Within the Polls at Pew Research
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Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. A lot has happened in the last week, and I'll touch on those items in my rant. But we'll also step back from the fray a bit and look at U.S. public opinion from a much higher and broader level with Mike Dimmick of the Pew Research Center. Let's dive in.

Well, what can I say about the last seven days? We haven't had a presidential assassination attempt in this country for decades. The last time it happened was when some people tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Before that, it was attempted assassinations of Gerald Ford. And before that, 1972, the attempted assassination of presidential candidate George Wallace in Maryland in 1972. And then we have the youngest person

elevated to the vice presidential nod on a ticket in decades. I'm not sure whether J.D. Vance is younger than Richard Nixon when Richard Nixon was elevated. It's pretty darn close. If it's not, they're within months of each other. And Vance has only been in the Senate a year and a half and had never held public office before. You know, that's very rare. I

Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale's running mate, had been in Congress five and a half years when she was elevated. Richard Nixon had been a congressman for four and a senator for a year and a half. You know, that's like almost triple the time of Vance. In fact, it is more than triple the time of Vance. So you take a look at this and you say, in three days, we had Donald Trump almost murdered on the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania. And we have the most...

unorthodox vice presidential pick in decades. What does this all mean? Well, let's take a look at the assassination attempt. It does a couple of things. First of all, at least for Trump's supporters, and I don't mean just the people who have already loved him to death. I'm talking about the people who identify with Donald Trump as somebody they want to support.

This has to be something that turbocharges their enthusiasm as well as solidifies their support. Why does it do that? First of all, the miracle of the survival. I'm not going to get into all of the things that some people are talking about with Providence and so forth. But the fact is he was literally a couple of inches away from having the back of his head blown. That is unbelievably close.

Tragedy, personal tragedy for him, national tragedy. We haven't had somebody, even Reagan survived, Wallace survived. We haven't had a leading national figure murdered since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was assassinated on the eve of his victory in the California primary in June 1968.

I think you're going to see the marginal Trump supporter likelier to vote because they will feel an obligation to the candidate that they might not have felt in the absence of this. It's not going to be a huge deal.

But if Donald Trump wins some states by a quarter of a percent or a third of a percent or a half of a percent that propel him to victory, do I think this will have had something to do with getting that person who sometimes votes and sometimes doesn't vote and likes Donald Trump to say, I got to go to the polls now? Yes, I do. Secondly, what this does is it puts a crimp, if not throws a wicked googly at Democrats

Joe Biden and the Democrats. What has the Biden campaign and the Democratic campaign largely focused on? It's focused on Donald Trump, and it is focused on making Donald Trump seem to be so dangerous and so extreme that you can't possibly think of electing him unless you really hate our country. You know, that's what danger to democracy means. That's what dictator on day one means. Well, of course, as was pointed out by NBC News' Lester Holt,

Perhaps that language has something to do with the circumstance and the milieu in which the assassination attempt happened. I don't think it will be as easy for the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party to make the sort of strong claims against Trump that they wanted to make. They're not going to not make strong claims, but

But every word they use is going to be looked at for its potentially inflammatory effect. They can figure this out, but I think it's going to be difficult. And it's particularly difficult in the run of a campaign because you can't control everybody who speaks.

Biden might be heavily protected and all of his scripted remarks are carefully looked at. But what happens if somebody who's a prominent Democrat goes off at the mouth? Well, Biden's campaign is going to have to answer for that.

What happens if a prominent liberal commentator goes off at the Mount? Well, Biden's campaign is going to be asked about it. What happens if a super PAC that is being run by known progressive activists goes over the top on something? Biden's going to be asked about that. So what that means is that for at least a little while,

The whole question of the attack, the framing of why Donald Trump shouldn't be president is going to be thrown into the washer. And we don't know how long it can come out clean and dry. That's not good news for the Democrats. The third thing that this does is it brings a certain sense to Donald Trump.

that it gives him the possibility, as he's hinted to Selena Zito in a post-attempt interview, that he can pivot to a more unifying message. Now, I don't think Donald Trump is somebody who's going to stop the attacks on Joe Biden, but can he say with some degree of plausibility that

We can disagree without being as hateful. We'll see whether Donald Trump can pull that off. We'll see if he wants to go there. But the fact is, this gives him a plausibility if he does. And then the question is, if what we have is a more conventional Trump, somebody who still makes strong political attacks, you know, that is simply part of being a presidential candidate.

That's true of any nominee, whether it is somebody who is a outsider like Trump was or somebody who is the ultimate insider like George H.W. Bush, who was very direct and mean about Michael Dukakis while not engaging in politics.

