texting a guy. Like, oh my gosh, I'd rather chew glass.

Literally. Like, it is absolutely. But they've taken so much of the human, like, element out of it, right? Like, you have, like, some 26-year-old, right, writing this message. It goes. And then, like, it goes to the contact center. And, like, those people are so used to just, like, write phone scripts, right? They don't write any of their own stuff.

They're just kind of, like, reading off a sheet of paper. If anything, they're less embarrassed, like sending a text that's that crazy versus having to say that out loud on a phone call. So because the human element is completely removed from it, there's no shame at any stage of the process for those folks. How do you know if the organization reaching out to you

is legitimate or not? It's true. It takes like a full day's worth of research. It's like, it's a lot. Yeah. I mean, the average person is totally unequipped to do it, to be honest. You first have to like figure out who is this actually from? And then if it's like going to, you know, an ActBlue page, then you've got to look like what PAC or who is this supporting? Where is the money actually going? You can go then to like the FEC and like look up, you know, the info on the candidate or the PAC or whoever it is from there.

And then, you know, it still might not paint the whole picture. A campaign or a PAC showing 80%, you know, money spent on like overhead doesn't tell the whole story because it could be that they're just passing money through to candidates directly. And so that would be legitimate, right? But you couldn't tell that from an FEC report. So like, it really, it's a lot of digging for people to do, which is why I always tell people like,

look, you want to support a campaign, like go directly to their website, make a donation, or, like, write a check, right? If you write a check, you will not get spam text messages for quite a while. Are there rules when it comes to sending political text messages that campaigns and consulting groups have to follow, or is it kind of the Wild West? Are there rules? There there are rules are they very enforced not really the main regulatory system that was kind of put in place over the past few years is what's called 10 dlc registration 10 digit long code registration that process is a

joke the campaign registry which is like the group that like facilitates that is a joke. You can absolutely scam your way through the application process because like they're looking to like ensure you have opt-in permission, right? So they're just saying, send us a webpage to see that people are opting in to your texts. But they're not looking to see if all these people now that you upload, right, once you're verified, have gone through that page. So you just make a page on your website that has a checkbox that says, I want to get text messages, and then nobody bothers you again, right? Oh, so it just has to, it's like, oh, we made it available, but we're not necessarily making people go through it.

Yes. Or like, we're just buying their phone numbers anyway. And then the platforms are not generally really investigating in a heavy-handed way because they're not taking money out of their own pockets, right? If they tell you, you can't text these 200,000 people, right? Like, then they're not getting paid for you texting those 200,000 people and you're just going to go to, like, a more unscrupulous vendor. So it's a real problem. The regulatory system is just not sufficient for what's happening.

Yeah, it feels like this thing we see over and over again with technology is that regulators have to play catch up. And I'm used to that when it comes to social media. But texting now feels so archaic and old school that it's surprising that it hasn't caught up there either. Really, the only people that have the incentive to do anything about it are the carriers, right? Our AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Anybody else is making a ton of money off of this. So the carriers, right, their incentive is like their customers are really annoyed. So, you know, for them, the incentive is like, we want to shut this down. We want So, you know, for them, the incentive is, like, we want to shut this down. We want to, you know, take action here. But, again, they're really and genuinely afraid of running afoul of lawmakers because, again, if you're looking at, like, where is more of the grift coming from, right, then you're opening yourself up to, like, accusations of bias. TCPA, right, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, is like the main, you know,

enforcement mechanism, but that's on an individual level, right? Like, I have to, you know, file a TCPA demand letter. There's no, like, group action that, like, a citizen or a civic group or something like that could really take to stop things en masse. Yeah, what can people do to get their numbers off of this list and to get it to stop? Yeah, so first thing you can do is make sure you're on the do not call list. That's not going to do anything, but it does give you standing then to file TCPA demand notices and stuff like that. And then I tell everybody the best thing you can do is start suing. Sending TCPA demand letters to folks who are texting you repeatedly, if you are on the do not call list, is a really easy way to get them to stop because those TCPA fines are really

expensive. So they will settle. Generally, you will get paid, and then, you know, you will stop getting those messages if you are litigious, because they will start, like, blacklisting your number so that you don't get the messages and can't sue, and they can keep bothering everybody else.

