(upbeat music) - More Idaho Matters now from the studios of Boise State Public Radio News. I'm Jamekah Dett. One of the things that seems to be missing from the upcoming November election is civility on all sides. And we wanted to find out more about the tenor of the campaigns. Dr. Sam Martin is a professor and political scientist at Boise State University. And she's sat down with our morning edition host, George Prentice, to talk about the reliability of polls and whether they're truly are uncommitted voters. Let's take a listen. - Do you have any sense of the value of polls, especially at this point in where we are? We're like less, we're almost a month away. - Yeah, so polls, most people have heard this before, but it can't be said enough times. Polls are snapshots. So what that means is they capture a moment in time that talks to a certain number of people. And I like to think of it. There's two ways that I describe polls to my students. The first is that a poll is like when you go on vacation, you take a picture and you bring that picture home and you put it in the frame, but that picture doesn't capture the whole vacation. It maybe doesn't certainly capture the moments when maybe your partner or your children were driving you crazy or you had seasickness on the boat. And so polls, that's the fluctuation in polls. That's what people mean when they're talking about standard deviations, right? Because those kind of folks, if they're not in the poll or whatever, that really can mess things up. The other thing that I like to remind people about when it comes to polls is that, you know, if you think about a game of cards that you play, if people still play cards, I don't know, but I play cards. And if you play a game of cards, sometimes your dealt a really good hand and sometimes your dealt a less good hand. From the hand you're dealt, you can still tell how to engage in the game, what's basically going on, what the rules are, maybe what the strategy is. And so polls are like that because every poll is talking to different people, which means every poll is essentially a different hand of cards. And that's why it's important to look at them collectively and to take the deck of cards, in the example a little bit further, right now there's evidence that some people are more likely to participate in polls than others. There's maybe some evidence that people on the right are disengaged from mainstream activities and politics like polls. If that's the case, it's like playing that card game without the ace of hearts, right? You're still getting close, but it's really hard. It's really hard to play with only 51 cards. And do you have a sense of new or younger voters and whether they participate in polls? Because pollsters have to reach out somehow, but there aren't so many different platforms. How do you connect? Well, good pollsters now will do what's called a multimodal poll. So that's a poll that often, where you will send out text messages, you will contact some people online, you will contact some people via phone. It's getting more and more unusual to contact anyone via landline. But a multimodal poll that has strict rules about how they're doing it that we call them cross tabs and we call them the ways that you ask questions and the questions aren't leaning. The more reputable the poll company, the less political the poll company and the more that they engage in that multimodal polling, the better the poll's gonna be. Remember, we also, when we look at political polls, in my opinion, especially about candidates, we look at those polls, if they're not right on, then the poll is wrong. Like it said it was gonna be 41% for this candidate and 43% for this candidate, and then it turned out to be 35% and something else. And we say, boy, that poll was sure wrong. Well, polls are really important and they're not actually important as much as we like to think for deciding or figuring out who's gonna get voted for. Polls are important because that's how we register as citizens what we would like our government to be like. And so if we know that 60% of the population favors a particular public policy and somebody does a poll on it, and that poll comes back and it says 54%, or if that poll comes back and it says 68%, then we still have good information when we've guessed that it was 60% because that is good enough. It's enough for lawmakers to know how the public is feeling. And so really when we're talking about competitions, it starts to feel like these surveys aren't worthwhile, but they are, it's just that their use is not just for figuring out who's going to win an election that will happen. It could be policy or practice, it could be right track, wrong track, right, especially in the term. Right, and that's the thing is that surveys are not meant to give you a precise exact number, they're meant to give you a sense. And I really encourage people to remember and think about that when they look at a poll. If it's in the ballpark, it's doing its job because it's giving us a sense of where the public is at. And so the sense that we have about this election is that the public is pretty split and it's going to be a close one. Is it possible that there are undecided voters at this stage? I think that there's a, like as I studied political communication and political discourse, we call those people unicorns because people who are truly undecided, there's a few reasons why people will say they're undecided. The first is that they're just a low information voter and they don't really pay very close attention. And so while it's hard to believe that someone could not know the difference between the candidates or the policies they prefer or the party they prefer, low information candidates are sort of like, my son is a huge football fan and he knows everything about Patrick Mahomes. Like every single thing that a person could know. And he was telling me stats the other day that about how he's on par to be better than Tom Brady. He's a very high information voter when it comes to football. And I'm a low information voter when it comes to football, which is to say, I know who Pat Mahomes is, but that's the end of my knowledge. Voters are like that too. They know who Donald Trump is, they know who Kamala Harris is, but that's the extent of their knowledge. The other thing is that we have a tradition in this country of thinking of voting as private because it's