Calumny against Michael Dukakis in 1988. If he does that, that throws another wrinkle in Joe Biden. Joe Biden essentially ran as the normalcy candidate, the unifying candidate. And here's a man, Donald Trump, who theoretically...

could try to claim that mantle himself. I don't know if he's going to do it. And sometimes in the past, Trump was able to do things that were less pugnacious for 48 or 72 hours, and then he turned back to the old ways. The fact is this Trump has been much more disciplined than the past Trumps. We'll see whether that happens.

But I am pretty sure about the first two things. Small but measurable increase in likelihood to vote among people already supportive of Trump. Difficulties thrown at the Democrats for how they're going to prosecute their campaign. Now let's turn to Vance. I wrote a very laudable, lauding article.

piece of JD because I've known him for almost a decade. I disagree with him on some issues. No two people agree on everything. I'm much more of a internationalist while not being a neocon on foreign policy. So that's an area of disagreement that I need to be upfront about. But the fact is this man has

It factor he is smart. He is thoughtful. He is non-ideological He is motivated by concern for the average person in the United States. He's not interested in making a Million dollars he could have done that He obviously has because he's the author of a best-selling book, but he wanted to go out and make money He could do that. That's what he was doing before he wrote the book

If he's not somebody who's a careerist, if he's 39 years old and he's on the presidential kick, but he didn't win his first office until he was 37 or 38. Careerists start young. Take it from a person who lost at the age of 24 running for office. That is yours truly, of course. Had I had the opportunity to be a careerist, I would have been. But the good people of my district decided that I need a little bit more seasoning. I'm still being seasoned.

But it was, I could have been a careerist. Lots of people are careerists. You don't start as a careerist at 37. This is somebody who, like other late entrants into political life, tends to be motivated by something else. And he has a way of talking. I think that's going to connect with people. What the Republican Party has needed for a long time is somebody who doesn't break

bring theory down to what they may consider to be the masses, or as Mitt Romney said, the 47%. It needs to be somebody who, like Ronald Reagan, sees the average person as the salt of the earth and the source of American greatness, not the un-average person. America is not great because it allows the great to rise. America is great because it allows the average to flourish.

J.D. Vance, unlike most Republican nominees in the past few decades, unlike most Republican-leaning intellectuals, believes that in his heart. It animates everything he does. It will come through to people, and people want that.

They've been told that for the last 30 years by people, and then they find out that those people either didn't care about them or didn't understand what they wanted or needed. And so you have this rising degree of frustration, rising degree of distrust. Vance has the possibility of breaking through that.

There's no sureties in life. There's no sureties in politics. Just like there's no sureties in sports. You can be drafted number one in football and you could be a complete washout. Who was drafted? Michael Jordan, one of the greatest players in NBA history, was drafted number three. Great trivia question is who was drafted ahead of him. I'm not going to answer that trivia question. Some of you know it. But the fact is, everyone,

is thought of in different ways. Tom Brady was a sixth round pick, greatest quarterback in NFL history. Just because you've got

an it factor at level A doesn't mean you can deliver at level B. But I'm excited about J.D. Vance because I think he can. I think he reinforces his boss's tendencies. I think this is like a Clinton-Gore ticket of 1992. Rather than balancing the ticket, Clinton went with doubling down. We're both young, Southern, new Democrats, a different type of Democrat.

so that you couldn't get pegged as the same old, same old. I think Donald Trump is doubling down on we're going to be a working class party. We're going to be a party that breaks. We're going to be the bulls that break the Washington China shop. I think that's what the Republican Party majority wants. I think that's in this circumstance what the swing voter of America is open to. And I think J.D. Vance is going to be very helpful to the ticket.

So what does that mean? It means, as they say in politics, a day can be a year and an hour can be a week. Who knows what tomorrow is going to bring? Who knows whether Joe Biden is going to be in the race next week? It's increasingly looking probably, but one never says never. And so

The last week has been tumultuous, the last week has been historic, and the last week

sets in motion some things that could be transformational. But the bottom line is this is still a race where Donald Trump has the advantage but is nowhere close to clinching the race. This is still a race where Joe Biden hasn't found his sea legs and one can't discount him from finding them despite all of the obvious problems in his way. So history has been made. Events have become

and breaking through the news cycle in a way that the average political event does not break through. I can assure you the marginal, low propensity, low information voter knows a lot about the assassination attempt and as a result probably knows more about Vance than they would have had this not happened because they're paying a little bit more attention to Trump in the wake of this. But we're still talking about a race whose fundamentals are weak

relatively unchanged and constantly we're talking about a race that with three and a half months to go remains, if not a toss-up, still a game that can't be called.