And is that something where it's like, okay, let me call up my lawyer, or is it like, can I send this letter, and that will be enough to spook them? Yeah, so you can just send the letter. I think it was, like, two years ago, a guy sued the Pelosi campaign and, you know, it was pretty well publicized. You know, he got like tens of thousands of dollars because the campaign just like kept texting him. So, yeah, anybody can do it.

And like the more people that do it, right, like the bigger the damage is on the fundraising side and the more they will have to re-examine, is this a viable channel? And then, honestly, just marking as many of you get them as spam. You can also copy and paste the full text of the message and send it to 7726, which spells out spam. And that directs it to the FCC. So that's also helpful. What kinds of things get flagged by carriers as spam? Like what are the things that make it say like, oh no, this is not, we are not doing this? It's kind of a black box. So the carriers don't, you know, obviously tell us ahead of time like

what they are looking for for spam. Things that we have found, though, kind of all caps stuff or lots of capitalized letters. If you start every word with a capitalized letter, that's a big spam flag. Sometimes talking about money. It's weird because we always think about

I only get ones asking for money, but there are certain words if you look for that like you'll never see certain like formulations of uh donate asks or like even dollar signs sometimes can yeah can uh flag spam you are more likely to get flagged to spam if you're not personalizing the messages right if carriers just carriers just see, you know, 400,000 identical messages going out, that's like a pretty big spam flag. Not including the stop language,

definitely a spam flag. Bitly links. So carriers want like links to be visible that people should know what they're clicking on and where they're about to land. That makes sense. So that's why you'll see that super long ActBlue link with a ref code and you're like,

who doesn't shorten links, right? Like, what is this? But that's why, right? And they're too cheap to buy a custom domain for themselves. So that's why you don't see those bitly links because that's a big spam flag. Is there anything else our listeners should know before we let you go? Are any other tips,

anything at all? Yeah, they should, if they want to donate to a campaign or to something they believe in, they should do it by check. Like seriously, make them work for it. And yeah, you should sue. Like everybody should sue. Be litigious. Like it's the only way this is going to stop is if it is not profitable for those folks to do this. They bother you. You might as well get paid. So people should absolutely sue as often and as many people as possible. Lloyd Kotler, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. After my conversation with Lloyd, I called up Anne to tell her about what I found. Okay, have you gotten any more texts since we last talked, or have they stopped? No, I've been getting, and especially the last couple of days, I feel like I've been getting a lot. Ooh, well you read one. Read one of the most egregious ones to me. These aren't very, like, they're not quite as unhinged, but I've been getting these and I know my friends have been getting these too. We have you in our records as registered to vote, but at least one other member of your household might not be. Please help ensure that everyone is registered to vote by checking your household member's voter registration statuses.

Yeah, don't click on that. Don't do that. Here's another one that is a little bit unhinged. Put Kamala in the White House. Donate $100 to crush Trump. Donations matched 400%. It seems like a lot. I told Anne that her hypothesis was basically correct. There is a consulting class behind the texts. I feel so much vindication.

I feel like a large part of my world makes sense, which maybe tells you about my life right now that this is a large part of my world. I told her how some firms we talked to really pride themselves on writing compelling, thoughtful messages and how they feel about the others that go for more volume. I also told her how some scammers are seizing on the moment right now and riding the coattails of legitimate fundraisers. Oh my god. Everything is a scam. I feel like I have this refrain with my partner where we're just like, everything is a scam. There's a few things that are like actually doing what they're meant to do, but there's just so many scammy parts to American life these days. And they just get your, they get your phone number. How then? I broke down for Anne the different ways these companies get voter information, including buying info from other campaigns. I'm not surprised. I know that voter

data is like actually pretty easy to get. And I think like I don't have a problem with that necessarily because I don't know. I think it's better than not to like be able to communicate with potential voters and things like that. So that, that feels okay. Another question you have is if this even works in the first place. And the answer is yes. Somehow it wouldn't work on me. I'm like, I'm not giving you all money. But it does work. And you were also right about the theory that it works on boomers a lot. I knew it. Yeah, boomers and boomers on like every side of the aisle. Okay. Well, yeah, I can't say I donate that much to political campaigns, but I do feel like I want to pass this along to the boomers in my life.

