What A Day - I've Got Polls But I'm Not A Pollster

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

With less than a week until November 3rd, almost 70 million people have already voted in this election as of last night, which is over half the total in 2016.We talk with Charlotte Swasey, the Vice President of polling at Data for Progress, about how things are looking for Biden, how to read the polls, and what results we may and may not get on Election night. And in headlines: protests in Philly over the shooting of Walter Wallace Jr., California’s record-breaking fire season continues, and Russia implements mask mandate.Show Links:Make a plan to vote: votesaveamerica.com

It's Wednesday, October 28th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick. And this is What A Day, where we are calling on Congress to pass a law against celebrity birthday parties on private islands. Yeah, or at least take down their Twitter account so we don't have to hear about how humbled they are to be rich. Yeah. Section 230 is actually all about not being able to post about this specific thing. I'm glad. I'm glad that they're finally getting to the bottom of it. On today's show, a conversation about polling and the 2020 election with Charlotte Swayze

of Data for Progress. Then some headlines. But first, the latest. With just six short days until November 3rd, almost 70 million people have already voted in this election as of last night, which is over half the total in 2016. Today, President Trump will be making stops in Arizona, a state that he's trying to defend this year. And Biden will be in Florida, Iowa, and Wisconsin later this week. That's right. And today we're going to talk about everyone's favorite subject and a thing that no one has opinions on. That is right. Polling.

In 2016, in the final days of the campaign, there was movement away from Hillary Clinton and towards Trump with a final national polling average actually ending up being close to Clinton's ultimate national vote win of over 2% across the country. Of course, that was not enough to win the Electoral College. The late movement disproportionately favored Trump, giving him the slimmest of wins in a few battleground states. Yeah, and that was 2016. But polling this time around is a little bit different. That is right. So while we don't know what is going to happen, of course, Biden's national polling lead is much bigger in these final days. According to FiveThirtyEight's polling average, Biden leads 52 to 43. And according to Real Clear Politics, Biden leads 50.7 to 43.3. Sorry for all the decimals. There are also fewer undecideds. The race has been more

stable for longer, less third party presence, and pollsters have learned a lot of lessons in both their approach and presentation of certainty since then. Yeah, so we spoke with Charlotte Swayze, the vice president of polling at the progressive firm Data for Progress, about what they're seeing this year, how things are looking for Biden, the massive early vote and what's going to happen or not happen on election night. Here's that conversation. Charlotte, thank you so much for taking the time today. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Of course. So I want to start with just basic polling overall. A lot of people kind of lost faith in the polls broadly after 2016. As a relatively new firm in this space, can you talk about how the polls themselves have changed since then with things like waiting for education levels? And do you feel like they are more accurate in terms of capturing who is actually going to turn out to vote? Yeah. So, I mean, I was working as a pollster in 2016 in my first job. So I've kind of been present through this, what was really a bit of a reckoning for the field. So Data for Progress, and I think everybody in the polling space is hyper aware of not repeating what happened in 2016.

Like on the one hand, what sort of happened is that variables that we don't normally look at, and we can't really measure it, things like social trust and willingness to talk to a pollster and political engagement, all of a sudden, were sort of the deciding factors of who you'd vote for in the election, which obviously, if you're if that is like this underlying factor into who responds to your polls, it's going to explode your accuracy. The other thing is that honestly, the polls were pretty close in most places. And we had the situation where a couple points was a huge deal. So this cycle, in addition to waiting for education and doing all this like kind of social trust work and doing new methods, like we do text polls now. We did not do that in 2016. Folks are just, I think, really reckoning with error bars and with like,

you'll see Nate Silver has these huge error bars on what's a very, very positive forecast. So I think people are, if anything, over correcting in this kind of 2016, I don't know, fear of going back that we have as pollsters. Yeah, right. For sure. And I think, you know, the people who are very desperate to see like accurate information in advance, people who are maybe very nervous or are, you know, checking more sources than ever.