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The title of this podcast is "Beyond the Polls," but sometimes, as you know, I like to talk with pollsters. And here we're going to combine both the title and a pollster to genuinely go beyond the polls of the sort that you usually consume in the media. And that's because my guest today is Mike Demick, president of the Pew Research Center. Mike, welcome to "Beyond the Poll." Thanks so much, Henry.

Why did I make that introduction? What is Pew? And to paraphrase the line from Passover Seders throughout the millennia, what is Pew and how is it different from all the others?

Well, thanks so much, Henry. Yes, many people have heard of Pew Research Center. And often I get the question, what, wait, what are you guys anyway? And what is Pew? Pew, P-E-W, is a family name, actually. The Pew family had set aside fairly large endowments and the Pew family, Pew Charitable Trusts, which is their main arm, does a fair amount of policy work, conservation work, other issues that they try to attack.

to make the world a better place. But they also really just care about an informed society. And many, many decades ago, they started investing in what they called information projects, just to generate a foundation of facts on which society can better understand trends and changes that are going on around us,

where people can actually see themselves in those trends and changes, not feel alienated by a bunch of statistics and numbers that are presented in a hard to access format. And now for a number of decades, our starting point has various eras to it.

We've been doing just that, trying to really listen to people, talk to people, understand the context of their lives, recognize that the experience is different for everybody, and bring that information forward with no agenda. We're not making policy recommendations. We're not here to try to advance an issue or a cause.

And so I've been at Pew for almost 25 years now, Henry, and it's been a really wonderful ride. I think we're able to do some really interesting work because of that wide open agenda.

With respect to Mr. Pugh, way back in the early ages, I believe if you buy your oil from Sunoco, you are buying from the corporation that is no longer owned by Mr. Pugh, but was decades ago the source of the family fortune. Yeah, that's right. Old school Pennsylvania oil strike money. Yeah.

And like many big, you know, philanthropies of that day, Carnegie and so forth, you know, of that era, the Pew stayed anonymous for a number of years. So the name isn't quite as familiar, but over the past 50 years or so has been more of a public facing, you know, nonprofit organization.

So, you know, most people who are not in a business of a sort know of polls through the sort of media polls that you see. The head-to-head, a few of the questions, highly topical, highly political. Give us an example of how you're different. You occasionally do head-to-head polls.

but rarely. You don't have a media partner, so you have to kind of be a nerd like me to be on the mailing list and get the weekly Pew output. Give my readers some examples of the sorts of things that you might do if the spirit moves you.

Sure, sure. The spirit moves us. That's a good metaphor, as you know, for many, many reasons. We do a lot of work on religion and faith. It wasn't unintentional. Yeah, I know. I'm just picking up. But no, it's actually an interesting example because we often do look for spaces that aren't necessarily explored deeply by other people.

polling organizations. So religion and faith and spirituality is a deep investment of ours precisely because we think it's a really consequential element of people's lives. It intersects with politics and national identity at a U.S. and global scale. And it's really, in my view, understudied as a phenomenon and a factor in our societies and our structures. But that's just one example of how we try to think about where an organization like ours that has that broad

and mandate and doesn't have, as you just said, the need to follow a new cycle in a really sort of

real-time way, the way most media-related polling organizations do, or to have to follow commercial demands. Where is their money? Where are their clients? Where are their investors who are willing to pay for polls on a particular topic or to advance a particular agenda? We're not driven by any of those pressures. So we're able to really kind of assess the landscape of where information gaps exist and

and lean into them. One recent example we felt we really wanted to do was to do a big survey of teachers in the US, just precisely because over the last two, three years, K through 12 education has become a really big issue in the civic conversation. Teachers are clearly at the center of this. You're watching local and national news stories all the time about issues, teacher shortages, teacher funding, this and that. But

Who's actually listening to the teachers, right? And understanding that there is no singular teacher experience. There's a multitude of teacher experiences, depending on what level of school they're in, the type of community they're teaching in, their own personal backgrounds that they're bringing to their teaching experience. So kind of really using our ability to kind of get a layer deeper on an issue that's clearly at the intersection of a lot of civic conversation, but probably not fully understood. Yeah.

Yeah, and that's one of the things. Doing a poll of teachers is expensive because you have to find a...

viable list of teachers. And, you know, you can't just dial a thousand people and we'll get back to the methodology changes in a minute because very few people dial anymore and you don't. I know that. But so that's one thing that you can do. You know, media pollsters aren't going to spend $100,000 to find a good viable list. But Pew can do that. The other thing you tend to do is have larger, as we say in the business, N's.

larger survey sizes so that it's not just 600 people and the only meaningful thing is a couple of crosstabs and your overall top lines, but you tend to have larger ends so you can look at the larger subgroups and have something statistically meaningful to say about the attitude of teachers in public high schools versus teachers in private high schools. I don't know if you went that, but you theoretically could if you had a large enough sample size. How

Is that one of the defining features of Pew, is that you can both go broader and deeper simultaneously and consequently say more about the fragmented but still very real nature of American public opinion?

Yes. Thank you. No, we think a lot about that. I think I would say that's not a new thing either for Pew or for polling or for public opinion. You know, America has always been a diverse society. You know, we are talking a lot more about it today. There is a really important and often tense civic conversation about the nature of our diversity and what it means. But the reality is America has never been a singular. There's never been a singular.

one American public opinion as if there's one view. This is what Americans think. And we do take that very seriously in our work. We rarely will you hear the Pew Research Center say the American public wants X or prioritizes Y. We're usually going to say, well,

It's more complicated than that. And here's why. And here's who's looking at this in different ways and how their experiences are connecting to how they're looking at an issue or a campaign or a candidate. And it's not just an issue of end, though, as you say, sample size. I mean, there are a number of polling methodologies today that can generate huge ends, you know,

You can see if you're following some of the aggregations, you'll see some polls that might have 10,000, 20,000 respondents to that. That doesn't necessarily, though, still translate into the ability to represent subsets of the American population with rigor and, you know, really representative inclusiveness and diversity.

You know, we could get more into the methodology of that, but I would definitely caution your listeners to not always get fooled by sample size. It's not as clean of a metric for the ability of a survey to have that representational quality. And we do put a lot of our kind of intellectual thought and our energy into trying to have that representation in our work.

Let's go there, because I did want to talk about methodology. You know that if you're old enough like me, you remember when or when polling literally was conducted door to door by individuals, which is why if you look at old car political cartoons, you'll see the pollster at the doorstep.

And then telephone poles, which is what most people remember. Telephone ownership became widespread enough that you could randomly dial telephones and gosh, in the world of the 1960s and seventies people answered their telephones and they didn't have answering machines. And so that became the gold standard.

The last 15 years has been the most challenging of the polling industry, I would say, methodologically, since its onset or inception in the 1930s under Mr. Gallup and Mr. Harris in the United States. Tell me a little bit about how Pew has thought about the challenges that declining response rate to traditional telephone calls has brought and how you've tried to solve them.

Yeah, it definitely felt like a crisis 15, 20 years ago. All of us who watched polling had become hooked on telephones as the most efficient and effective way to reach cross-sections of our country or whatever community we were studying. And, you know,

Just one thing to keep in mind is that the loss of access to people was less a trust issue. It was actually more just a technology issue. We all started to get

caller ID. And once we all had caller ID, our habit was to not pick up a number we didn't know anymore. So ultimately, there are still high quality telephone surveys today, and there are various techniques some telephone surveyors use to get past some of those challenges. So don't take any of what I'm saying as if I'm telling you telephone polling is dead, but it's definitely more challenging and more expensive than it used to be. So more than a decade ago, we made a

pretty big decision to just get out of the telephone polling approach. We just didn't see it as viable for the kind of work we wanted to do. And we ended up moving towards, it's kind of a back to the future thing, where not quite back to knocking on doors, but the intermediate step, which was the U.S. Postal Service, you know, that's actually...

Today, I would say the most effective way to reach a true cross-section of the American public. You know, 96 plus percent of Americans have a mailing address that we can find. And when it changes, they file a piece of paper with the post office that changes it. You know, we know who is where. We can reach out to people with that full, as the pollsters call it, sampling frame that represents the full population that we want to reach with known people.

parameters around it, known kind of errors and known qualities of that data. So now we recruit people by mail with a very nice official looking package. And then we do the surveys online, which means we you'll if I were to if you were to be selected, Henry, you'd receive this very nice envelope, it might even have $2 bill in it to kind of tell you, hey,

Open this up. This is pretty serious. I'm not just trying to sell you something here. And we would invite you to log in to your own unique ID and take a survey and then recruit you into what we call our American Trends panel. And we're not alone in this. A number of major institutions have made it's a big capital investment to get started with this approach.

But once you've got that infrastructure in place for the volume of survey work that the Pew Research Center is doing and the type of data we want on that representation we talked about earlier, the subgroups, the diversity of the country, this is a very efficient way then for us to serve our mission, get the kind of data that we want, build that capital infrastructure on which we can do those sort of surveys regularly, right?

And so one advantage of doing surveys online is that's actually how Americans do most of their communication today. Think of it this way. Telephones were a natural way for people to express themselves 30 years ago because most of our communication in that day was actually over telephones.

Talk to a 25 year old today. They're not comfortable having a long telephone call. You know, they communicate digitally. They communicate in an online environment. Part of the art of getting thoughts out of people's heads with the least distortion is letting people communicate in the mode that's most comfortable to them. That's not true for everybody online. But today, online is a much more effective way to get people to participate, whether it's on a computer or on a mobile device. And by this point,

Older people are used to communicating. They may not text like 25-year-olds, but they're used to getting to some digital interface and doing reasonably complex things online that maybe 10 or 15 years ago their age peers would have shied away from. Yeah.

And in fact, you know, we still try to account for that. Kind of to your point earlier, we'll go the extra mile. So if we have recruited people in the way I just described by mail, and they tell us they're just not

comfortable working in a digital environment, they maybe don't have technology at home or they just don't enjoy it. We'll let them do the surveys by phone. We'll still provide that alternative for people because we don't want to say you're trying to represent people who are 80 years old and older. I don't only want the ones who are tech savvy. I want everybody in that group. And so we need to go that extra mile to be sure we're picking up a real cross section of people, not letting technology be a barrier.

And for some of the things you do, language is a barrier. You do a lot of work with ethnic minorities. And while many, and in some ethnic minorities, most are English literate, if not proficient, many prefer and some are monolingual in the non-English language. Tell our listeners how you deal with language barriers and like dealing with the Asian community, which is not only...

significantly non-English proficient, but has so many different languages that are needed if you want to survey the entire experience of the Asian American community. Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, one, the largest...

non-English proficient population of the U.S., of course, are Spanish speakers, that's relatively easy to address. We've got the largest migrant population being from a monolingual background. Most surveys, and if you ever see a survey that's claiming to represent Latino Americans and isn't bilingual, you should sort of throw it out right away because it is a really important factor. Asian Americans is so complicated because you've got so many language backgrounds, as you just said. In our standard

survey work, this American Trends panel that I've described to you, we can't afford to translate every survey we do on that into, say, 20 languages. It's just an overwhelming...

process, both the time that it takes, the staffing that it takes, and then ultimately the cost structure of it is just backbreaking. So what we try to do at the center is, at an occasional level, do really bespoke deep dive studies of populations that are particularly hard to reach, that are particularly small and not well-represented

at all, really almost statistically invisible in most survey work, we'll go that extra mile, do that deep dive work on those populations, make sure that we're doing the language translation, take our time with it, and put the resources behind it to do it well. So over the last two years, we did a really major Asian American study that was translated into multiple languages. And the goal of that was

to push past this concept, and you're hearing it already in the election cycle, how will Asian Americans vote? Well, really, there is no

singular Asian American, you know, just like there's no singular Latino American or Black American. These are very diverse populations. And Asian American, particularly as the most recent, in some cases, migrant waves from some countries, extremely diverse in the reasons they came to America, the experiences they've had in America, the opportunities they see in America, their connection to American civil society, their comfort, their

with language and other elements of society. So really going past that singularization of groups and giving that full texture. Then once we've done that, that gives us a foundation on which to see whether the work we're doing that is perhaps in English only, what gaps there are in it and be more transparent and accountable for when an English only survey is missing really important elements.

You guys do a lot of fascinating stuff, not just in this country. You know, you do international polling. You've had some polls recently, by recently I mean in the last few months, on Israel, looking at Israeli public opinion, which of course means both Jewish and Arab public opinion.

I want to start by getting into that particular set of surveys. What's prompted you to do that? And what are some of the things you've learned, both methodologically and how to do that, but also

you know we tend to think well there's israeli public opinion of course if yeah i'm a nerd that i've got my israeli voting uh 2025 2021 kinesit map on my thing so i can tell you yeah well actually there's 11 different parties and you know

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you've got Arab opinion that breaks down between types of Arab. You have like multiple types of Jewish opinion that break down on religion or ideology or immigrant status or so forth. Tell us a little bit about that. Why did you decide to do this? If you have a finding that you want to toss out, what finding do you have? But what did you know, learn methodologically about how to survey something that is balkanized

Israeli society. Yeah.

No, thanks. And yeah, the divides in America in some ways pale in comparison to divides in Israel along some cultural and even political dimensions. And yet there are these deeply unifying national identities as well at the same time. But backing out a little bit, the Center has been doing international work for around 20 years now on a regular basis, on an annual basis. It's a big part of the mission as we see it.

In two senses. One, um,

We believe, and this may feel a little hokey, but that Americans could learn something by watching what's happening with democracy and society in other parts of the world. Many of our experiences are not uniquely ours. And often the comparison of what's happening in our country to how other countries are adapting and changing, whether it's to political division or national identity or populism or technology change or climate change or whatever trend you're looking at,

we think there's something Americans could learn from that perspective. Now, Americans tend to not think about the rest of the world very much. So that may be a Pyrrhic effort on our part, but, but we do believe that that's really important. We also think that while most countries we survey and have their own internal national polling, you know, and, and, and, you know, we don't want to go into a place like Israel and tell Israelis about Israel. You know, they, they've got plenty of really smart pollsters who can do that. Um,

We really want to tend to focus on a lot of the cross-national comparative work that many countries are left out of because a lot of the existing cross-national work is either regionally focused or just leaves a lot of countries out of the broader global conversation. So we think about that as a kind of two-part

goal with our work. Israel has been a country we've surveyed in for a long time. It's clearly an important center of a lot of international conversation and a population that we've wanted to represent, along with Arab populations, both within Israel and in neighboring and other regional countries when possible.

In each country, the approach is different. Some countries were still doing face-to-face door knocking. That's both the most effective way to really reach a cross-section in a population that isn't necessarily technologically connected. In many developing countries, as you and your listeners probably know, they've leapfrogged sort of

are waves of technology and have moved right to mobile. But the way they're engaging with mobile is so different that, you know, you can't necessarily assume that everybody has access to a mobile device or would be able to be reached by it. You have gender differences, socioeconomic differences, regional differences.

So we tend to use face-to-face in many countries. We tend to use telephone surveys in other countries where the challenges of telephone in America are not as present, whether it's the cultural or access or expectations around telephone. So we try to customize to the best approach in any given country.

And yeah, with Israel, part of our passion, I mentioned earlier, we care a lot about religion and the role it plays in people's identities and political orientations and how they connect with the broader world. A really important set of issues there in Israel. It's a very, you know,

There's a lot of unity in the country after the attacks last year, yet there's a clear recognition that, you know, the choices being made are, it's unclear how this is going to resolve, you know, the tensions that Israel faces. And you're seeing those divides within the country, even as there's a national kind of gathering, you know, around the need for Israel to be concerned about its existential, you

Um, and, um, you know, I would just add one of the more intriguing findings about Israel as a political social phenomenon is that a lot of the pressures in America that we're seeing exhibit, um,

in our political divides have to do with a secularizing trend in our nation that many Americans find threatening, scary to the very identity of our country, which they see as a Christian nation, and they want those Christian values to be represented. And so the long-term trend lines are

really are raising a set of social questions in our country and in many European and other countries that are deeply rooted in some of the political divides. In Israel, those trends are kind of the reverse, right? The social conversation is about growing highly religious populations, a decrease or, you know, a decline in this sort of more secular route, and that's creating an entirely different set of dynamics in the political landscape in Israel. And again, to me,

That's a really interesting thing to think about when we look at our own political dynamic to recognize what's similar and what's different in those situations. What are some examples of recent polls you've done in the United States that aren't head-to-head polls but have real...

ability to help cast a light on the ongoing public conversations that we have in, about, and regarding the election. Yeah. No, we take the election cycle seriously, right? This is when democracy happens. We care a lot about democracy in this country and in other countries. We want to understand what people are really thinking, hoping, worrying about as we go into elections. And, you know, while the vote choice itself is the ultimate goal,

you know, end point of that. It is the civic engagement with our democracy that matters. It's a pretty poor representation, in my view, of what people really want. You know, as we know, over the past couple decades, most Americans are voting against someone more than they're voting for someone. And Americans, by the nature of our system, are only offered two choices, typically, you know. And

What you're hearing most of the time, and particularly this year, if you're following the polls, is that they don't like either of those choices all that much. You know, the majority would replace both of them if they could. You know, that this is not an environment where people are feeling like their hopes, their expectations, their concerns are adequately being represented in our electoral system. And that, to me, is the biggest issue right now, right? You know, that the public sees...

a system of representation that's fundamentally broken, especially at the national level. And, you know, so how are we looking at that? You know, well, we want to look at the dynamics of that mistrust, that sense of alienation from the process. What are Americans' willingness to consider reforms? Where are those reform opportunities, even

you know, scarier than the problem, right? Some people worry that a change could only make things worse, whether in general or for their side of things. So how are people navigating the issues of the pathology of our electoral system as they see it, yet their hesitance to engage in reform or their exasperation with the opportunity for making real changes in the system? The other thing we really want to get a deeper understanding of is where

the partisan divide, can we really understand the texture of it a little bit more? It's so easy to just, again, look at America and say, oh, it's red versus blue. There's there's no we're fundamentally divided.