You absolutely should. And they definitely have checkbooks. Yes. Yes. goodbye, I told Anne what she can do to make the text stop. Get on the do not call list, forward the messages to 7726, and if all else fails, send out TCPA letters. Do you think you'll try any of these things? I think I will probably forward to that number that you said. So I could do that. I don't know. I'd need more time, maybe in the summer, maybe during winter break, I could start suing and getting a little bit of money on the side. That could be my summer gig. Yeah, that could be it. That's your side hustle is suing scam packs. Yeah. For democracy. It's for democracy. Exactly. It's for democracy.

So the biggest takeaway for boomers is that if you want to donate, do not click that link. Just take the extra three seconds, go to the website or get your checkbook because I know it's in your purse. Yeah. You still have a checkbook. Use it. Yeah. I know you want to balance that thing. They love to balance a checkbook. They sure do. After the break, we tackle one of our most frequently asked questions. What's the deal with polling? Stay tuned. Welcome back to Explain It To Me. I'm your host, Jonquan Hill.

And I'm here with our very talented producer, Sophie. Hey, Sophie. Hi. Okay, so as you know, we've been asking people to call in with their questions about the election. Yes, if you have a question, let us know. Call 1-800-618-8545. There's one topic that we keep getting asked about over and over and over again, and that's polling.

Polling. People want to know about the polling, specifically how accurate the current polls are, how polling has evolved to make them more accurate since our 2016 moment. And then my current favorite just says, election polling methodology, reliability, improvement. To get some answers, I called up my colleague Christian Paz. He's a senior political reporter here at Vox. And lately, he's been covering the election with a specific focus

on young voters and voters of color. He eats, breathes, and sleeps the polling numbers. I wake up in the morning in a panic. I open Twitter to see, because I've turned off push notifications, but I still have alerts set on the Twitter, on the X app for various kinds of polling updates, fundraising updates, new media, you know, ad buys that campaigns are making, other political news. I do this in the morning. Oh my gosh, all the greatest hits over your coffee. Literally. I want to lay some groundwork before we jump in.

Why is polling happening in the first place? What is the point in all of this? The function of polling, I think, fundamentally, is to give us another tool to measure public opinion, to measure how people are feeling at any given point in time, and how to essentially correct our own biases about what is happening in terms of what issues are in the conversation or, in this case, what is happening in an election. It's a useful statistical, mathematical tool for us to figure out what's going on around us, to move beyond just analysis of vibes, to get beyond just what we're seeing on social media, to get beyond our bubbles. Is that what you would say the role of polling plays in your reporting? Like not too long ago, you were in Philly, like hanging out with people doing outreach programs in both the Harris and the Trump campaigns. Like, I'm curious what the role of that polling plays in your reporting.

Like, how does it fit into all of that? I'm not even worried so much really in my political writing about what specific percentage point increases that looks like. I care about a trend. Is there like a broader shift happening? It's a grounding for a trend story, a grounding for a greater story about what's happening in America. And it supplements or at least gives a basis for the kinds of reporting and conversations I want to be having with people. Yeah, it sounds like for you, you know, the polling is a way to say, OK, there's something going on here. Let me go talk to some people and find out what the deal with that is. How do we know if a poll is accurate?

Because it's, I mean, it's easy to kind of get the answers you want from who you want them from. This is one of those things that I'm sorry to say I'm not going to be able to have a perfect answer because polling isn't perfect. Like it fundamentally has error involved in it. When I think about how a poll is accurate, how a poll is right, I'm taking into account a few different things like who's running the poll. Are they aligned with a specific party to begin with? If it's a Democratic firm or a Republican firm, there's probably a different reason behind them making that information public. Maybe they want to juice

fundraising or attention from national media, or maybe they just want to give the impression, right, that the race isn't as out of the realm of possibility for them to win. I think the other thing I'm also looking at is something really basic, but it's margin of error. You know, that's the window in which a poll's result kind of exists where if it's like 51 49 but it's a margin of like three percent you could say that the person who has the 51 is up but really it could be plus or minus you know three in one direction or the other direction so is that really a lead no it's better to just say it's tied. And so I think that question gets into a lot of other conversations about what exactly we want a poll