confidential. That's actually sort of an anachronistic understanding of why we have a secret ballot. We have a secret ballot so that people couldn't be punished for who it was that they voted for. They used to have party bosses and really big party machines. If you didn't vote according to them, you could lose your job. All kinds of terrible things could happen. But now that has morphed in our contemporary day to being that your vote is very private and almost like an intimate thing that you should keep to yourself. So that affects polling a little bit too. And it doesn't have to be that way because people shouldn't feel sort of sheepish about who they want to vote for. It's a really important decision. - I've been trying to think of a possible October surprise and I'm really struggling this year. Usually it's the economy, the lightest job numbers but job numbers haven't really that needle hasn't moved much in quite some time now. And the only other thing I can think of is American blood being spilled somewhere. - Well, yeah, I think that the political violence that we have been seeing, the two times that someone has shown up to try to take a shot at Donald Trump, I'm certain, I can't imagine that Kamala Harris's experience is all that different from what we know about what Barack Obama went through. And Obama, people remember, he had to be assigned secret service protection almost immediately when he was running in the primary. And that's very unusual. And so that's probably happening to her, I don't know. And so I think that the October surprise, four years ago we had COVID and we had the George Floyd protests and we had Donald Trump who came down with COVID. That was all very surprising. And I think that something like that is going to happen that we'll call a surprise, that at any other time in the news cycle, we would just call news, right? Like something's gonna happen and it's gonna be newsworthy and it may or may not upset the campaign. - Because of rages, falsehoods, that's any day, right? - Yeah. - They don't seem to move the needle at all. - We are living in a country where folks are getting their media from different places. Young folks are getting their, the Harris campaign, I've read several articles as a comm scholar about how much campaigning she's doing via meme, via TikTok video, that I for one am not seen because I don't hang out there like my college students do. But so they're getting a different experience of Kamala Harris than I'm getting when I sit down and watch her be interviewed on CNN. And that doesn't even begin to touch the ways that we just have a different understanding of what's happening in the world and how it runs. And there's a big difference in people forget this, there's a big difference between something that's a fact and something that's true. And as we're talking to people who may or may not agree with us, I really hope listeners will think about that. So it's a fact that there's gravity, right? It's true that Boise gets cold in the winter, but what I think of as cold may be very different than what somebody else thinks of as cold. And that's not a, we don't differ now on the facts, we differ on the story that we're telling about what's going on. And if people would think more about how a person who doesn't vote like them, they have a story and that story makes sense to them and they have good reasons for it, there may be not reasons that you would have and there may be not even reasons that particularly makes sense. But they think it's cold for a reason and we should find out what that reason is. - I am curious about your engagement with your students. And especially since Kamala Harris is now the top of the Democratic ticket, can you give me a sense of the students that you communicate with on a regular basis? Are they plugged into this? - caveat, I teach politics and I interact with a lot of political science students, so they're more likely, right? That would be a bad survey 'cause my students care about my field, but- - But there's levels of engagement. - Of course, and I was very surprised by two, I've been very surprised by two things. The first week of classes was the Democratic National Convention. So I came in and I asked, I said, "How many of you watched the DNC?" And 20 hands out of this 100 student class went up. And that's a level of, I mean, that requires them to turn on the TV, right? So that's a- - After you're surprised, that's a high number. - Yeah, it was, they were, and we were able to have a conversation about what we thought and students expressed different questions or ideas. And then after the debate, more than half the students shot their hands at the day to watch that. And then the third thing that I'll say, which is tickling me, is that I am offering my students 10 points in extra credit if they give me evidence they're registered to vote, and then 10 more points of extra credit if they can give me evidence that they have actually voted, which means they have these 20 points and they just take a selfie in front of the polling place or whatever. 80% of my class has already registered to vote. And we know that once people register, they're likely to vote. And I can't believe that just the extra credit, I don't normally have 80% of my students take me up on extra credit. - We have talked with the officials in Ada County, and they're predicting 80 to 90% turnout. Does that make sense to you? - Well, 2020 had the biggest turnout really ever. It was extraordinary the turnout. And we haven't talked about this, but there is a lot of research that suggests that the harder folks make it to vote, the more requirements there are, the more that people sort of feel like they're being threatened or disenfranchised, the more likely they become to turn out to vote. So the silver lining of some of the, what some people think are voter suppression efforts or whatever, the silver lining of that is that it's motivating because people say, you're not gonna take my vote away. And parts of traditionally marginalized groups, whether we're talking about people of color or women, they're especially that way because it means something to them because they remember. - I'm curious, should we read anything by large numbers of people who vote early? The early voting phenomenon, and they're extending it by a week here in Idaho this year for the reasons we just talked about, should we read anything into that other than convenience? - No, I think some people are just anxious to vote. - I think that it's convenience. I think, and they're anxious to vote because they want to stop paying attention because the climate of the campaign can be so, so negative. What's interesting is that at the national level, I don't know this about Idaho, and Idaho of course is a state that has far more Republicans than Democrats, at the national level, there still seems to be a reluctance on the part of people on the right to vote early. If that happens, then we will have a sort of thing that happens with returns again, where you see a lot of Republican votes come in early, and then the Democratic votes trickle in late, and that's just by function of how votes get counted. If they have the votes in hand a month early, getting them through the machine on voting day is real fast. - But the possibility of extraordinarily long lines on election night could be a problem. - Yeah, and people should be outraged when that happens, because voting should be something that is simple, easy, and fair. If some people have to wait in a long line to vote, and others can just walk in and out, it's normally because the place where people can walk in and out has a lot more precinct setup, and fewer people are expected at each place. And so when you see a long line, you can know almost without doubt that that is an area of our country where they have not set up enough precincts, and they are asking people to make a sacrifice that is bigger than in other places. And in elections that are on the margins like this, that's just simply unfair. And whatever one thinks of the candidates, or however they want the election to go, we sort of have a conversation happening in our country right now that let's make sure that only people who are actually qualified to vote are able to vote, that are old enough, that are actually citizens of the United States, that this, that, or the other thing. I mean, the thing that I really want to remind people of when it comes to voting is that we are worried that people will vote who are ineligible. But we know that's a very small problem. It's also a crime. When it comes to other crimes, we don't expect people to prove that they're not committing it. We expect the government to show that in fact you have, and we have a very high standard for that. So if you're suspecting your neighbor of voting, and not being eligible for that, really think about that, because you're accusing them of committing a crime, and our standard, if we think someone has committed a petty crime or a serious crime, is really high. And we expect the government to bring the burden of evidence, not the person who wants, not the person who's accused. - We've heard of one state already insisting that every vote be hand-counted, Georgia, which leads me to believe that the morning after, we probably are gonna be where we were four years ago, and that is, it's probably gonna be two or three days. Don't you think this could take a little while to shake this out? - Yes, and from a procedural standpoint, again, that is where, if we do some critical thinking about what's going on, imagine that I did something wonderful for you, which was walk in and throw a bag of money, like pour out a bag of a whole bunch of money on your desk. Would you rather have that, and you got to keep, however much of that you counted by hand? Would you prefer your self-count, or would you prefer the count that the bank did, where they run it through the machine, and they come back and tell you, right? So, this idea that the machines are somehow less accurate, it's really insidious, and it's not true, and-- - Yeah, there's no data that supports that. - And there's also really no other spot in our society where we prefer to do things, let's call it the old-fashioned way, when we have technology that we know does it better, right? We don't use slide rules because we have calculators, we don't use calculators 'cause we have computers, right? Or we have cell phones, just notice and ask questions if you're out there, what does someone gain by me doubting the technology, right? Instead of just admitting that the technology is dubious, maybe it is, but there's always more going on than just the person who's asking you not to believe in it. - I think I know the answer to this. Do you expect things to be as ugly as they have been, maybe just a little bit more each day as we get closer to the election? It's been pretty nasty. - Yeah, I mean, I don't study political violence, but I'm really worried. The two attempts, even if the second one didn't get very close on Donald Trump's life, this is really concerning. It's also a thing that we like to say in my field, let's not exaggerate how bad it is. Almost one in four presidents has had an attempt on their life or has been assassinated. It's political violence is not new, but it's never okay. And it's why I'm always talking about whenever I get the opportunity. I'm always just reminding people, the person who disagrees with you is still a person. You see it all the time. Something awful happens to someone when we say, wow, I don't know them, but that was someone's mom, dad, brother, sister, husband, wife. Well, the person who disagrees with you, they're that to someone too. You can fiercely disagree. I'm not a person who thinks that the solution to everything is meeting in the middle. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes there's one side that is right, but the person who disagrees with you is still a human, and we don't want them committing violence and we don't want violence committed on them. - That was Dr. Sam Martin, a professor and political scientist speaking with our morning edition of George Prentice about the upcoming November election. Thanks so much for listening to Idaho Matters. Boise State Public Radio and Idaho Matters are members of the NPR Network. It's an independent coalition of public media podcasters. You can find more shows in the network wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jamaka Dett. We'll see you tomorrow. - The candidates for November are set. - I know Donald Trump's tight. - Between now and election day. - We are not going back. - A campaign season unfolding faster. - Kamala Harris is not getting a promotion. - Then any in recent history. - Make America great again. - Follow it all with new episodes every weekday on the NPR Politics Podcast.