And that, don't get me wrong, that is true. The nature of partisan difference in this country has just grown and grown and grown over my career in polling. Yet, it does have a lot of texture to it. It has a lot of important elements to it. And I think right now, in addition to doing work about how people view the candidates and the campaign and the electoral system itself,

really trying to understand how some of these emerging sociocultural issues, whether it's around gender, whether it's around race, whether it's around how we think about America's history, whether it's around immigration and the very nature of American identity, those have become these really visceral touch points in our public conversation right now that have been categorized

captured in the political fight, you know. And because they're so emotional, they're driving a level of antagonism even across partisan lines that is really, really deep right now. And again, we're not, don't get me wrong, we're hardly the only people studying this, but maybe another way of thinking about how we think at the Pew Research Center is

We're not doing it in a news-driven, okay, how does the event of this weekend or this convention or that thing shift the needle? We're not really in the needle business, so to speak, when it comes to tracking an election season. But we're also not academic. There's lots of really, really smart academic research going on there that's getting much deeper in the psychological factors and the causal factors and all of that stuff.

Boy, a lot of that stuff, Henry, I love it, but it's very hard to read. It's like hard to access. So we try to kind of be in the middle there. We try to connect

what you can learn from that really deeper academic research, which I value and think is really important, but it's hard for a typical reader, a typical consumer to really understand and connect to their experience. So we often see ourselves trying to meet those two worlds a little bit that we're not caught in the timely fray of the campaign cycle, but we're also not so removed that we're going to issue our report two and a half years later when it doesn't matter anymore. So...

And you use plain language and charts and graphs, you know. You don't have to know your Greek equations or be able to do multivariate calculus to understand a Pew Research report. Let me have a final question for you, and that is,

There's a lot of, I think, largely because of the methodological questions that people are unfamiliar with, but that impact public polling. There's distrust of polling. People say, I can't believe the polls anymore. How do you answer that?

I say that healthy skepticism is a good quality and always has been, right? I mean, I've been doing you've been a polling nerd for a long time. I've been in the polling business for almost 30 years.

In my experience, public skepticism about polling has always been around. It was a big deal in the, you know, yeah, in the 80s and 90s, you know, there's good reason to be skeptical. It is an inexact science, getting thoughts out of people's heads.

with as minimal amount of distortion as possible is one of the hardest acts of science in my view. You know, there are a lot of things we can measure in the world, but measuring what's inside people's heads, wow, because it's changing, it's malleable, it's context specific, the language you use, everything you do can create interference and distortion. So taking that science seriously is a big deal. And so also reaching

you know, a good representative cross-section of people is a big deal. So you've got these two threads of challenge related to polling. And as we've been talking about with the industry, as the technology of polling has changed, the sort of barrier to entry, so to speak, has changed. You know, when I started out in polling, it was hard to do polling. It was expensive to have field houses and do all that.

calling, you know, it wasn't, nobody could just show up and do it. Today, there are lots of online platforms that can claim to produce a representative sample for you and let you ask whatever question you want to ask, right? Whether it's a good question or a biased question. So there's a lot out there now. So there's a good reason, I think, for consumers to be, you know, skeptical of polling. The things to look for, though, are

probably a lot of the same advice you and I would have given 20 years ago, which is really look at the questions that were asked. Say them out loud to yourself. Does that question really sound like it's measuring what they say it's measuring? How would you answer that question? How would you feel your voice was represented in that question? No, just use that fundamental logic test. And if a pollster won't actually give you the actual wording of their question and the context in which it was asked,

You should really be skeptical about the quality of that poll. Look at the way the poll was designed. There's a lot of really good polling going on now and through November that is designed to measure likely voters. And that is a science of its own, right? Very different than the way we we've structured Pew Research Center surveys. There are some really smart people who have tackled that challenge.

of really understanding who is going to vote in order to best predict the outcome of the election. But those polls may not be optimized to do the kinds of things that I've just been describing that the center does, that broader representation of people, that sampling that's really reaching people who are respective of their engagement in politics to really hear those voices as well. So think about polls today.

You know, just like a minivan and a Mustang are two different cars, right? One is better for some things and the other is better for other things. What we've gotten to in this era, in this post-telephone era, is there's a lot of different kind of polling going on. Some of it we should be very skeptical about.

Some of it is perfectly good for what it's been designed to do, but isn't necessarily going to be as good for the other stuff. And so it's a much more varied world today. And I know as a polling consumer, that's just frustrating. It's like, just tell me, who can I trust? Who can't I trust?

But it's not that simple today. You know, different polls are really designed to do different things. And in my view, the post-phone era, so to speak, which again, as I said before, still includes phones in some cases, has just

been an opportunity for the field to do a lot more than it used to do. In my 25 years at the center, the polling quality and the rigor and the reach of what we can do today is better than any other period that I've been at Pew. And when I look at what other pollsters are doing who are focusing on different questions, I'm amazed at the

at the extent to which they can really hone in on that craft. So like technology, it's any technological change, it's disruptive, but it's opening up all sorts of new opportunities, but it makes it, you know, really confusing for the consumer.