to do. Because like I said, for me, a poll is accurate looking at all these things, but you can only really judge whether it's accurate after the fact. One of the most recent stories I wrote, which was, can we trust the polls, right? Are polls accurate? The first response I get from pollsters and from analysts who analyze these polls is to remind people that polling is a blunt tool, that it's not like a precision tool that sciences are exact. So exact science is kind of repetitive. But like polling is not exact. And part of that comes from quirks that make it more difficult to run polls there or to then correct for any potential errors in your sample. Like Wisconsin, for example, doesn't provide data in its public elections in terms of its voter registration, in terms of race and gender or political affiliation. So then it becomes difficult to correct some of the errors that you might have in how you're polling. Christian and I recorded this two weeks ago, the same week that a new New York Times Siena poll came out. Before we got into it, I wanted to know the context. You know, we didn't fall out

of a coconut tree. All the polls are telling us right now is that it's an extremely close national election, statewide election. And if you look at polling averages, not much has changed since the conventions. If anything, we did see a little bit of a bump for Kamala Harris after the first debate. And since then, things have remained pretty standard. The polls have not moved that much. Favorability for Kamala Harris has really shot up, which is one big reason why this remains competitive after it wasn't that competitive once Joe Biden's campaign was fizzling out over the summer. We had assassination attempts. We've had indictments and still numbers haven't moved.

And what all that reveals is polarization is real. You know, people have picked their sides and Republicans are backing Trump. Democrats are backing Harris. And we're moving toward what one pollster once told me was like a reality, a world where like no candidate will fall below 47 percent by the end of the day. Oh, wow. That's it's going to be like it's 47, 47. And then everyone's just battling out over that remaining single digit of support that's left. Yeah. So it's like five people who are going to

determine who the next president of the United States is. Yes. I mean, this election is going to come down to like less than 100,000 votes in like three to four states. Wow. And so that's what makes it hard to get a good sense of like just specifically how close the margins are in various states, especially at the battleground state level. It looks like Pennsylvania is going to be the place that the election may end up getting decided. But this Time-Siena poll that you mentioned was really interesting, I think, because it has a few things that we assumed, and we look at it, and you're like, yeah, that makes sense. And then some things that you look at, and you're like, that doesn't make a ton of sense, right? So the first thing is you have results that show nationally that Harris is up by three points within the margin of error,

but that she is overall keeping this really competitive. That fits with the average lead that she has in other national polls and polling averages. The second is they polled Texas, right? We haven't really gotten that many polls out of Texas. Yeah. That also looks pretty normal. It's Donald Trump is up,

leading solidly out of the margin of error by about six points. And so that's naturally how we kind of expect Texas to look like. And then the third one was Florida, which over the years has no longer is a swing state. It's becoming more and more conservative, more Republican. And so the expectation we get, right, is it's probably going to be Republican.

But I think an interesting thing emerges from there where it gave Trump like a 13 point advantage. Oh, wow. Which is pretty significant. Yeah, that's huge. A lot of people see that and they're like, oh, see, so polling is broken. That can't possibly be true. Like, I feel like if you're a super red state, why wouldn't that be true? And that's the interesting thing because what that poll is telling us,

the New York Times itself, Nate Cohn, did a write-up about explaining some of these results and what makes it different if you're super, super nerdy and want to torture yourself about polling. I love torture. Methodology. But they use a different metric to weight their polls than other pollsters do. Christian says that that's an important factor to consider when trying to understand one poll's results in the context of another poll's results. So weighting is a practice that pollsters use. It's not universal. Every pollster kind of has their own formula that they use.

But it's when they go out into the field, get the results back, and then I'm going to try to correct that sample for what the electorate might look like or the electorate looks like to begin with. So I can do that for gender and sex, you know, make sure that I have a representative kind of balance of women and men. Same in terms of education. I might try to do that in terms of age and in terms of race. So weighting is essentially a backup technique and practice that pollsters use to make sure that whatever result they get doesn't look just completely impossible to believe, that it kind of aligns with what electorate exists there or the electorate

that might end up showing up. Let's say we have some data. We're looking at it. What are you looking for? What makes you go, huh? So I think I would break it into two things, right? First is like, how much do I want to trust this? Again, who's behind this? I check the ratings of a pollster. At this point, I'm beginning to look at likely voter data so in the past uh because it was so far out from the election most of the polls we were getting were about registered voters so that's just like anyone who can possibly vote in the state um likely voters you know has a little more weighting involved there because it's uh a pollster's best guess of the electorate that will end up showing up to vote then Then I'm also looking, obviously,

