We try to fix election polling (update)

Polling is facing an existential crisis. People aren't picking up the phone. Nobody wants to talk to pollsters. Trust is on the line. We pluck a solution from the economics canon and convince a polling firm to let us test it. Today on the show, we head to Marist College — home of the Marist Poll — to learn how to be pollsters ourselves. We learn the great moments in polling history, the latest science of polling, and find out all the tricks that pollsters use to get people to finish their surveys. Then we get on the phone and give it a try ourselves. And offer some of our own solutions. This episode was originally published https://www.npr.org/2022/11/04/1134434712/planet-money-tries-election-polling before the 2022 midterm elections. We have an update on our idea to save polling, which Marist is still testing, and we find out what it might be able to tell us about the 2026 midterms. Music: "Partyline https://npr.sourceaudio.com/track/22447336, "The Danzig Connection https://npr.sourceaudio.com/track/38874305, and "Saku https://npr.sourceaudio.com/track/41204479" Read: Our book:Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD Our weekly longformPlanet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUB Our weeklyIndicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow: Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuws TikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrq YouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3C Facebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS This update was produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was mastered by Gilly Moon with help from Cena Loffredo. The original episode was edited by Jess Jiang. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more atplus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Speaker 01

  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  Every time election season comes around and you see all of those frantic election polls in the news, I think back to the time that I learned just how hard it is to actually do one of those election polls and why it's gotten so hard. This was back in 2022, when we, as in, we at Planet Money, had an idea to try and maybe fix polling. And one very generous polling outfit actually let us try out our idea. So we thought we would revisit that story today because we also have an update to how polling is changing and how our fix is actually still being used, though maybe not how we had originally imagined. Details about that at the end. But first, let us start with a trip

• 1:05Speaker 02

  that Nick and I took for the original story. You and I headed to Poughkeepsie, New York, to visit the Marist College Polling Center. Polling is how we figure out what Americans think about anything.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  And for pollsters, this is the most exciting time of the year. Right here, they are making hundreds of thousands of calls to figure out who's likely to win in the upcoming midterm elections.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  And the person tasked with training up all the people who do the dialing is Daniela Charter. And Daniela has agreed not only to let us sit in on a training, but later tonight, she's going to let us do the dialing for a real poll. But first, she needs to run us through the script we're going to use.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  So why don't we start, Jeff? Read that introduction, my first victim.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  Hello. My name is Jeff. I'm calling for Marist College. We're talking to people in your community and collecting opinions about issues facing residents.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  Well, who are you? Why are you calling me?

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Daniela's mission is to prepare us for the hundreds of calls we're going to make tonight and all the different ways people are going to try to avoid answering our survey.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  Sometimes people will come back right away and be like, I'm not buying anything. Or they hear college, I'm not donating. No, no, no, no. We're not looking for money. We're not selling anything. We just want your opinion. We're doing important research.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  We came to Marist College because, well, full disclosure, Marist has a working relationship with NPR. They do some polls for us. And also, Marist has one of the top polling operations in the country.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  And one reason they're so good, Daniela says, is the magic phrases they use to keep people on the phone.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  My very favorite is, let's try a few and see how it goes.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  As in, let's try a few questions and see how it goes. She says it works for nearly everything. If a person says they're too busy, well, let's try a few and see how it goes. If they say they don't have any opinions, well, let's try a few, see how it goes.

• 3:09Speaker 04

  And it works. It really does. Does it work every single time? No, but you'd be surprised.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Do you use that term in your personal life now?