So that's for sure. But your polling is actually looking pretty promising for Biden right now. Can you talk about what's driving that and where there might still be some uncertainty in that polling? Yeah. So we've been doing a whole bunch of, lately it's mostly been Senate states, but we also poll presidential there. And we've seen really good results for Democrats as a whole. We're seeing pretty decent shifts from 2016 in a lot of these states. We're showing Texas as a near tie, which is amazing because it's Texas. And I think a lot of what's driving that is just like Trump's favorability is super low. He's an incumbent. We know incumbents usually win if nothing bad happens.

But I mean, you can look around the world and see why his favorability would have utterly tanked. And so we see Republican voters who in some cases, even if they're not willing to vote for a Democrat for Senate, are willing to vote for Joe Biden because they're just over it at this point. Yeah. And one of the things I was curious about, like when you look at some of the cross-steps of these things is that some of the weaknesses for Biden in polling have been attributed sometimes to Trump doing marginally better with groups like Latino men, for instance. Are you seeing that as a trend? And could that make the difference in some states that we're looking at? Yeah, I think this is definitely something we're looking into. It's really hard to

tell, especially with trends among Latino voters, just even the past estimates from 2016 are all over the map. And when you're looking for a three to five point shift, if you have three to five points of uncertainty in your estimate, like it's incredibly hard to know. We do think there is some evidence of Trump doing better among like Latino men, specifically maybe Black men to some extent. It's probably not enough to make a big difference with this massive move against him. But it's definitely something that Democratic groups are taking heart in tailoring their outreach and trying to reach these groups that are kind of Trump is picking up in this time where he's doing really terribly overall.

Yeah. And the other thing that we've also been talking about and sort of trying to keep track of is given the pandemic and expanded early voting, there's obviously this crazy historic turnout well before election day, like possibility of what, like 100 million by the weekend or something that's like that. So when you like go about measuring a pool of likely voters, how do you take that into account in the actual poll? Yeah, so we've started adding questions as of a couple weeks ago where we ask people if they've already voted. We field to a likely voter sample, which means that we're trying to give our survey to people we think are going to vote. And then we actually ask them about it in the poll. Like, are you going to vote? Have you already voted?

And then we split them going to vote. And then we actually ask them about it in the poll. Like, are you going to vote? Have you already voted? And then we split them off into questions. So if you've already voted, we ask you who you voted for. If you haven't voted yet, we say, like, who are you going to pick? We're seeing that our samples of folks who've already voted are very democratic, like really, really democratic. I think more so than you'd expect in a normal election, because normally early male vote is like people who are super politically engaged and want to vote on the first day they can, or like elderly people who are using ballots because going to a polling place is difficult for them. This cycle, it's everybody in numbers that we've never seen before. So when you're talking about the typical early voters versus this pandemic year, and, you know, we talked a little bit about how, you know, it's usually people who are more engaged or have a reason to do so early. Now it's everyone. And now it's more, now it's more democratic. Does that bode well for actual election day? Like, should we expect there to be huge turnout on election day from either party? Or, you know, is this kind of,

do you all feel that from your polling, this is reflective of how it's going to go? So, I mean, it means that election day is a bit of a toss up. We have this, what's essentially a huge number of democratic votes banked, like those are already in, we know they're cast. And then election day is a huge question mark. There's like two main sources of uncertainty. One is turnout. So are Republicans like, oh no, Democrats have voted early, we better go to the polls. And we see sort of similarly massive turnout, or are they like, not so into it, it rains, there's, I don't know, the lines are really long, something goes wrong, Trump says something terrible on the news. And then maybe they don't show up as much. That's just something we're literally not going to know until we start

getting counts of votes in. The other unknown and something that I think about a lot as part of our election night reporting project, which is this election night integrity project dashboard we're running, is the order in which those votes get counted. So depending on the state, either we're going to get in-person election day vote first and then we're going to get mail. Some of them have said that they'll be counting them simultaneously.

