This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Swamp Notes — Can you trust the polls?’
Marc Filippino
Polls look pretty different depending on which side of them you’re on. When you’re losing.
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Marc Filippino
But when you’re winning . . .
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Marc Filippino
This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing, where we talk about all of the things happening in the 2024 US election. I’m Marc Filippino, and this week we’re asking, what are polls good for anyway? Here with me to discuss is Lauren Fedor. She’s the FT’s deputy Washington bureau chief. Hi, Lauren.
Lauren Fedor
Hi, Marc.
Marc Filippino
And we’ve also got Jon McHenry. He’s the vice-president of North Star Opinion Research. That’s a Republican polling group which helps conduct the FT’s monthly opinion polls on US politics. Hey, Jon. Hey, Marc. So, Jon, the FT released a poll last week on a range of US political and economic issues. What’s the big headline from that poll regarding the presidential race?
Jon McHenry
I think the biggest headline coming out of this was that while we, over the last couple of months, had seen a little bit of improvement in how people viewed President Biden’s handling of the economy, going from 29 per cent approve to 31 per cent to 32 per cent, he dropped back down to 28 per cent, which is the lowest we’ve had since last November. And while he had a good boost from the State of the Union address, and things seem to be going more towards him, that’s a pretty good sign that his messaging has gotten a little bit more muddled at this point.
Marc Filippino
So, Lauren, given that the economy is such a weak spot for Biden, we’ll get into the reasons why a few. Does that mean Trump’s got the upper hand in the election?
Lauren Fedor
Well, it depends on which way you slice it, right. But we conduct this poll every month and every month voters say that the economy is the number one issue for them. And every month since we’ve started asking the question about who they trust more on the economy. Voters, by and large, say they trust Trump. That’s obviously bad news for Biden. But what the White House and the Biden campaign are banking on is that even though people say the economy is the most important issue to them, at the end of the day, enough of those crucial swing voters will perhaps prioritise other issues. So what are those other issues in the eyes of the Democrats? It’s mainly two things. One, they’ll say democracy. What they really mean there is, you know, preventing another January 6th. And then the other, big issue obviously for them is abortion. And that has been a vote winner for them in the midterms and various special elections since that decision to overturn Roe vs Wade.
Marc Filippino
What aspects of the economy are people citing when you poll them? What in particular are Americans saying hurts the most? Is it high interest rates? Is it inflation still coming back to bite them? I remember gas prices was a big deal for a while during Biden’s presidency.
Jon McHenry
They’re still very much focused on inflation. And it’s easy for an economist to say, well, inflation is getting better. It’s, you know, it’s not at 6 per cent, 8 per cent. It’s now at 3.1 per cent. And I think most Americans hear that and say, my grocery prices have increased 40 per cent since Joe Biden was put into office. And that’s just a stubborn fact.
Lauren Fedor
Even when inflation comes down. And this may be obvious to an FT listener, but prices don’t come down. You’re right to mention gas prices. Now, gas prices historically, traditionally always go up over the summer. So we can expect some of that. But housing costs seem to be on the rise is something that people are concerned about as well. You know, in my own reporting and talking to Democrats the last couple weeks, it seems like this is there’s an increasing awareness that housing costs are a real weak spot for, the president and Democrats down ballot, particularly with younger voters. Right. Because while we talk a lot about Gaza, younger voters do care about a variety of issues, including economic ones. Many polls show that younger voters place the economy as their top issue, too, just like older people. And for younger people who are probably more likely to be renting and if they are renting, maybe wanting to get on the housing ladder and feeling like they’re locked out of that, this is an issue that weighs on them pretty heavily.
Marc Filippino
OK, so the economic picture doesn’t really favour Biden at the moment. But, you know, his polling numbers weren’t always this grim. Jon, if you had to pick a moment when Biden’s fortunes really started to change for the worse, what would it be?
Jon McHenry
Thinking about this election? I think the sort of clear demarcation for President Biden was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, where that was sort of a you broke it, you bought it situation. Up until that point, he could say, this is former President Trump’s fault. Whether he’s talking about the economy, you’re coming out of Covid, anything foreign policy related wasn’t his fault. After Afghanistan, that became very much his issue. And it really the presidency essentially became his at that point.
Marc Filippino
You know, that feels like aeons ago.
Jon McHenry
It does.
Lauren Fedor
But it was also the numbers bear out that was this real turning point for his approval ratings. Just took a dip then and kept going in that direction. I think that a lot of that goes well beyond foreign policy specifically, and it just is about the kind of image that he’s projecting. And he obviously inherited many things from the Trump presidency. But he ran on this campaign like, I’m the competent guy. I’m the grown up in the room, I know how to handle complex situations. And that situation was a disaster. And it really undercut that kind of reputation that he’d built for himself on the campaign trail. So I think it’s important to remember to whatever the policy is, sometimes it goes well beyond the policy issue in terms of what the kind of impact is for the for the president or the candidate.
Marc Filippino
We’ve talked a lot about Biden. I want to switch and talk a little bit about Trump. What were the top lines from the most recent poll there?
Jon McHenry
So much of what we’ve talked about is really focused on the economy and on Biden, and how things are going now that Trump tends not to sort of naturally come up in a lot of the questions. That’s honestly one of the big problems for Joe Biden. He desperately needs this to be a choice election. You’re choosing between the current president and the former president. And it seems to be among voters, sort of a fundamental difference between having former President Trump covered every day, every second while he was sitting as president vs what’s happening now, which is, yes, you’re going to read a story about him sitting in a Manhattan courtroom. You might once a week read a story about him appearing at a rally, but he’s not in your face constantly. I think the fewer people see of Donald Trump, probably the better it is for the former president.
