September 8th, 2020 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00 Speaker 0] welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin.

[0:00:05 Speaker 1] The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. So I

[0:00:12 Speaker 0] tell people on a regular basis there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called

[0:00:17 Speaker 1] Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution. They have become the norm. At what point must a female senator raised her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room? Welcome

[0:00:34 Speaker 0] to the second reading podcast for the week of September 8th. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m joining in today by Josh Blank, director of research for the Texas Politics Project. It’s the week after Labor Day. Are you ready for the beginning of the campaign? Josh. I am the beginning of the serious phase of the campaign. E should say it’s the week after Labor Day. Are you sick of the campaign and looking just looking forward to it being over?

[0:01:07 Speaker 1] Oh God, are we having fun yet? That’s a party down reference anyway. No, I’m not, but we’ll just we’ll deal with it

[0:01:15 Speaker 0] right Well, we should note that Josh is also a father, and it’s back to School Day and Thesis RL Texas Arian the Austin Independent School district for Josh. And so you also are, you know, sort of back to being a schoolhouse, I guess.

[0:01:32 Speaker 1] Yeah, you can tell by the tears.

[0:01:37 Speaker 0] So today, what we thought we would spend most of our time doing is something that we do all the time. But to talk about where we are with polling in the 2020 cycle, Um, you know, obviously there’s been a lot of polling in Texas because of all the discussion of partisan chain state and the possibility that not even the possibility the you know, the impression that people have, which I think is fair enough that Texas is more competitive than it’s been. That’s driving a lot more polling in the state this cycle. And obviously there’s a lot more pulling in the presidential race. And we wrote about this very briefly a couple of weeks ago. I guess in one of our weekend, maybe it was even last

[0:02:21 Speaker 1] minute last week

[0:02:22 Speaker 0] might even have been last week. We write about way complain and bitch about it so often that it feels like we’re always writing about it, but maybe not. Um, But what We thought we today would be a good day, given that it is, uh, the week after Labor Day and I was joking about it, you know, it is the period when, despite the fact that we know the campaign has been going on for literally years, um, you know, in a lot of ways at the presidential level, for sure, um, this is the period of time when people start paying more attention in the general public for you know, anybody listening to this it’s probably not true of you, I would think. Um, but for most people, particularly given t say the least what a crowded public, you know, discussion it’s been and what how crowded the environment has been in terms of public policy and and issues out in the in the public sphere with the pandemic. There’s a lot going on, and I think people would be forgiven if they’re not paying a ton of attention to the ins and outs off the presidential race. That doesn’t mean they don’t have preferences or, you know, but I mean the depth and extent of attention given all this stuff going on, probably more than it’s been asked. Perhaps, and we could talk about that. But this is the time when people start. And it’s not a bad time to start talking about polling to talk again about polling because there’s gonna be a lot more polling in the public sphere. I mean, is we get to the post Labor Day. They’re gonna be people pulling. You know, there’s gonna be new polling multiple times a week, and then within a couple weeks, we’ll beginning new polls almost daily in one race or another.

[0:04:01 Speaker 1] Well, just the flip side of this. I mean, you were sort of mentioning the fact that people aren’t paying attention and, you know, a lot of people aren’t paying attention for a lot of reasons. It’s the summer, right? I mean, again, if you’re listening to this, you probably pay attention all summer. Most people are taking vacations. They’re taking their dealer, you know, with having their kids at home. They’re just

[0:04:17 Speaker 0] doing other vacations or

[0:04:18 Speaker 1] not taking vacation or just doing other things. But the other side of it, too. I mean, even sort of outside of the, You know, this is when the campaigns also begin, like to really start spending their money, right? That’s the other piece of this, too,

[0:04:28 Speaker 0] unless you’re the Trump campaign.

[0:04:30 Speaker 1] Unless you spent it already

[0:04:31 Speaker 0] a few months ago on on Brad Prescott driver.