Some of them count votes that are mailed in or cast early ahead of time. So there are these dual uncertainties in who will vote, when they'll vote, and then also in just literally how we will get reports on those. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Gosh, it's not going to be like anything that's ever happened before. No, it's going to be a whole new world. Yeah, nightmares. Scenario we put ourselves in. It's this weird, like, stressful scenario. And, like, for me, I've kind of been in campaign boiler rooms and in reporting rooms where, like, I'm in a physical conference room with a bunch of people who want to tweet stuff about how we're doing or give directions to leadership or update the candidate. And I'm, like, refreshing my spreadsheet and trying to figure out what's going on. And all of a sudden, everybody is in that place. And so I think it's really crucial for folks to understand kind of the pitfalls and to know that unless they are

doing something with that information, unless they like have a decision to make, it really is in their best interest to just give it a bit, whether that's hours or days until we get full results in. Yeah, that's right. And on this difference between the, you know, early vote turnout, election day turnout, one of the things that like you see, I think Democrats trying to figure out is, are we cannibalizing voters early on that, you know, just aren't going to show up later? Or are we just adding an insane amount of people that are voting for Democrats up and down the ballot? Is there any sort of sense of which of those outcomes seems to be more likely at the moment? Yeah, I mean, we've been looking into this. This is like the question right now. And this is always the question with early vote. Our general sense is that a lot of it

is votes that would be cast anyways, getting cast early. There are definitely some gains, like we are seeing some places, you just can't get to turn out this high without seeing some new voters. But there's some evidence, I think there's a paper from Wisconsin where it shows that weekday early vote tends to be kind of cannibalizing election day, but weekend and to some extent mail can actually bring in new voters. But again, all of those are calibrated

to like normal elections. Right. So as much as we know, it's still kind of a question mark what it'll be like this time. And I wanted to ask also like on a state level. So I think we mentioned Texas at the beginning of the call because everybody's super excited about Texas. In this week, I think that there was a split among four polls. Two showed Biden kind of narrowly leading, two showed Trump narrowly leading in the state. I'm curious, if you got a chance to look at the New York Times Sienna one, what do you think led to

the difference between yours and that one? And does that say anything about sort of the unique challenges in polling Texas and the challenges that we've been talking about overall? Yeah, so we kind of have taken a look at those. We were in the camp of having Biden narrowly leading. I think the main difference is like how you treat Hispanic respondents and your exact numbers there makes a huge difference for Texas. It's both like what percent of the voting population you think that'll be. And even stuff is in the weeds as literally which measure of a voter being Hispanic you use. You can use stuff that's like their registration. You can

use self-report. You can use a model. You can use name. Those tiny methodological decisions make a big difference in states like Texas where the exact like how much of the Hispanic population will vote and how much will vote for Trump is one of the main questions so I think that's where we kind of varied we had Hispanic voters I think a bit more democratic than Cohn did and I'm obviously crossing my fingers that we're right. But again, we'll kind of see after election day or election week, election week. Yeah, exactly. Election month, election, everything,

nothing lasts the right amount of time anymore. But so we have a lot of listeners who are following the polls as closely as we are, maybe not as closely as you are. But, you know, we've, I think, made the point clearly that these aren't really a prediction or a promise, but these are just the numbers that we're given. So if our listeners see a poll, right, what would you like them to take away from it? Like, what is something that they can say, I read this poll, here's what I'm

getting out of it, and here's how it maybe'll inform how I take in the results as they come. Oh man, I love this. So my recommendations, if you see a poll is one, like look at the source because people can tweet whatever you can, like I can go on Twitter and be like, according to my poll of people who live near me. So like make sure it's a valid source. And then also look at the polling averages, like even a completely legit legit like awesome poll can be 10 points high because they just got a weird sample that day so before you read too much into any poll look at the averages look at where the kind of consensus on that race is and then i think the final thing is like figure out if this is going to impact what you're doing in your life and only pay too much attention to it if that actually like changes a decision you're making like if you work on a campaign and you're like where should i spend money sure look at the polls

great gotcha if you're like should i call voters and tell them to vote you probably don't need polls for that like you can just yeah you, yeah, it's always a good idea. Well, Charlotte, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. This was awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This is really fun. That was Charlotte Swayze at Data for Progress. And now that there is less than a week left in the election, if you have a mail ballot, it's time to drop it off in person at a ballot drop box or at the polls on election day, if your state allows that, or vote early in person or on Election Day. The USPS is being really, really explicit that they can't guarantee election mail will be delivered in time for the election as of now. As always, go to votesaveamerica.com to check the rules in your state and make a plan. It's Wednesday, WOD Squad.