Lauren Fedor
That’s part of the reason why this debate, this first debate, will be happening so much sooner than it has historically in the cycle. You know.
Marc Filippino
It’s June 27th, right?
Lauren Fedor
Yeah, exactly. And I, you know, on one hand think this is a huge gamble for the president, but on the other hand, I can understand that they’ve made this calculated risk, that they believe that it’s better to kind of force the issue now and present the choice in the starkest terms on a stage with the two candidates. For the average American voter. They are not glued to the cable news coverage of the Manhattan courtroom day in and day out. They’re probably not even paying attention to the rally that President Trump has. Once or twice a week. And they’re not really paying attention to whatever Joe Biden says on his way on or off of Air Force One as he flies around the country, around the world. They’re just not plugged in yet. And so for that reason, I would just remind and caution that polls are a snapshot of a moment in time and not predictive of what’s going to happen in November.
Marc Filippino
Guys, last question here. And this is kind of just about the state of polling more than anything else. Polls have gotten a bad rep in recent elections.
Jon McHenry
How dare you, sir.
Marc Filippino
Not to over quote Sarah Palin, but yeah, yeah, they aren’t just for strippers and cross-country skiers, but they have gotten some bad press, right? Polls undercounted Trump support in the run-up to 2016. They over counted it in the run-up to 2020. Jon, what makes polling so difficult right now in the era of Donald Trump?
Jon McHenry
So I guess the caveat is polling was difficult before Donald Trump came down that golden escalator. People increasingly on their cell phones, they’re looking at a caller ID that is a number that they don’t recognise, so they’re less likely to answer the phone. So it’s been difficult. I think what makes it more challenging in the era of Donald Trump is that the folks that are most likely to support Donald Trump are typically among whites, but increasingly across demographic groups are the non-college-educated voters, and they are the least likely to participate in the survey. The other aspect is that Donald Trump has encouraged so much scepticism of institutions that when someone calls and says they’re conducting a poll, they’re like, mainstream media, yuck, don’t like them. So his voters in particular are less likely to participate in that a Democratic voter would be. But you do have good polling firms out there who make sure that they are, you know, setting quotas to make sure that they’re not just getting, you know, whatever electorate they can and then just sort of weighting it to make sure that it oh, it looks like the right electorate. Because those extra calls, those extra interviews online are what separates a good poll that you can trust vs a down and dirty survey that’s just going to, you know, get a thousand people and say, oh, here’s what they think.
Lauren Fedor
On this point about sampling Trump voters. What is your explanation for why in the primary landscape this year, the pollsters seem to be vastly overestimating Trump support. I mean, like by double digits in Iowa and New Hampshire, it was, you know, ten points closer than everything had predicted.
Jon McHenry
Some of it, I think, is on the Republican side, a little bit of a hesitancy to say, oh, yeah, I support one of these other people. There’s also something to that’s a free vote. You know, Donald Trump’s going to win the primary. You go into New Hampshire and you’re like, it’s just him and Nikki Haley really at this point. I’m going to vote for Haley as a protest vote, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. So it’s just a free vote when you walk in. So I think that’s part of the reason that we saw, yes, some, you know, maybe a ten point overestimate for Donald Trump in the primary polls.
Marc Filippino
All right. We’re going to take a quick break and we come back. We’re going to do exit poll.
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Marc Filippino
We are back with Exit Poll, where we talk about something that did not happen on the campaign trail and apply rigorous political analysis to it. Last week, a city in Texas called Kyle, Texas, tried to break the world record for the largest gathering of people with one name. Now they were able to round up 706 Kyles, which would have seemed respectable, but they fell way short of the record, which was set by a Bosnian town which corralled nearly 2500 Ivans back in 2017. Guys, America sent a man to the moon. We invented the funnel cake. But to lose a world record attempt this badly. I mean, our voters are going to see it as a sign that America has lost its ability to do big things.
Jon McHenry
To paraphrase President Kennedy, we gather Kyles not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Gathering Kyles in the United States compared to gathering Ivans in Bosnia is we really tried the hardest thing possible. That was like trying to win the Premier League with Nottingham Forest’s salary.
Lauren Fedor
Yeah, I think I agree with Jon. I don’t think this is a particularly, you know, weighty reflection of US kind of dominance. And I would say, you know, looking ahead to this summer with an eye to the Olympics, which I am a huge, unabashed fan of, team USA is going to do just fine on the global stage and assert ourselves as the pre-eminent holder of world records of all kinds.
Jon McHenry
That does put a lot of pressure on the US Olympic team to get as many gold medals as they got under Trump.
Lauren Fedor
True. Very true, very true. Well, we’ll have to check back on a future episode, kind of in early August about who the Olympic tally is better for Trump or Biden.
Marc Filippino
We’re going to have to do two things. We’re going to have to see if there are any Olympians named Kyle, and whether or not Austin is listening to this conversation. You get to try and give it a run for the money. I want to thank our guest, Lauren Fedor, who’s the FT’s deputy Washington bureau chief. Thanks, Lauren.
Lauren Fedor
Thanks, Marc.
Marc Filippino
And Jon McHenry, he’s the vice-president of North Star Opinion Research. Thanks, Jon.
Jon McHenry
Thanks. Good to be with you.
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Marc Filippino
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News Briefing. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we’ve got a link to that in the show notes.
Our show is mixed and produced by Ethan Plotkin. It’s also produced by Lauren Fedor and Sonja Hutson. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I’m your host, Marc Filippino. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. And original theme music by Hannis Brown. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.