[0:04:35 Speaker 1] Anyway, that’s

[0:04:36 Speaker 0] a reference to The New York Times story

[0:04:37 Speaker 1] this morning, right? But but in general, historically and traditionally, this is when you start spending your money and that’s both on the advertisements, you’re going to run. But it’s also, you know, all this sort of Get out the vote work all the You’re getting all your volunteers to go and start knocking on doors against setting aside Cove it. This is when this all starts to begin. And I think it’s important to remember to, you know, we were still having primaries in the summer, like technically, the race. I mean, we just had the, uh, national conventions a few weeks ago, which is when they actually nominated the candidates, even if we knew who they were beforehand. And so there’s a lot of reasons that, like they think that we generally tend to think of Labor Day as the official start of the campaign.

[0:05:14 Speaker 0] So given that is a marker, one of the things that we’ve talked about that it’s just it’s just the kind of the practices that are followed. Um, not just in polling per se, but in the way that polls make their way out into the public. What we call disclosure and you’ve looked at the polling is we’ve been putting together and, you know, updating our poltrack around the Texas Politics Project website with the release of every president or most presidential polls in Texas, you know, we’ve had to make some decisions about policy and what we ought to include and what we shouldn’t. And one of the things that we found in looking at these is that the level of disclosure is, you know, despite, you know, you have discussion about disclosure in 2016 was a watershed. But, you know, the really predated 2016, we can talk about that looking at stuff. We found really uneven disclosure in this in the polling that’s been going on here, right?

[0:06:12 Speaker 1] Yeah, that’s right. And so you know what? What are we talking about? We’re talking about disclosure. I mean, ultimately, the things that you know, we want to know. So as someone who looks at polls professionally, right? You know, if I find that a poll just got released and there’s some article on, let’s say it’s on ABC News or some website and says, You know, here’s some top line results You know, Biden leads Trump or Trump leads Biden or whatever, right? The first thing I do when I get to that article is I try to go through basically, look for the link that takes me to the actual disclosure of this poll, the poll, the poll disclosure is not the article that tells you the result. The poll disclosure is what tells you how the poll was actually conducted. It usually includes a methodology statement that tells you, you know who was contacted, right? How they were contacted, Was it, You know, by phone? Was it a landline? Telephones, cellphones. Some combination was done online. Was it a combination of all three? So who was contacted? How many of them were contacted? How are they contacted? When were they contacted? Why might that be important? Well, I mean, imagine if you were to do a poll right before a debate, where one candidate had a major gaffe and then a pole right after a debate where a major candid had a major gaffe. You might expect to see differences in the polling

[0:07:20 Speaker 0] results most recently before or after the convention, something people have been paying attention to recently,

[0:07:25 Speaker 1] but something potentially consequential. You want to know when the poll was conducted, right? You know, and that’s kind of the beginning. Then you also want to know what was done with the data. We have all these things, you know in polling called Not me, this thing called non response bias. Ultimately, some people are more likely to respond to polls and others, and so ultimately, almost every pollster has toe weight. The data to kind of account for that correction. How was it waited just ultimately, what were you know, what were the relevant characteristics that we waited back to usually race, age and gender. But ultimately, you know, this should be made pretty clear to people. And then finally, you know, we finally get to that top line item, and that’s not really enough, because the question is not only first of all, how specifically was the question asked, because that’s important because ultimately, you know, people say to us all the time. Well, if you ask that question a different way, wouldn’t you get different results? And the answer almost assuredly is yes, it’s a different question. So ultimately, you want to see how the question was asked, and you also want to see what else was on the pole and what the sequencing was, because ultimately, you know, there was a There was a recent poll that purported to show a trial ballot result between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in a state to remain nameless. And this question was, you know, I think about 50 or 60 questions into the pole, the entirety of which up to that point was basically an evaluation of the state of the government’s covert response. Ultimately, then, at that point, you know, your evaluation of the presidential ticket basically becomes like Imagine if we had a campaign that was totally about evaluating how Cove it was doing, and then we asked you how you were gonna vote. I mean, that’s basically what you’re simulating and something like that, but you wouldn’t know that unless you saw the actual questions and the order of the questions. And so these are all things that we think about is being, you know, pretty important in disclosure. You could go a step further, you could provide the actual data set. You know, there’s other things that people could provide further, but this is kind of what we think of How did you conduct a poll? Who were you talking? Thio. What did you ask? And ultimately right

[0:09:13 Speaker 0] now? Yeah. You asking how in terms of what order and wording.

