Lin, thanks so much. Thank you. For months leading up to
Election Day, we hear from Marquette Law School poll
director Charles Franklin, whose poll was recently ranked number
three in the nation. As polls dominate the news, we wanted to
go behind the scenes to better understand them and the director
behind the data, Marissa Wojcik, started by asking how the polls
are conducted and what has changed from 2012 until 20
through 2022. telephone, okay, randomly
dialing phone numbers in the state, both landline and cell
phone. But that became increasingly difficult because
more and more people don't pick up phone calls. So beginning in
2023, we shifted to a sample based on registered voters. The
list of registered voters you can buy from the state. And that
allows us to send an email and a text message inviting people to
take the survey online. Only the person we've sampled can take
it. They can only take it once. You can't volunteer to do the
poll. So it's still a random sample of the population. It's
just that we're not randomly sampling phone numbers. We're
randomly sampling people we know are registered voters. Now about
80% of people complete the survey online, either on their.
Phone or tablet or whatever is convenient, and about 20% if we
haven't heard back from them in a couple of days, we start
phoning. So we complete those interviews by telephone.
>> How has that changed the data? Or has it changed the
data? there are some subtle ways.
There are some advantages to online in that you can ask a
slightly more complicated question online that might sound
really hard to understand when an interviewer is reading the
question, but just reading it, it's pretty clear to the
respondent. The other thing is, we know a bit more about the
person that we're trying to interview, because we sample
from the voter list. We know where this person lives, and so
we can be geographically more precise in our sample, when we
were on the telephone, we divided the state into five big
regions based on media markets. In the state. Now we divide the
state into 90 different regions because we know where these
people live. And so that means those regions are defined by
going from the most Republican to the most Democratic, say,
within the green Bay TV market. So we're making sure we get the
right percentage of people from the most Republican areas of the
green Bay market and the most swingy areas and the most
Democratic areas. >> I wanted to show you Vernon
County. >> So that's one of the changes
we've made to try to make sure that we're representing the full
range of opinion. >> It's just really striking how
much diversity and heterogeneity we have in opinion, even within
a pretty rural Western Wisconsin county.
polling more accurate or better? >> We think it does. The reason
for making these changes is in part in response to the polling
errors that we had in 2016 and others had in both 16 and 2020.
But the proof will come in November when we finally get the
vote count, and we'll see how close we are.
>> 2016 and 2020 was a tough set of cycles for many pollsters,
not just the Marquette poll. Some of the explanation for that
was people who wanted to vote for Trump didn't feel
potentially comfortable telling that to someone on the phone.
Does that mean that kind of might be mitigated?
>> I don't think it's so much the so-called shy Trump voter
who somehow doesn't want to admit they're supporting Trump,
go to a Trump rally. There are not a lot of shy folks at a
Trump rally. What I think it is, though, is that Trump appeals to
a set of voters, some of voters who have not traditionally voted
in elections but are being motivated to vote because of
him, and who are very skeptical of mainstream media. The
established political parties and pollsters. So I think where
the problem comes is not so much unwillingness to say who you'd
vote for, as it is skepticism about doing a poll at all and
therefore falling out of the sample beyond turnout.
>> Do polls ever convince voters who to vote for, or how they
should feel about an issue? >> I I'm skeptical of that.
>> What I would push more is the value of seeing what the polls
say about the people in your community, your state, who don't
share your views. It's so easy to be trapped in the notion that
everybody I know agrees with me on this. This is the obvious
majority. And yet the poll can tell you that maybe 30, 40,
maybe even 60% don't hold the same view as you on that, it's a
bit of a pipe dream to wish people would use polls that way,
but I really think that one of the most valuable points of
polling is to talk about policy issues, not just candidates, and
to try to recognize the wide range of opinion people hold on
those things even within a county or certainly within a
state that not everybody's on your side on this.
>> How should an average voter use this information? It can
feel a little overwhelming. It can feel like there's horse race
polling and how how do we get value?
>> One fairly serious answer is try to ignore it all. Make up
your own mind. Talk to your friends and do that. I think
that's a totally valid way to follow this.
>> How has this election really shaken things up for you as for
me personally, I have rewritten so many survey questionnaires
this year and this summer, especially on the last night, I
can make changes before we start interviewing.
to hurry to rewrite the questionnaire for Harris rather
fun time for me that way. >> What do you think is the most
important thing for voters to think about in this election as
a whole? Not in polls. >> I think I really go to the
question of this election is important, no matter which side
you're on, and paying attention to the candidates and making
your own mind up and treating it as seriously as you can is
really my main advice. It's not about the polls, per se. It's
not even narrowly about how the candidates campaign. But I think
this is just the political scientist in me. I think we're a
better society when more of us vote, we're a better society
when the majority wins, when we release our final poll before
Election Day, the last thing we say is, remember, polls don't
vote. People do. The election's in your hands. In the voters