• 3:16Speaker 04

  Definitely. Let's try a few and see how it goes. In fact, I think I just said it to my husband yesterday about something. I think about changing his diet. I really do. I really, I just remembered that. I really think that I said it.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Daniela teaches us some other phrases we can use to get people to answer. Every opinion matters. There are no right or wrong answers. It'll just take a few minutes. I promise.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Though Daniela says her most important advice, it's not a phrase. No, no, no. It's more of a state of mind. She tells us, when you are out there dialing later, promise me this. You're going to throw a big smile on your face.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Smile while you dial. Absolutely.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Smile while you dial. Because if you smile.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  Sound upbeat, you sound good, and you sound like someone that the respondent's going to want to talk to.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  That's how you hook them. And that's really important. Because the biggest problem that Daniela and other pollsters are facing right now, not enough people are completing surveys. They're hanging up. Or worse, they're not even picking up the phone.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  And when people don't respond, it is way harder to get accurate polls. It has become a full-on crisis for the pollsters and maybe for the rest of us. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  And I'm Jeff Guo. A lot of important information, a lot of economic data, like what the unemployment rate is, where inflation's at. All of that relies on polling.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  But how do you know the polls are right? For all the pollsters of America, this is their final exam, their big chance to check their work and make a case for their very existence.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Because for years, the polls have been off. They've been getting elections wrong. People are saying, you can't trust the polls anymore.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Today on the show is polling broken. And can we fix it? We start smiling and dialing to find out.

• 5:17Speaker 05

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• 6:28Speaker 03

  We got to Marist ready to dial. And they told us, actually, you got to wait. Because pollsters generally work at night. That's when more people are likely to be home to pick up the phone. And so because of this, pollsters tend to be night owls.

• 6:42Speaker 06

  We're really not morning people.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  This is the director of the Marist Poll, Barbara Carvalho.

• 6:47Speaker 06

  We start the day probably about noon, and then we go to about midnight.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Have you looked at a mirror recently? Was there something there? Or?

• 6:56Speaker 06

  Well, you know, some people think we're even worse than vampires. You can get rid of a vampire a lot easier than you can get rid of a pollster.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Barbara's a big deal in the polling world. She's been a pollster her entire career. For decades, she's run every aspect of the Marist Poll. What questions they ask, the methodology they use, the math behind it. It's Barbara's job to make sure they get things right. And maybe more importantly, that they don't mess things up.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  And that's because the history of polling has been defined, unfortunately, by blunders. And so to show us how polling works today, Barbara took us through the three most infamous blunders.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  The first major blunder was the election of 1936. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for reelection. His opponent was Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas.

• 7:48Speaker 07

  The Republicans think Alf Landon is the man who will win in November. He is our next president if he can beat Roosevelt.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  People were glued to their radios and to their magazines.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the most popular magazines in America at the time was called The Literary Digest and was especially famous for its election polls. For years, The Literary Digest mailed out millions of surveys to their subscribers and to any other address they could get their hands on.

• 8:16Speaker 06

  They would survey people who owned cars because there was a list of people who owned cars. They would survey people who owned homes because that was a list.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  The Literary Digest asked these millions of people who they were going to vote for. It was basically trying to do the vote before the vote. And for a long time, this worked. The Literary Digest had a 25-year track record of getting elections right.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Enter George Gallup, a pioneer of modern polling. Gallup had a hunch, based on math, that there was a better way to predict election results. Rather than get the opinions of millions of people, Gallup said, I'll just interview a fraction of that amount, just 3%, but the right people. And they'll give me the more accurate answer.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  So in one corner, there was The Literary Digest Poll and their survey of 2 million people. They were saying, yeah, FDR is going down.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  They said it was going to be a land-on slide for Landon, that Alf Landon was going to land on Washington. Those are his campaign slogans, not our bad puns.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  And then there was Gallup and his teeny-tiny survey. And he said, no, actually, FDR is going to win.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  If you know anything about American history, you know who won this battle. It wasn't even close. FDR won all but two states. Gallup was right. And The Literary Digest went out of business.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Gallup said the problem with The Literary Digest Poll was that the respondents, even though there were a lot of them, they didn't look like America. They were wealthier than average. They owned cars. They subscribed to a magazine called The Literary Digest.

• 9:56Speaker 06

  Just from the name, Literary Digest, you kind of get a sense this is not an everyman's publication.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Are you saying that it's snooty to read?

• 10:06Speaker 06

  Well, I think for The Literary Digest, that was true.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Gallup said the issue was snooty people with their fancy cars and homes and books. They were not what's called a representative sample of voters.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  That was Gallup's big idea and the big lesson of polling blunder number one, that if you're going to conduct a poll, you have to talk to the right mix of people. Get a representative sample.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Math won.