[0:09:17 Speaker 1] Yeah. And ultimately, you know, this is important because you can’t really evaluate the quality of a pole without this information, E. I mean, I would say that, you know, I’m not trying to be, You know, I’m not trying to overstate it. You literally cannot evaluate the quality of any results. You see, that doesn’t have most of this information available to you. Would you agree with that?

[0:09:37 Speaker 0] Yeah. I mean, I think so. I think that I think that’s most true. And I’m not disagreeing. I’m splitting hairs here, but and I’ll tell you why in a second, I You know, I think it’s particularly true when you’re talking about election preferences and attitudes. That or not well, for wrongly held, but particularly election preferences. I mean, I think you’re you know, your idea about the you know, your account of the poll in which the, you know, that the trial ballot was questioned 53 is I recall is, um you know, I think a pretty good example of that and the reason that I’m flagging that is just because, look, you know, we push out a lot of policy attitudes that don’t have that information directly linked to what we’re pushing out. I mean, you kind of have to go find it a little bit, but I think the point holds and that’s really what we’re you know, we’re sort of talking about here is that you know, you’ve got to be able to find that information somewhere. I guess I’m I’m talking about accessibility rather than disclosure to some degree on, But I think you know, it’s something I sometime about social media and my own it in it, in which, you know, I mean, I spend you know, more time than I should probably relative to my responsibilities, um, pushing out individual, you know, poll results that we’ve gotten that seem relevant to the public discourse. And, you know, I’ve surrendered to, you know, the tyranny of Twitter and that, you know, every tweet doesn’t say Here, here’s a result on gun attitudes. And if you wanna look at where this was in the poll and we’ll look at the questionnaire, you can also find all that here. And, you know, I you know, all things being equal, I would, you know, I would like to be doing that mawr, but But I don’t want to muddy the point, but that’s

[0:11:28 Speaker 1] kind of but it makes a good, but I think it transitions as well. I mean, it makes a good point, which is just to say Ultimately, though, we don’t expect most normal people to say, Well, wait a minute, now that you know I want to go and I want to see exactly where that gun control question was in that exact pole and how you know what was asking for what was

[0:11:45 Speaker 0] on Twitter, they just jump. They just jumped to the alternative favorite word that would have helped their position. But sure,

[0:11:51 Speaker 1] and you know, and that’s fine, right? And again, like most again most people are not gonna do that, they’re gonna engage with the material. I would say, You know, in our case, you know, we’ve been conducting these polls in Texas for over a decade and have made every bit of information available that we possibly can, you know, if we if not as accessible as possible, certainly available and certainly willingly, you know, very willing to answer people’s questions. Um, but the thing is, is for most people, right? You know, they’re not going to do that. But then the question becomes, Well, who are the gatekeepers who provide this information to other people? And are they both willing and able to do that? Kind of, uh, you know, let’s say a quality check before presenting this, because ultimately what? You know what polling results become is they become a quick shorthand reference for people about the nature of the race, right?

[0:12:37 Speaker 0] Yeah, Yeah, I think you know, in a way, it’s ah, you know, I think at some point I probably sort of myself. I would never use this, but, you know, you had another broken vow to myself, you know, there was a matter of like, there’s a difference between disclosure on the surface in a way that becomes to the discourse. But, you know, already ability to show your receipts. Quote unquote Andi, that’s kind of you know what? I guess what we’re talking about in terms of theon going or you know, what we’re talking about in terms of the ongoing discussed this. But I mean but right. I mean, the you know, this really does come down to what are best practices and who should be responsible for them. You know what kind of reliability in this area should casual readers of political information and particularly news media expect? And I think that’s really what we’ve been noticing is that we’re seeing, you know, a lot of reporting to some degree in what we think of his traditional general audience outlets. We can’t just called the news media anymore exist so much, you know, But, you know, newspapers, magazines, professional journalism outlets, you know, reporting on on poles with really uneven levels of disclosure. And I think it’s it’s kind of striking given, you know, for two reasons that it it feels to me like, you know, pre 2016, you know, there was a certain amount of enforcement and gate keeping on this. And frankly, sometimes early on, I I resented it because we were doing Internet. Were using the Internet before a lot of other people were, and there were gatekeepers of some of the national media outlets. You know, some of them, you know, that I won’t mention the New York Times were, you know, draconian about this beyond reasonable nous In terms of just, you know, adopting is the best practice. The idea that, you know, if you use the internet to collect your data, by definition, it wasn’t a jet. Now, some of those attitudes air still, you know, kind of out there, you know, in corners, you know, among you know, mostly I think, frankly, older professionals. But I think you know, But But it points to the fact that you do expect, you know, I think it’s okay to expect that journalism outlets will have policies about them and that their readers can rely on them. And that seems Thio. I’m in a direction that I’m a little bit surprised by,