at the margin of error to make sure that any conclusions that I'm getting are, I can actually say are real and are tracking a trend. And then that's the last thing on that front that I would say is I'm comparing the same pollster over the last few months just to see what trends they're tracking, because maybe that can't predict something but at least it's giving me a sense of the direction that the race is kind of moving in but still there's a question nagging at me who are polls even for the candidates political sickos like me and christian voters yeah why do we put ourselves through all of this i mean part of it is like there's like an empirical scientific nature to it of like just wanting to know what's happening around us. Part of this is useful for people in advocacy or movements trying to get a sense of how many people support this policy, how many people support this ideology, how many people would be open to this kind of message on health care, rights you know minimum wage and on that front i

think frankly issue polling is much more useful than horse race like candidate polling it's for journalists for sure it's for media to be able to you know this has been written about so many times but like the way that political journalism is fundamentally kind of for is to create narratives about what's going on. And polling is incredibly useful to be able to set some of those narratives. So that's one thing. It's definitely useful for the candidates and that's why they have public and private polling, internal polling. Useful for the parties to get a sense of where they should be sending money, where it's useful to be sending volunteers and staff. It's useful for be sending volunteers and staff.

It's useful for activists and volunteers who want to participate in something. Like if they see that a particular race is close, they might want to sign up to volunteer and help in that particular area. And I think fundamentally, it's also for, honestly, like a Vox reader or a Vox listener. You don't want to feel left out. You don't want to feel like you don't know something. And in some cases, you might feel anxiety or you might feel stress and you just want to get a better sense of what will happen. Do polls at all seem, I guess, obsolete to you? You know, if we want to figure out where to ship flu vaccines, we're not going to call

1,000 random numbers. We're going to go to Google Analytics and see where people are searching for flu symptoms. Like, why are we doing this with politics when we don't do it really with any other aspect of life? That's a great question. And it's like asking me to like, I'm the ice guy. And you're asking me if ice cream is obsolete. Should we get rid of ice cream? I would never say that. FYI, ice cream forever. Sorry, it's like a random comparison that I made.

No, I love it. It's still useful. It's still describing things. It's still people talking to real people. Like pollsters aren't making these numbers up. They're talking to Americans and getting a sense of what's going on. In terms of like in the election space, the answer that I get when I ask the pollsters is like what would we go off of otherwise? Like would we go off of yard signs? Would we go off of crowd sizes? Would we go off of crowd sizes? Would we go off of just fundraising numbers? This is what a lot of people in this analyst universe call the fundamentals, right? Like, who's raising more money, who's bringing, who's holding more events, who has more volunteers, who has more people showing up, who at their rallies, who has

more yard signs that they're giving out. And all those things are really, really subjective and are fundamentally less objective than what a poll tries to do. So on that front, I don't think polling is obsolete. I think it's gotten less precise, but that's okay. It's still giving us a directional sense, right? It's still giving us a sense of how things are changing, how things are moving, if not exactly predicting who is going to win or by how much they're going to win. Yeah, I keep imagining a world where we don't have any polling numbers, where we kind of don't know the direction it's going to go. We just have debates and talks and stuff and there's no numbers. And then we just wake up on election day and we're like, I guess we'll see. And it's breaking my brain. I'm not going to lie to you.

But maybe, but no, it's just staring me out. And maybe that's the point. I don't know. It makes me feel funny. That's kind of the point, I think, right? I mean, if all the good pollsters stop doing polling and we stop relying on good pollsters, there's still going to be bad pollsters out there

and people who are trying to push specific narratives. And the incentives are already there. Like we exist in a world where an outlet will run with whatever is out there if the good pollsters aren't out there putting out good information and being transparent about what they're trying to do. And I mean, I don't know. I love vibes, but you... Man cannot live on vibes alone. So true. Well, Christian, thank you so much for explaining this to us. Always fun to nerd out.

And God save us all. Christian Paz is a senior political reporter at Vox. FYI, during our conversation, he also gave me a list of the pollsters he trusts. I wrote about it in Vox's Today Explained newsletter. You can find a link to sign up in our show notes. That's it for this episode of Explain It To Me. Thanks to Anne for calling in to find out what was going on with those unhinged texts. Like I mentioned before, we want to know what's on your mind the week of the election.

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Go to vox.com slash members to join today. Thanks for listening, and talk to you soon. you