Well, Mike, how can my listeners follow your work and the work of the Pew Research Center? Yeah, well, it's pretty easy. Pewresearch.org, P-E-W research dot O-R-G. And if you look at the very top, there's a newsletter button. And what I would recommend is the weekly newsletter, because we're not going to flood your inbox with a bunch of bunch of pings. On Saturday morning, you can sit back and just kind of get an overview of what we've done and how it connects to the news of the week.

Well, you know, that is actually one of the things I do on Saturday mornings. I suspect some of my listeners may be cutting the lawn or something, but that's why I have the job I've got and subscribe to my podcast. But it's a wonderful resource. I use it all the time. I strongly recommend it. And Mike, it's always a delight to talk to you. And I look forward to having you back. Thank you so much. Ryan Seacrest here.

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They can't vote for you if they don't know who you are. We have looked at a number of different introductory ads that candidates have used to explain to voters who they are while providing reasons that listeners and viewers should vote for them. That's what this week's ad of the week is. Tony Weed's attempt to introduce himself to Republican voters in Wisconsin's 8th Congressional District. Let's listen.

When you run small businesses for three decades, you learn to solve problems. And right now, Wisconsin needs problem solvers. Our borders are overrun, prices are soaring, and career politicians don't have any idea how to fix them. President Trump endorsed me because he needs conservative fighters with real-world experience. I'll secure our southern border, lower prices, and deliver for you. Let's send a Trump-endorsed outsider to Washington.

I'm Tony Weed, the Trump-endorsed conservative, and I approve this message. Well, it should be pretty clear why this ad is a good ad. What do you need to do? You need to provide an identification of the name. You need to put a favorable impression of the person. And you need to give credit.

listeners and viewers reasons to vote for you. This ad does them all, and it does it in a very easy way. Tony is standing in front of Weed Oil Company, and at least one shot in the commercial has the name clearly identifiable. This is a guy who clearly owns a business. It's not a big business. It's a little gas station, and it's got an old shell pump out front that hasn't been used probably since the 1930s, which also shows the duration in

the community. But he's speaking direct to camera in a short-sleeved shirt and shows that he's an informal kind of guy. That reinforces the message of outsider. What do Republicans want? We know that Republicans have wanted a few things for a few years. They want somebody who's not a politician. They want somebody who's a fighter. And they want somebody aligned with the vision of Donald Trump.

Now that is something this ad delivers in spades. You've got the outsider image that he both talks about in the ad and which the visuals reinforce. He doesn't look like a politician. He comes from the community, not from Capitol Hill or from some bureaucratic agency. The words Trump endorsed not only are spoken over and over, but when his name comes up on the screen,

Trump endorsed comes up on the screen. So again, that technique that I like, the synchronization of the visual and the audio.

happens in this ad as well. What does he talk about? Well, he talks about the things that polls are showing are the biggest concerns for Republican primary voters. You know, we're looking for somebody who wants to fight on immigration and shut down the border. We want somebody to get the economy going right. And of course, all of this is tied up with Donald Trump. We have a lot of pictures of Donald Trump in this. We have pictures of Donald Trump on his own. We have pictures of Donald Trump with Tony Weed. There's no doubt that

that after you watch and listen to this ad, you will know who the Trump-endorsed candidate is. The Trump-encourced candidate is a good guy. The Trump-endorsed candidate shares your values. The Trump-endorsed candidate shares your priorities. I don't know if Tony Weed is going to be the nominee. This is a relatively safe...

congressional district centered on Green Bay in the upper reaches of the Fox River Valley. It can be won by a Democrat in the most extreme circumstances, but certainly does not look like this is going to be a pro-democratic wave here. So the winner of the Republican primary on August 13th is likely to be the next congressperson, and there is a multi-candidate race underway. Trump's endorsed candidates can lose. A couple of weeks ago, we had

The dueling ads of the two people in the runoff in the South Carolina 3rd Congressional District, the Trump candidate lost that race. Narrowly, but the Trump candidate lost that race. But you take a look at this ad and you say, "Absence somebody running a compelling ad,

which, again, as we've had another example, the Big Sean ad from Kansas, too, is one of those memorable, compelling introductory ads. But absent something like that, I would say that Tony Weed is the favorite based on his Trump endorsement and a good, solid ad. And the fact is, if an ad is meant to get you elected, one that serves that purpose relatively well is one that deserves to be commended. And that's why it's this week's ad of the week.

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