[0:15:01 Speaker 1] and I would I would even add a little more complexity released to the pre 2016 I would say the other element outside of sort of the journalism outlets that had some sort of odd and idiosyncratic kind of hard and fast rules about what they would and wouldn’t report was that you know, most of the policing that was going on, if you could even call it that came from poll aggregators various, you know, basically websites that would go and create forecasting models off of the work of other pollsters into the extent that there was like, you know, some policing going on in the Twitter space and stuff like that. It was often around, you know, whether or not disclosure sufficed enough to basically feed the models. You know, in a lot of cases, it wasn’t really about disclosure for understanding how a poll was conducted. It was just so that they could basically manage some degree of uncertainty into their models. And again that leads to other problems again, he said. That sort of the arc through this, of course, is the 2016 election where a lot of people said, Oh boy, the pollsters really get the strong now we could rehash this a million times in the really quick, quick version of this nationally, the pollsters were spot on. They predicted a narrow Hillary Clinton win in the popular vote. She basically hit that mark. Most of the statewide polling in states that had good, consistent statewide polling had pretty accurate pulling. The problem was, is there were a handful of consequential states in the election where there was not a long history of good polling and a lot of these models that predicted, you know, 95% chances of Hillary Clinton wins, which you say a model is not a poll. Its’s a byproduct of it, right? We’re taking these sort of, you know, kind of local

[0:16:27 Speaker 0] and in fact, the model main integrate polling but not rely solely on it,

[0:16:32 Speaker 1] right? And yeah, exactly. And so brought that stuff in, said Hillary Clinton has a 95% chance of winning. As I’ve said many times, no pollster would ever run a pole and say, You know, this candidate has a 95% chance of winning. It’s just not in our DNA, usually to say something like that. Uh, And then when she lost, her friend said, Oh, well, the polls air really messed up. Now The funny thing is that the polling community took this very seriously. You know, ultimately, you know, issued a bunch of postmortem reports, really went toe look into the problems and basically said, Hey, this is actually a pretty narrow problem, but there are things we could do to improve this. In the aftermath of that, I think the media,

[0:17:06 Speaker 0] you know, you should say what those were.

[0:17:08 Speaker 1] I mean, you know, for them I mean, the main sort of thing is to basically, this is an acknowledgement of the under consideration of college education in, uh, in polling and making sure that there is a enough represent relatives of non college educated respondents in basically survey samples.

[0:17:26 Speaker 0] And that and that showed up mainly at the level of state level polling and pointed to the other, you know, to the other point, which is the quantity of quality polling at the state level, which, you know, was also a problem that was underlined in that report.

[0:17:43 Speaker 1] Right. So then, in the aftermath of that, I think the media got really tough, and they started, so I mean, you know, all of a sudden you know, you you know, you get une email from, like CNN or somewhere, and they would want all kinds of really, I mean, I would call them almost like deep statistics on the on the quality of the polls were talking about, you know, they wanted to know response rates. They wanted to know coverage. It’s all these sorts of, you know, in terms of terminology that does not matter for the purpose of the podcast. But the sort of thing that I would say even goes beyond kind of the normal disclosure we talked about until, like some pretty extensive nuts and bolts. So that was going on for a while. And it seems like it for a long time, you know, even getting any polling results covered it. A newspaper required, you know, basically giving them a full methodology statement regardless of the track record. Whatever. Fine. It’s great, right? But you kind of jumped.

[0:18:28 Speaker 0] I would say that was mainly national outlets. I mean,

[0:18:31 Speaker 1] that was me, the national Well, yeah, I mean, it was some state outlets. There’s definitely national outlets, but there’s definitely a lot more caregiver, and I think for a while, in terms of what polls people were willing to report or not and that we’ve kind of hit this point where it almost seems like, you know, ultimately, our appetite for pollings no less, it seems, is just sort of, you know, a za people. The media’s appetite for polish, no less as a people, uh, and then you know, And so what you’re starting to see now is one you’re starting to see pollsters, I think, you know, sort of, you know, I would say doing intermittent disclosures. So especially these pollsters who do, Sort of like, you know, what we call like, you know, thes sort of weekly tracking polls or, you know, every other week tracking polls, basically, you know, a lot of them are sort of falling back on. Well, I disclosed it at the beginning How I’m going to do this. So therefore, going forward, I don’t have to disclose this anymore.

[0:19:20 Speaker 0] And you’re you’re thinking mainly about entities with media partners, right? For the most part,

[0:19:26 Speaker 1] these are mostly thes air, almost solely entities with media partners. Ultimately, you know, I mean, there’s a reason for them not to report this information. I mean, they have the space, they’ve got the words. You know, they could they could do it, but a lot of them are now starting. Well, we’ve reported this once and so and then you just don’t see any anything after that. You know, this may or may not be important, but look, you know, I’ll just you know, I’m just gonna name names for one, because it was last week, right? But morning Consulate released a poll last week. They do this kind of on a weekly. They do a lot of polling. Ultimately, they basically we’re looking for post convention bounce is they Look at a bunch of different states. Just if it was didn’t find anything big except in Arizona. But, for example, in Texas, you know, they found that, you know, I think they had trump up by one point before the convention. They had him up by one point after the conventions, but nowhere at all. And we emailed horning consoles and, you know, but nowhere at all. Could you find the sample size or the margin of error for this poll? Now, does that matter? Well, you know, when you’re proposing that there’s a one point race, it kind of does. If you’re proposing that there’s a two point race, you kind of want to know if the margin of error is 2.5 or three points or whether it’s 1.5 points and they have big samples, so it could be very small. But ultimately it’s kind of hard to know. And also that doesn’t even add to the fact of all the other stuff, which is, you know, it’s a purported poll of likely voters. Who are those people? I don’t know and we can talk about that. But ultimately, you know, likely voters or a group of voters who don’t exist until the election. So ultimately, there’s a lot of uncertainty and something like that. But you know, Morning Consulate has done a bunch of polling, has disclosed how they’ve done it previously, so ultimately they kind of get given a pass. But then there’s this other sort of thing that goes on that I find even to be more pernicious, which is that, you know, sort of a lot of media outlets that generally seem to have pretty strict standards for what’s gonna sort of be published under their masthead, whether digital or otherwise. But if it’s in a newsletter, eso

[0:21:17 Speaker 0] let’s let’s pause for sit back and stop and say so, Yeah, so I mean, I think once you move into this, there is Ah, there’s a piece that is about media habits, you know, And and, you know, I think this does. This is tied a little bit to shifts in the business model, you know, among media outlets to where you know you have premium newsletters. Now some of this is our new offshoots or relatively new. I mean, you know, the last decade. But are offshoots of established so that are generating revenue with insider, more premium information. And, you know, as you say, I mean, I think there’s two things going on. One is that pollsters and this and this gets us into from public polling. Also into campaign polling have figured out that this is a way to inject the results into the bloodstream. Even if the mainstream outlets have still have enough standards to not release campaign polling things, Campaign polling finds its way into the newsletters and still finds its way into the political bloodstream that in the kind of information economy, that way, it’s become a work around to all the work in the public discussion about disclosure. That’s one of the things that is also feeding the on a fluctuation in the standards at the at the national level. In the more public outlets, right?

[0:22:40 Speaker 1] Yeah, I think that’s what I mean. That’s interesting. That’s an interesting point. I think that’s I think that’s right, too. And in part of it is just, you know, we sort of say, You know, well, why is this? Well, I mean, there’s a lot of reasons why, you know, journalists report, you know, on the one hand, say, I can’t report this, you know, under the masthead. But I can put this in a newsletter. There’s all kinds of justifications, you know, that kind of go through that that you can imagine. But part of it also is just keeping up, right? I mean, ultimately, if outlets gonna cover it, you know, you sort of have to have an answer as to why you’re not going to cover it, right?

[0:23:10 Speaker 0] Well, right now, yeah, I think that’s right. And there’s such get into the cycle, you know, we started, you know, with the laboring. The point of Labor Day. Um, there’s such a There’s such a You know, you take Texas example in what we’re seeing in the Texas media real appetite among insiders and professionals to find out what’s going on in the congressional and state district races as the as the environment gets more competitive, everybody wants to know like, Hey, what are you hearing? And what you’re hearing is stuff that is being paid for by campaigns and interest groups. And that is the stuff that is being either just internally and leaked out. Sometimes just via a you know, personal relationships, somebody goes, Oh, hey, Yeah, Look, I just got this and you happen to be somewhere. They show it to you on your phone A lot less of that going on right now on some of it is a campaign saying, Hey, you know, we wanted to change the discussion. There have been stories about this race. We want the impression to be that this race is close or not close, and so you send a reporter a selective leak, which is not subject to any of the means of disclosure in in most in most likely it or you just issue a press release and hope somebody will pick it up and to get back to where we started on this little piece. Now that stuff gets picked up in the news letters all the time.

[0:24:34 Speaker 1] Yeah, and the key. And the key point here is And I think you know, if your singer is saying, Well, how is that different than anything else that I think the point you should you know, people need to acknowledge is have you ever heard of a campaign release any of its internal polling in any way that made them look bad? I mean, they just don’t I mean, ultimately, if you I mean I mean, you know, the sort of things that your site, especially these sort of looks into congressional and statehouse races. I mean, ultimately, if if if, if the poll is coming out of you know, a Democratic campaign without fail, the Democrats are up in that race or they’re within striking distance. If it’s a race that you know, they don’t necessarily expect to win, and vice versa for Republicans, if Republican campaigns or releasing polls, you never see a poll in which it’s not being mobilized to some strategic advantage. Whether it’s either to say, Hey, look, we’re so far up. You know, nobody should put any money on on the other side again. A strategic conservation or hey, we’re only up a little. We really need money, right? Or hey were within striking distance of taking this seat back. We really need money. It’s basically I mean, ultimately, it’s is more of a fundraising tool than anything else. But the idea that this is somehow like insider information, it’s like It’s not, It’s, I mean again. There’s no way to evaluate because I’ve never seen a campaign poll released with any. You know, with almost I would say with anything but the most minimal amount of disclosure, if any disclosure at all. Every

[0:25:50 Speaker 0] now and then, if somebody is trying to really push it, they’ll give you, you know, I mean, I wouldn’t say never in my experience, but I’m older than you.

[0:25:57 Speaker 1] Well, but I would say no. I would say I’ve seen I’ve seen some disclosure from time to time, but even then I think it’s it’s mostly been, you know, notably incomplete, right, Like, I mean, maybe they show you the four questions that they asked out of whatever you know, right? And so I mean, I think that’s the thing that’s a little bit nerve racking right now. I think it’s someone you know is a public pollster. I mean, we you know, we not that we’re sitting here trying to police other people, but ultimately we’re trying to do good work. We’re trying to provide people with good information about where the electorate stands on a number of issues and on races. And then ultimately, you know, there are a bunch of people who are mostly in the campaign, since I think most people are trying to do good work generally for what they’re trying to do. But the point is that, you know, where is our goal is sort of a public public pollsters working for, you know, Ah University in the media outlet is to provide inside information period. We don’t have a stake in the outcomes, you know, we’re just trying to basically shoot it a straight. It is possible. But to the extent that you know, it’s hard to open a newsletter, I think these days it even harder still as we get toward the election without some campaign poll purporting to tell us now you know what’s going on in these races with no way to evaluate it and no reason to believe absent again any disclosure that there aren’t motivations for releasing these results,