And for today's Temp Check, we're talking about an important cultural institution that was produced inside of a quarantine bubble. It's the new season of the Jersey Shore Family Vacation, which takes place in a massive empty hotel in an undisclosed location, and it's premiering next month after the election on November 19th. Seems like a lot of work for a Jersey Shore reunion season, but I guess MTV decided, hey, it's worth it, and we're spending money on nothing else, so why not? So Giddy, while we are on the subject of coronavirus proofed mtv reality shows from the early 2010s what show do you want to bring back and how do you propose that they shoot it oh i think it could be fun if remember at the emmys where the people would come to the houses in the crazy like hazmat suits to give the awards over if you had the opportunity to deploy people in those an mtv cribs could be really fun you know where we are we are visiting a lot of people's uh a lot of celebrities different houses and seeing like what their covet setups are like you know what extra like furniture and crazy stuff have

they had access to that us normal folks have not had access to. That would be something that I would want to see. And also like, how would they take precautions for the people who are walking in and filming it? You know, like almost a meta version of the original Cribs. Oh, I kind of love that. I also think that like, yeah, it could be in the same vein as Naomi Campbell on Instagram going through her like plane decontamination routine. Like, I would love to

see how they get through their packages. Who's delivering stuff to them? Do they have like help that just quarantined with them? Like clearly a lot of people are doing that. So I think that it's, that would be worthwhile. Yeah. I dig that. Yes. Maybe even we could revamp it a little bit. Like if they're not comfortable having us, we would be the hosts of this show in my proposed version of it in their house, then it's like accompany them on an activity and see are they wiping down the car? What's going on?

Anyway, many possible opportunities MTV, but same question Akilah, what show do you want to see here? There was this show, it was more early 2000s that I was thinking of from MTV it was called Boiling Points. And so I don't know if you remember this, but the whole point of that show was like you made money the longer you would put up with something annoying, but you didn't know that you were on film.

So it would be like a person checking out your groceries in very slow motion. And the longer you didn't start complaining, the more money you could get. And I think that because things are so frustrating now, especially with Zoom, right? Like a boiling point Zoom where like things start happening, maybe not in the tube and vein, but like more along the lines of, you know, just a disconnection error or like somebody like changing the link a bunch of times. You being like, I can't do this.

I think that making money based on what you're willing to withstand in frustrating times is a great format. And I would love to see it now. That is truly genius. And like even as simple as somebody being able to mute somebody else as a way to, you know, raise the blood pressure. Man, that is hours of television. I would waste my life watching that. Yeah. Honestly, like I, yeah, I would love to see someone like deliver a package, but it always be missing and just like have them consistently be like, you just said you were here. Like I just I like the idea of someone else living out that fantasy of being enraged and, you know, maybe not making any money because of it. Yes. Yeah, I think this is great. I honestly I think MTV listens most days, but like today I really hope they're taking notes as well.

Yeah. And also writing those residual checks in advance. Well, just like that, we checked our temps, stay safe, stay cool. You know, don't reach your boiling point and we'll be back after some ads. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. Protests erupted in Philadelphia this week after police fatally shot a 27-year-old black man. Walter Wallace Jr. was reportedly holding a knife several feet away from officers when they fired at him multiple times. A video of the shooting circulated on social media, and Wallace's mother was recorded at the scene attempting to intervene. She reportedly told the police that her son had mental health issues. Protesters in the city began marching on Monday, the night of the shooting, and were met

with police officers in riot gear. 91 arrests followed the first night of protests, and the city has called for local reinforcements for expected protests this week. Activists and some local lawmakers are criticizing the two officers that shot Wallace for failing to use de-escalation tactics, of course, and they're demanding the release of body cam footage. It's just devastating every day. California's record-breaking fire season continues with two large wildfires burning in the southern part of the state. 90,000 people there are under evacuation orders as the fires grow. It doesn't help that the area is also experiencing bone-dry humidity and strong winds. The humidity is almost certainly a result of climate change.