• 10:33Speaker 06

  Math won. Math always wins.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  However, Gallup's victory lap, it wouldn't last long. Because the next big polling blunder was just around the corner. The famous Dewey defeats Truman headline, where a newspaper got the 1948 election results so very wrong, that was in part because Gallup and a bunch of other pollsters had been saying that Harry Truman would lose the election. How big of a moment was that for polling?

• 11:01Speaker 06

  Do we really have to talk about that? I mean, that is like one of the biggest polling debacles in the history of polling, and it had a significant impact.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, the polling blunder here was although the pollsters tried to get a representative sample, it just wasn't representative enough.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Here's what happened. Gallup had been telling his surveyors, just get me a bunch of people that look like the census. Go poll this many housewives, this many farmers, this many businessmen of a certain income bracket, and so on and so forth.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  And his pollsters would hunt for these very specific people, grab them off the street and ask them, you voting Dewey or Truman? This was problematic because it was hard to fill these buckets. And so the pollsters, who weren't paid all that well, some of them started to cut corners. All right, sure, you're not a well-heeled businessman, but say you were. You voting Dewey or Truman?

• 11:58Speaker 03

  So one of the big lessons from the Dewey defeats Truman disaster, polling blunder number two, is that it's really hard to make that representative sample by hand.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  And the way modern polling fixed this problem was with more statistics. The math people said, there's a better way of making a representative sample. And it's so simple that it almost sounds dumb. Here it is. Just pick randos. Just close your eyes and pick people at random.

• 12:30Speaker 06

  Generally, if you're looking at a simple random sampling, when you get to about 100 individuals, you can make some pretty clear generalizations about that particular group of people.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  This is the magic behind random polling. You don't have to go hunting around for the right people to make a representative sample. In fact, that can distort the poll by introducing bias. The math says a truly random sample won't be biased, and that even a small random sample will be surprisingly accurate. This was one of the most important ideas of the 20th century. It changed how scientists do research, changed how we study economics. And for pollsters, this became their holy grail, getting that perfect random sample.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Luckily, just around the corner, there was a revolutionary technology that would make it kind of easy to achieve that holy grail, the random sample, the telephone.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Did the telephone revolutionize polling?

• 13:32Speaker 06

  No question about it.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  At a certain point, by the 70s or 80s, almost every household in America had a telephone. And telephones are great for random sampling because you can just pick random numbers out of a list.

• 13:45Speaker 06

  So that would be the golden age of polling.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  And Barbara says the golden age lasted for decades, pretty much. People had landlines, and they were actually excited to pick up their phones. Soon, pollsters could even dial with a computer, robo-dialing. And even though there were complications over the years, like the rise of caller ID and cell phones, pollsters were able to get pretty close to that holy grail, that fully random representative sample.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Was there a time in the golden age of polling that you just nailed it?

• 14:19Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I think 2014.

• 14:24Speaker 07

  Get your popcorn popped. Plan your hydration needs accordingly because this is going to be a long night with lots of...

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Barbara and her team were at NBC that night, and she remembers the excitement, the delicious snacks, but mostly watching the election results roll in and how they totally matched her Marist polls.

• 14:43Speaker 06

  It was just so cool that everything just worked out perfectly, practically to the decimal point.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  But Barbara had a bad feeling.

• 14:52Speaker 06

  My comment to my colleagues was, relish this moment. Remember it forever because it doesn't always happen this way. And polling is always going to change, so you actually might not see this again.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Da, da, da.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  You jinxed it.

• 15:09Speaker 06

  I jinxed it. I totally jinxed it.

• 15:13Speaker 07

  Polls leading up to the 2016 presidential election were wrong, wrong, wrong.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  2:50 this morning, Donald Trump did what so many said could never happen.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  Many people this morning are wondering how could pollsters have gotten this so wrong?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, 2016 was the third major blunder for pollsters. A lot of them, and the people who make forecasts based on polls, said Hillary Clinton was going to be the president. That did not happen. The polls missed. And a lot of the polls missed again in 2018, and again in 2020. The golden age of polling, it's over.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  And mostly that's because it's gotten so much harder to get that random representative sample. These days, people just don't pick up the phone anymore. The response rate for telephone polls, that's plummeted to like less than one in 20. And what made it worse was in 2015, the FCC took away a really important tool. The FCC said, you pollsters, you can't robo-dial cell phones anymore.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  It's been seven years, you still seem pissed.

• 16:21Speaker 06

  Well, of course, because in order to connect with a cellphone, we have to hand dial that cellphone.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Literally hand dial.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Wait, are you literally boop-boop-booping the phone?

• 16:33Speaker 06

  We boop-boop-booped the phone for quite a while.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Barbara says the FCC rule, it tripled their costs. They need a lot more people to dial and a lot more snacks to feed them.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  What's really concerning is that it's become especially hard to reach certain kinds of people, like rural voters and younger voters. They're not participating in these surveys as much anymore. So all the samples that the pollsters are getting, they might not be that representative of America anymore. Like, some analysts think that Trump supporters specifically are less likely to talk to pollsters. And if that's true, that could explain why so many polls seem to favor Democrats recently.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  There are a lot of other challenges for pollsters, of course, but most of them come back to the same age-old problem, getting that perfect representative and random sample.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  And this has got a lot of pollsters wondering. Is this the death of the telephone poll?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  After the break. Just how bad has polling gotten? We try boop-boop-booping to find out.

• 17:47Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 17:51Speaker 00

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• 18:33Speaker 00

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• 19:02Speaker 02

  The Marist Survey Operations Center is a sight to behold. There are rows and rows of undergraduates with their AirPods and their sweatpants, and in the center, a prize wheel. You get to spin the wheel when you complete an interview.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Nick, are you ready?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  I think we've got to be ready. Like, it's dial-in time. We've got like 30 undergrads here. They're already dialing.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  The goal of the evening is to get as many completed surveys as possible. And lately, this has been really hard, like existential crisis for the polling industry hard. People just don't want to pick up their phones, or they screen their calls. And even when they do pick up, they don't want to talk to pollsters.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  But we figured, let's try a few and see how it goes. Let's see how many calls we have to make before we can get someone to complete our poll.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Nick, look, you have a special name tag. It says Nick Fountain Training.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Exclamation point.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Exclamation point. Got to smile while you dial.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  All right, good luck out there.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Okay, you got this. Nick and I are dialing North Carolina tonight. There's a contentious Senate race going on.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  The Marist folks set us up with our own cubicles, with these cute little headsets hooked up to phones. On the screens in front of us, there's a script. Jeff calls a few numbers, and one of them connects.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Hi, my name is Jeff Guo. I'm calling for Marist College.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Immediately, he starts using the tricks that Daniela taught us earlier.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  So we could try a few questions and see how it goes?

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Those magic phrases, they really work. Pretty soon, Jeff has finished his first interview.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  My God, this was stressful.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Wait, really? Wait, I get to spin the wheel? They take me to the middle of the room, and they let me spin the prize wheel.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Pick a prize? Pick a prize? Oh, I could pick any of these? I picked the M&Ms. Must be nice. Must be nice. Because while Jeff is enjoying his M&Ms basking in his glory, I'm striking out. Talking to people in your community and collecting opinions about issues facing residents. Oh, I got hung up on. I did not smile. I did not smile.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  For each call, Nick tests to document why he failed at getting a completed survey. In this case, caller hung up. That's one of nearly 20 reasons you can put down. There's also the soft refusal.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  He was nice about it, though.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  The hard refusal.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  He said, "Opinions are like buttholes. Everyone's got them."

• 21:38Speaker 03

  There are answering machines.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you. Is this a real person?

• 21:44Speaker 02

  There's a voicemail. So many answering machines.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  And fax machines.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  This is a fax machine. Sorry, it's blowing out my ear.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Remember, we are randomly dialing North Carolina numbers.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Have you ever seen someone strike out 70 times in a row? Things are not going well. I get so frustrated, I start rubbing my eyes. I'm sorry, I just lost a contact. Starting at about call 150, I start to think, yes, polling is truly doomed. Phone polling is supposed to be the gold standard of polling. It gave us the golden age. But it is impossible to get people to complete these surveys.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  And the people at Marist are trying to figure out how to do polls in this era when most people don't pick up the phones and don't want to answer surveys. Barbara says pollsters have come up with a couple of ways to try to fix the problem.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  The first solution is maybe just abandoning the phone poll altogether. A lot of pollsters these days are starting to text people. It's still a random survey. It just doesn't rely on people answering the phone.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  The second solution is to try to adjust the data that you have to make it more representative. For instance, if you can't get enough white rural voters in your sample, you could take the handful of white rural voters you did talk to and multiply them by like two or three or four. So you give their answers more weight. This solution is called weighting. It's how pollsters try to fix a bad sample by using math. And pollsters are getting more and more sophisticated about weighting. A lot weight by race and education. At Marist, after 2016, they've become a lot more careful to weight by geography.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  And they're also trying to weight by what people call psychographic factors. Jeff, who has actually gotten someone to pick up the phone, he got to ask these psychographic questions. And they're pretty weird.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  And have you smoked at least 100 cigarettes in your entire life?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  The idea behind this question is that it might help you understand someone better than their race or age or gender. And pollsters are hoping that this extra information will help them make their samples more representative.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  And there's a third solution, one that I personally think is brilliant. It involves this really interesting idea that economists love called the wisdom of crowds.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Some researchers have been testing these ideas. And they told us, if you want to predict an election, do not ask people who they are going to vote for. Instead, there are these two other questions that will get you way closer to the truth.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  The first question is, who do you think will win? And this is supposed to be better because you're asking people to make a prediction themselves based on everything they've heard and seen in the last few months.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  The other question, which the researchers really love, is, think of all the people in your life, your friends, your family, your coworkers. Who are they going to vote for? And the beauty of that question is you're basically asking people to share information from their social networks. So talking to one person is like talking to a dozen. Right now, Barbara and the folks at Marist, they aren't using these wisdom of the crowds techniques. So Barbara, we have a question for you.

• 24:57Speaker 06

  Uh-oh.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Would you be willing to let us test one of these methods in one of your polls?

• 25:05Speaker 06

  Oh, sure.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Really?

• 25:07Speaker 06

  Well, if they're, I mean, if they're appropriate, objective, you know, questions, that would be great.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  So here's the exciting news. We worked with Barbara to draft two questions. One where we ask people to predict the election and another asking them who the folks in their social circles are voting for.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  She said she would slip them into a poll Marist is doing before the midterms, run some analyses, and let us know how useful they might be for the future of polling.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Back in the dialing room, it's like 8:00 PM.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  I'm not even sad when they hang up anymore. I'm numb.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  We've been dialing for three hours and poor Nick is still striking out.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, at this point, I'd pretty much given up. I'd called 236 numbers and hadn't gotten a single completed survey. The rejections on top of rejections, they started to get rather amusing in a dark-humored sort of way.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  Another thing that's really cool about this, you get a lot of funny stories.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's a funny story? And then, just as one of the students is telling me a hilarious story. Hi there, my name's Nick Fountain. I'm calling from Marist College. We're talking to people in your community and collecting opinions about issues facing residents. Are you 18 years of age or older? Just take a few minutes. Oh, terrific.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Nick has hooked someone. And as he gets further and further along in the survey, the room starts to get a little quiet. A crowd starts to hover around his cubicle. We're all waiting to see if he will finally finish a survey.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  That's totally fine. Thank you. Have a wonderful night. I really appreciate your time. Take care.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  Turn that wheel!

• 26:53Speaker 02

  You did it. I did it. I think I figured out why we cracked it. You were telling me a funny story. And so I was already smiling when I was dialing.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  See, that's the secret. Smile while you dial. That's it, that's it.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  So this story was reported in October of 2022. A couple of months later, after the midterms, we followed up with Barbara to see how her team did. And it turns out that 2022 was an amazing year for Marist. Their poll estimated that overall, Republican candidates in the House would get three percentage points more votes than Democrats across the country. And when the final election results came out, House Republicans were up 2.8 percentage points. They nailed it. Our questions, though, not so much. Factoring in our wisdom of crowds questions, the results would have moved to like a plus eight Republican. But Barbara said that is what science is all about. It's about testing ideas, learning from the results.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  And we actually called her back just a couple of weeks ago as she was ramping up for these 2026 midterms. And Barbara told us they are, in fact, still asking these wisdom of the crowds type questions.

• 28:05Speaker 06

  I think it's really interesting because in some of the states where traditionally Republicans have won, we're showing a slight lean to the Democratic candidates statewide. But yet, when we ask the wisdom of the crowd question, which is who do you think's going to end up taking office? People overwhelmingly believe the Republican will.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  So for some reason, the wisdom of the crowds questions are still pulling the polling predictions toward Republicans in these sorts of competitive races. Whether or not that means Republicans are being underrepresented in the polls, we will find out in a couple of weeks. But Barbara says these questions, they are about more than just the final result.

• 28:45Speaker 06

  We're not going to just be looking at it for whether, you know, it could determine who won or lost. We're going to also look to see, did it determine whether somebody voted or not?

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Barbara says figuring out how likely it is that someone will vote is a big question in politics and in polling. Most of the time, you just can't ask people straight up, are you going to vote? Because there's social pressure. People feel like they have to say, of course, I'm going to vote. So instead, Barbara says, they try to ask other types of questions. Like, does someone have a plan to vote? Or how do you feel about the election in general? And now she and her team are investigating how these wisdom of the crowd type questions might help predict turnout. For instance, if people think that their favorite candidate is going to win, does that make them more likely to go out and vote? In other words, is there a bandwagon effect? Or is it the opposite, right? Is there an underdog effect where people are more likely to turn out

• 29:41Speaker 03

  if they think their favorite candidate is behind? The factors that affect turnout and the polling questions that best predict turnout, those all tend to change over time.

• 29:51Speaker 06

  The questions that seem to really resonate this time around is your opinion of President Trump and whether, in fact, you identify with a particular party and how strongly you identify with that party. And those two questions pretty much give us a sense of who is likely to participate.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  This time of year, there's a big focus, obviously, on the big question, who is going to win the election? But Barbara says polls, for her, are about much, much more than that.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  I think the role that public, public opinion polls play, at least in the past, has been, we kind of let everybody in on the secret because the campaigns are polling. They're probably not going to release a poll that, you know, says that, you know, everybody hates their candidate and they're doing terribly.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  But we, as the public, we want to know that information. And public polls give us that information. They can prevent spin. They can influence policy. They can give us a sense of who our fellow Americans even are. And for Barbara, this is the most exciting time of the year, where the pollsters finally get to check their work.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Hey, a quick plug before we go. We are doing another Ask an Economist virtual event for our NPR Plus supporters. This one is on AI and the job market. Could AI wipe out white collar jobs? Or could it transform and grow the workforce? The indicators Adrian Ma will discuss all of that with Darwin Asamooglu, a Nobel Prize-winning MIT professor, and Eric Manjolson, the director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. During this live Q and A, you're going to have the chance to put your questions directly to our guests. It's on Wednesday, October 28 at 3:00 PM Eastern, noon Pacific, over Zoom. Again, this is a supporter-only event, so make sure you're signed up for NPR Plus. For registration and event details, just go to npr.org/askan economist.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  That's all one word. Again, npr.org/askan economist. This update was produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kessler. It was mastered by Gilly Moon with help from Sina LaFredo. The original episode was edited by Jess Jiang. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to the whole team at Marist, including Stephanie Calvano, Mary Griffith, Lee Miringoff, Rachel Sanford, and our student coach, H. Ead. Also, thanks to the researchers who helped us with our wisdom of crowds questions, Henrik Olsen and Drazen Prelick, and to our colleague, Domenico Montanaro. I'm Jeff Guo.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  And I'm Nick Fountain. This is NPR. Thank you for listening.

• 32:39Speaker 05

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