[0:27:08 Speaker 0] right? I mean, I think what I would, you know, I would even extend it to be on, you know, I mean, I you know, we probably have slightly different views of this a little bit, but, I mean, I’m kind of most you know, I’m less offended is you know, somebody that conducts polls and I am offended is the wrong word. I’m less bothered by this dynamic, you know, from the principle of pulling the name of the principle of what the public discourse looks like. And that’s what makes it hard, You know, to me, is like trying to be part of, you know, a rational, evidence based discussion when people are inject and poor evidence into the discussion or poor, you know, poorly disclosed or, you know, footnoted for lack of a better term evidence. You know, it’s problematic and I think to connect all these dots in a way. I mean, that is why disclosure kind of plays a role because, you know, disclosure, particularly the mess means you know how something was done. And I think that you have toe. Also remember that the organizational and political context of campaign polls that air released out in public is fun, different from the process that takes place in public polling. And we got we got a little glimpse of this and it’s now been eight or 10 years. But, you know, a few election cycles ago there was a candidate in a primary who lost the race, that everybody thought that candidate should have won that candidate. You know, frankly, you know, among among blaming everybody but himself. Blame the pollster. Uh, and the pollsters said, You know, look, I put lots of memos, assumptions about what the electorate might local. I give them to the campaign except for the campaign to use, based on my advice, what they use, and certainly to release what they’re going to release now. That seems like a little bit of just a little blip in the aftermath of a campaign that had gone south. But I think people it gave us a glimpse into what happens inside campaigns, which is different than what you’re seeing in public polling, which is, you know, campaigns were given lots of different polling results. They get lots of, you know, different versions of what the result might look like based on, and they could to choose what they release. And that is a fundamentally different scenario, you know, Look, we may think about different weighting schemes, but ultimately we’re settling on the best picture that we think is most accurate. That’s not what’s going on in the process. That’s not the objective of a campaign pull release. It’s a completely different as you were. You were talking about motivations earlier. It’s a different motivation. Not just that. How the release. You know what you do, You know how you disclose it or who sees it. But what your you know, your ultimate. The purpose of the exercise is when that data become public.

[0:29:58 Speaker 1] Yeah, and just you’re wrapping it around. I’m gonna wrap it around again. I mean, I think the other yeah. No. Here we go. We’re gonna We’re gonna full circle it twice. Uh, we’re back where we started, but anyway, but I mean, the other pieces, I think that’s why you know they are different things when you’re talking about, you know, getting public media polls and sort of their level of disclosure or not. On the one hand, campaign polls in their level of disclosure or not. But I think you know you can’t help but look at it in this overarching context of, you know, there was a plush and I would say they’re still sort of is to require, uh, you know, pollsters to provide this basic information about how you did a poll e think it’s very makes me nervous again, whether as a pollster, whether is someone who is addressed in the public discourse, you know, they’re already they’re always going to be journalists and outlets that are going to report on campaign polls because, you know, they, they feel there inside ary. They feel like insider information. They’re sexy

[0:30:56 Speaker 0] there. Yeah, that’s their market segment.

[0:30:58 Speaker 1] Yeah, it’s the market. Sometimes there’s no other information. Even so, you want to take even the questionable information. I think the thing is, is that you know the bar for including that kind of stuff gets lower. Still, if we just start reporting on public polls without any disclosure because ultimately then if that’s that’s, you know, I don’t see how you

[0:31:14 Speaker 0] know that. Yeah, that was kind of the point I was making earlier that. I mean, I think the two things begin to affect each other. You know, the dynamic is kind of mutually reinforcing. I think that’s right. And I think it is a problem. All right, well, I’m glad we got that off our chest. Um, so with that, I want to thank everybody for listening. Thank Josh for being here. Thank our crew in liberal arts. Uh, instructional technology services slashed the liberal arts development studio. Thanks for listening. And we will be back next week. Second reading Podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.