The wind is less clear. Maybe we'll ask Donald Trump. He knows the most about it. Utility company Southern California Edison has already come out and said its equipment might have been responsible for starting one of the fires, which has burned through over 12,000 acres as of last night. Quick throwback. A different California utility company, PG&E, just emerged from bankruptcy this year after generating $30 billion in liability from huge wildfires in recent years. This year, PG&E has been cutting off power to their hundreds of thousands of customers to avoid the same mistake, and it looks like it's working for them so far. Maybe not so much for people who keep losing power. Yeah, that can't be good either way. America may have won the race to the moon, but Russia has won

the race to the mask. Nailed it. By imposing mandatory mask laws yesterday as the country fights off a second wave of coronavirus. Russia imposed a mask mandate during its first lockdown in the spring, but since then, President Vladimir Putin has left pandemic measures to regional leaders. The country announced its vaccine back in July, plus plans to produce millions of doses by the end of the year, but it hasn't been rigorously tested and very few people have taken it. So for now, they're stuck with the old-fashioned mouth vaccine, which is what I call masks when no one is listening and sometimes when lots of people are listening. Yesterday, Russia recorded 16,550 new COVID-19 cases nationwide. It's fifth day in a row with over 16,000 cases.

Russia has the fourth highest number of cases in the entire world behind the US, India and Brazil. But leaders there have promised not to enforce another lockdown, which is how countries that aren't handling this well say, I'm actually a cool mom. Yeah, if you're gonna die, do it in my country. Exactly. Ireland's own free willy, a dolphin called Fungi, who lived in the harbor of a town called Dingle for the last 37 years, has now been missing for two weeks. Now, I assume you all know what I'm talking about, but just in case you don't, Fungi's presence in Dingle as a consistently friendly dolphin turned the formerly sleepy town into a tourist destination complete with dolphins spotting boat tours, restaurants and souvenir shops, a Fungi statue, and so much more.

In an interview, one distillery owner described Fungi's impact, plus said the words Fungi and Dingle at least two times each. Fungi's part of Dingle has been that he's unified so many businesses. People may come to see Fungi, but from that, they've done Fungi, but they've discovered Dingle. Okay, so Fungi became so vital to Dingle that some proposed he was actually multiple dolphins being switched out by local businesses. This theory is called the Olsen twins of the sea hypothesis, and it's not that outrageous, guys. With an estimated 40 years of age, Fungi was very old,

so most believe he has swum on to the big dingle in the sky. Residents feel confident that the tourism industry he helped build will live on, which is what he would have wanted, assuming that dolphins can have complex thoughts about tourism and the economy. They don't have their own money, but maybe they use like sand dollars or something. I don't know. Yeah.

Why they accepted currency. Yeah. And those are the headlines. Quick announcement before we go. WOD squad today marks the one year anniversary of what a day. Can you believe it? We've did it. We are old enough to get rid of our

pacifier i i am throwing the pacifier out the window and i am shocked um truly but as a thank you and as an anniversary gift to ourselves frankly we are offering our listeners a special 20 discount off of our headlines t-shirt while supplies last when you use the promo code headlines 20 at checkout head over to crooked Crooked.com slash store now. And thank you all for being part of the WOD squad. We love you guys. We love you. That is all for today.

If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, stay away from private islands, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just TripAdvisor pages for Dingle like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And happy one year anniversary to WOD. I'm going to celebrate by recording the next episode. I think that's probably my move as well. Man. I'll see you there. Okay. Sounds good. What a Day is a production

of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tun is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein and our executive producers

are Katie Long, Akilah Hughes, and me. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka.