Crosscut Ideas Festival

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- Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

My name is Mai Hoang and I am the Central Eastern Washington Reporter for Crosscut.

I write stories on a variety of topics, including politics, business, and housing, to show what's happening east of the Cascades and the region's relationship with the rest of the state.

Today we're here to talk about what Washington voters think of the U.S. Supreme Court based on results of the latest Crosscut-Elway poll.

I recently wrote a story on the poll results where I spoke to a few of the 400 registered Washington voters who picked up the phone or responded to a text to answer questions about the court.

Now I'll talk about those responses compiled by cross-cut pollster, Stuart Elway, who's here with me today.

Stuart has been analyzing public opinion since 1975.

He founded the Elway Poll in 1992 and currently directs the Crosscut-Elway poll, an ongoing nonpartisan analysis of opinion in Washington State.

Stuart, welcome and thank you for joining me today.

- Good morning and glad to be with you.

- Stuart, why was it important to do a poll on the U.S. Supreme Court right now?

- Well, you know, I think it's generally important to do it.

The court is part of the democracy.

If you think of democracy as a grand conversation about where we're going in a society, it's not always so grand (laughs) a conversation, but it it's part of that conversation and people have the opportunity and the right to talk about the people who are governing us.

And so there's that.

The journalistic aspect, I think doing it for Crosscut, particularly, part of journalism's role is to explain us to each other, to help us understand issues and to help us understand how other people are thinking.

So that's generally why we do the polls.

Now, the Supreme Court, as I say, is part of the government, and at more prosaic level now, the voters are not going to influence the decisions of the Supreme Court, at least not the ones that are currently, they've probably already been decided.

But those decisions may and probably will influence public opinion, so it goes that other way.

So it's a good way to check in with people to see how voters are thinking about the issues that are before the court, which are issues that have been in dis in discussion, or some of them in discussion for several years, sort of in the public debate.

And then finally, the court, to a degree not seen in living memory, sort of interjected themselves into politics last year with the Dobbs decision and became themselves a political issue.

As I say that, that is unprecedented, and so it's even more pertinent now to measure public opinion about the court.

They are themselves now a political issue.

- And speaking of political issue, for most of the court's 234-year history, there is widespread approval for the court, regardless of party.

Our poll showed that less than half of Washington registered voters approve of the court's work.

Why is the change and is that a similar trend to what we're seeing nationally?

- It is similar.

There was a poll done just like two weeks by Pew, two weeks before our poll that had almost exactly the same result.

That is a slightly negative view of the court, two points to the negative side on approval for the court.

So it's really split, but tilted just slightly negative.

And in some sense, that reflects approval and confidence in institutions across the board.

We've seen them going down for all kinds of public institutions over the last years, and the court is no exception to that.

- Yes.

So did results of the poll show that people no longer consider the court in impartial entity that interprets the constitution?

- Well, we asked a couple of questions, one about that overall approval.

Then we asked, "Does the court reflect your values?"

And only 33% said, "Yes, it does most or all of the time.

2/3 said, "The court reflects my values only sometimes or never."

And then we asked, "Does the court follow a political agenda or does it follow the constitution?"

And 57% said it follows a political agenda.

And that certainly is going to contribute to the overall approval, which, by the way, pretty much fell along party lines.

Most Democrats disapproved of the court in our initial question, most Republicans approved of the court in our initial question, which you would expect in that opening question, "Do you approve or disapprove?"

Before we're into more of the substance, would be expected to sort of break along party lines, and it did.

- I think I wanna make one point.

So regarding whether the court follows a political agenda or interprets the Constitution, obviously Democrats overwhelmingly said that they have a political agenda, but Republicans are actually split.

In spite of them approving into court, they also were split in whether they said they followed a political agenda or they interpreted the Constitution.

- Right.

- And in my story, I talked to people that said that it reflects kind of how Republicans have seen the court for some time, that they've seen the court as a more political entity, and Democrats have just come along recently, because obviously of the Dobbs ruling.

What do you say to that?

- I think that's right.

I think, not all Republicans, but there's been a movement in the Republican party or on the right that goes back 50 or 60 years to transform the court.

They've been at this for a long time and have had court appointments at the top of their agenda politically for generations.

The Democrats mostly sort of discovered it (laughs) last week or last year.

The Dobbs decision, it really poked the tiger (laughs) in the form of, for example, younger voters who typically don't vote in large proportion, particularly in off-year elections.

Last year voted way more than they typically would and stemmed what was supposed to be a red tide last year.

And the credit to that goes mostly to the Dobbs decision, just awakening people on the democratic side to the fact that these elections have consequences and that the court really does affect their lives in very personal ways.

And so there were polling after the election last year, exit polling on why people voted as they did, and certainly abortion got most of the attention, and rightfully so, but other polling showed that people felt that democracy was under threat.

In some of the polling, that question was not asked, so it didn't get represented, but the answers got lumped in with the abortion issue.

But there's more to it than that.

There's a feeling that the court is going in a direction that people, particularly Democrats, really don't like, and it is, as I say, having a more immediate impact.

And this is back to the initial question of why are we doing polling about this?

So the court is now seen as a political actor in a way that they haven't been in anybody's memory.

- Do you see that as a permanent belief, that they're a political actor, or do you think the court can regain that reputation they've had for so long?

- Well, that's a really good question, and for the court and for the other institutions as well.

But for the court, I should point out that our poll was done before the ethics stories started hitting the newspapers, the front pages about Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, and now even John Roberts.

So the court is in a place where they're gonna be very uncomfortable.

They have considered themselves above the fray, and that's kind of how it was set up, that they would be, yeah, impartial jurors to decide some of these things, and being dragged into the political fray itself is not a comfortable place, and it's not a familiar place for these justices, and they aren't gonna like it.

And how they respond now is going to go a long way to answer your question about can that trust be regained?

And there's lots of calls now, even from Republicans and even from conservative jurors who say it's time to implement a much more stringent and transparent ethics policy on the part of the court.

We're not going to just say, "Oh, you can take care of that in-house."

I don't think that is going to play, and I think until something is done, that clamor is going to continue.

So I think it'll be a while before the court is again held in the esteem as an impartial juror as it was before, and some of these cases that we're gonna talk about today are going to continue to play into that.

They're taking on cases that are very contentious and don't seem shy about asserting an ideology point of view beyond just the law into those cases.

- And speaking of change and reform, our polls showed there's widely-held support for court reforms, including term limits and mandatory retirement.

Were you surprised at the enthusiasm for these proposed reforms?

- Not particularly.

People kinda generally like term limits as a concept.

It hasn't been applied to the Supreme Court before, so we did ask four questions about that.

Three of them had to do with term limits or mandatory retirement, which is a sense of term limits.

And we had like seven out of 10 of our respondents supported term limits and supported mandatory retirement, and almost six out of 10 supported a plan where you would have an 18-year limit on justice terms, and those terms would be staggered, such that every two years there would be a new nominee, a new member of the court rotating on.

So it would be a rotating supreme court roster and every president would get at least two nominations, or would get two nominations.

Not at least, would get two and only two.

And so that the court would be more connected, shall we say, to public opinion and democracy and changing times than it is with these lifetime appointments.

And so people supported those.

Matter of fact... Oh, and the other one that they did not support, 49% opposed and 44% were in favor of adding more justices to the court, which is probably the reform that's gotten the most discussion in Congress.

And that was not a majority support.

But 85% of the people in our poll supported at least one of those reforms and 27% supported all four of them.

41% of Democrats supported all four, while 35% of Republicans supported zero, none of them.

So the partisan influences shows up again in these questions as well.

- Yeah, I talked to several voters about the court reforms and I think what I found interesting was to hear from voters I talked to, this idea of fresh voices.

The court is older.

A lot of the justices have lifetime terms, so you could have justices, you do have justices that serve well into old age, and some of the voters I talked to were concerned about sharpness of thought or just not being in touch with the voters, and when you think about it, at one time, people didn't think that way.

They thought of the Supreme Court as kind of this institution that was gonna do the thing they were supposed to do, and you heard about term limits on the president or Congress.

How do you feel this response changes kind of how I think people see the court as an institution or just the belief that, yeah, let's give 'em lifetime terms, because that's how they'll get the right decision or do the right thing.

- Well, that was the idea when the framers put the court together, or in the constitution.

Lifetime appointments in order to insulate them from the Sturm and Drang of daily politics and partisan politics, which the framers also hated.

But the way it is playing out now, and particularly as we see, as I mentioned earlier, this 50-year Republican program to get their people on the court, and not only the Supreme Court, but throughout the federal judiciary, which most of whom also have lifetime appointments, the people that they nominated were young.

They were 50 years old, and so we have Roberts and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, for example, who, if they serve into their 80s, will still be on there when my grandchildren are voting.

And so there's a sense that, well, in one sense you want to insulate them.

In the other sense, you do want a judiciary that is in touch with the times, and it's not gonna be like the House of Representatives where every two years you change 'em, but some flow, some rotation in there is going to result in decisions that are more reflective of where society is.

- And I think one point I'd like to make before we move on is that when I talked to some experts regarding reforms, the one that's actually easiest to implement is the one that received the least support, which was to add the most justices that can be act done by an act of Congress.

But it sounds like with the other reforms, which had much more widespread support, it will actually take a constitutional amendment, which is actually much more difficult, given the partisan deadlock we have right now.

- Right.

- Obviously we didn't ask about that, but I just wanted to hear your thoughts in terms of do you think our voters might've changed if they knew the difficulty of getting some of these reforms?

- Well, I think they like the idea, regardless of the difficulty.

I think you're right, the most popular reforms here, they're just not gonna happen (laughs) in a long time, because it does require a constitutional amendment, which requires not only a super majority in the Congress, but a super majority of state legislature, so you just don't see that happening.

The adding more justices to the court, as you point out, it can be done by an act of Congress, which in this Congress also makes it very difficult to achieve, but it's been done many times.

There was a period in the 1800s where Congress changed a number of justices several times in a relatively short period of time.

So that is more reachable, but seems, at least in our poll, is less popular.

So either way, these reforms are gonna be very difficult to bring to life.

- Okay, so now we're gonna talk about individual cases.

The poll of responses regarding the opinion of court fell heavily along partisan lines.

However, when we do look at individual cases, only 2% of people polled chose either the conservative or the progressive side in every case.

Why aren't party lines predictive when we're talking about individual cases?

- Well, I think it varies.

There are some cases... Well, first of all, it's very difficult to poll on Supreme Court cases for a number of reasons.

One, they're legal, and lawyers don't talk like normal people, and so it's difficult to write a question for a survey that accurately reflects what the issue is.

Oftentimes the issue before the court is some point of law that is not really directly the fundamental underlying issue that people would care about, so there's that.

And then the conversation around the issues, again, by the time it gets to the court, sometimes the issue's polarized, sometimes it it's brand new.

So some of the cases we talked about, I have to believe that most of the respondents in our poll were hearing about it for the first time when we told them about it, so it's really not a considered opinion.

They're listening to our question and trying to come to a decision, and then those questions are likely to fall along party lines because that's a cue that people can use to help them make a decision.

So it depends on the question being asked, I think.

And some of them where we asked, there have been party lines drawn long before the case got to Supreme Court, which is why I got to the Supreme Court in the first place.

- That's right.

A reminder to all of you watching at home that we're gonna be answering some of your questions, so be sure to enter them in the chat section on your screen.

So we'll move on to the case.

In this poll, 68% of voters said race should have no consideration in college admission.

Affirmative action has been prohibited in the state since 1998.

How much does prior knowledge of an issue matter in poll responses?

- Well, I think the prior knowledge may have some effect, but I think the prior opinion has an effect.

I mean, in this state, we've already voted not to use affirmative action as a determinant in college admissions, so the idea that the poll would show that again is really not that surprising.

Although, you know, one would think that a deep blue state like Washington would be more inclined to support affirmative action, but as you point out, it was three to one in our poll and majorities agreed that affirmative action should play no role, so they opposed affirmative action in college admissions.

There are majorities in every demographic category, both Republicans and Democrats, Eastern Washington, Western Washington, Seattle, Pierce County, all income brackets, all genders.

Even 59% of the people of color in our poll agreed with the 69% of Caucasians on this question.

So there really wasn't the kind of division that you might expect around the question that nationally is fairly controversial, and in Washington, again, where you would expect support, because we're such a blue state, that just people do not think that it should be a consideration.

- Yeah, when I talked to voters on this issue of affirmative action, a lot of them clarified that when they responded that race should have no consideration, they also clarified that racism is still an issue, that there should be diversity in colleges.

They're just questioned about whether affirmative action was a good tool, especially giving concerns of fairness or whether the right applicants, qualified applicants would get in.

And I think we talked about this, Stuart, when I was working on this story, that sometimes when people think about an issue, it's not reflective of the entire issue.

So in this case, diversity in colleges or the issue of race, that they're speaking to a very targeted area.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that?

'Cause I think that's a very important point to make.

- Well, yeah, and that's part of the challenge of doing survey research, is you wanna ask a question that is pertinent, that is going to give people a chance to accurately reflect what they think.

Now, I've always said, "The most dangerous thing about survey research is if you ask people a question, they'll give you an answer, so you have to be very careful about how you asked the question."

So in this case, we really tried to boil the question down to what the issue was before the Supreme Court.

We could do, and I have done, a whole survey on affirmative action and diversity.

I've done many over the years on that question and people's response is nuanced to, as you found out in talking about this with some of our poll respondents, that people have complex ideas about the whole idea of diversity or any other issue, but in this case diversity in society and how you achieve that.

But this particular question is, "Should it have a role in college admissions?"

And for that particular part of the formula, people say no, but that doesn't mean that, as you found out, and we would've found out if we'd done a whole survey on this or asked follow-up questions, that people are not opposed to diversity, but people are...

I've found over the years that maybe the most fundamental driving force in public opinion is fairness.

People want fairness.

They want a fair playing field, and affirmative action has been perceived, and we could talk about that for a long time too, but it's been perceived as providing an unfair advantage to people of color, for example.

And as I say, there's a whole litany of debate around that particular perception, but that's how people are perceiving it now, I think, in most cases.

- Yeah, and speaking of fairness, one of the questions that had a surprising result for me was a majority agreed that transgender girls should be prohibited from participation in school sports.

Did that surprise you?

- Well, not exactly.

I don't know.

I mean that, that's a difficult one.

It's relatively new on the public agenda, but certainly getting a lot of attention and is being pushed into the political arena, so we're gonna be hearing a lot more about it.

In our poll, it was 56% who said that transgender girls should be prohibited from participating in girls' sports.

And again, this is an issue where most respondents in every demographic category agreed.

Democrats, Republicans, both genders all agreed that trans transgender girls should not be participating in sports.

So opinion at this point is pretty clear on that.

I don't know if it's settled or not, because again, it's just not that long ago that it entered the political arena.

And we think about gay rights and gay marriage, for example.

Years and years and years, that was an argument, and then boom, all of a sudden, opinion changed in a very short period of time and gay marriage was legalized and affirmed by the Supreme Court after years and years of opposition.

So we may be in early stages on this issue.

As I say, we'll see.

I mean, I expect it to be part of the presidential and other political races next year, which will elevate it even more as a political issue.

So we'll see if that develops, evolves, or if people have their opinion and they're gonna stick with it.

We don't know.

- Yeah, and I brought up that this is also an issue of fairness, because some of the experts I talked to said that some of the progressives who might be siding for prohibiting transgender girls, who might be for transgender rights in general, because it does clash with title IX fairness regarding female participation.

The expert I talked to you said that conservatives have done a good job really pushing that message ahead.

- Right, right.

Well, and it is a little bit like we were just talking about with affirmative action, only even more pointedly, as you just pointed out.

This is a specific question about trans rights.

Should they be in girls' sports?

This question in itself says nothing about support or opposition for other trans rights or feelings about trans people in general.

I mean, there are some pretty draconian measures being passed in legislatures around the country now around trans people and their rights, and this question is very specific and doesn't really address the larger issue.

- So how far can we go with these poll results?

Does this illustrate any direction on how voters might approach these issues on a ballot?

- Well, some do.

I mean, I think the ones like affirmative action and trans rights, there were a couple about religious freedom in here as well, voting laws, as I have said, where people have had a chance to think about it or it's been in the discussion, been part of the political conversation for a while and people have been exposed to ideas and arguments on both sides and they've worked their way through the issue.

Daniel Yankelovich would talk about public judgment.

There's public opinion and then there's answers to public opinion polls and then there's public judgment, which is people have thought about the issue, they've considered the pros and cons, they have arrived at a judgment that they are comfortable with, and have really thought it through.

So on some of these issues, we're in that kind of place where people are...

The trans issue, for example, the one we're just talking about.

It's a hot button issue right now and people are going to their partisan corners on it pretty quickly when it comes up in a debate, but voters are just being exposed to it as a political issue.

They're in the early stages of working their way through.

That's why I was talking about earlier.

Later on, we may see quite different opinions about it as people consider it more.

So on some of the issues...

I forgot my notes here.

On some of these cases that we talked about, we can probably say that these are more or less settled opinions.

On others, there are some issues here, as I mentioned, that we asked people about where they probably hadn't heard about it at all before, and an answer to a question like that is gonna be politically unstable.

We wouldn't be able to predict a year from now how people might think about that because it's brand new to people.

So it's mixed.

- Yeah, and that's what I found in my reporting as well.

When I talked to a University of Washington professor, he pointed out with the transgender issue that they might change if there's other policies associated with transgender girls in sports, such as a medical examination that might be invasive.

So there might be less support for something like this if it means that cis girls have to go through a medical examination.

So I see what you're saying about evolved views with new issues.

- Yeah.

- All right, so we have (laughs) a lot of audience questions.

We'll try to get through as many of them as possible, so let's see what we have here.

- Okay.

- All right, so we talked a lot about Republicans and Democrats and how they're split.

Did you track responses by those who identify as independent and anything surprising in those results?

- We do.

The way I ask the question, and I've asked it this same way for decades is, "If you had to register by party in order to vote in Washington state, would you register as a Republican, a Democrat, or something else?"

And since we don't register by party in Washington state, that's how I ask the question.

So the something else and no answers and independents, they're combined.

So we have republicans, democrats, and independents or nonpartisans.

And in this poll, just for reference, and I'll have to look at it, 38% said that they would register as a democrat, which is the average for the last 20 years.

Democrats have been at 38% on average.

21% said Republicans, which is slightly below the average of 23% over the last 20 years.

And then the rest, 41%, either said independent or didn't answer.

So we do track that.

In this case, there were a couple of issues, I'm trying to find 'em, where independents sided with the Republicans in the majority, and sometimes with the Democrats, but in many of the cases, as I pointed out as we were going through them, there weren't partisan differences.

I mean, on some there were, but the independents, they always seem to come down, as you would expect, in between the Democrats and the Republicans and don't have as strong opinions about these issues or are not represented in as large of numbers as Republicans or Democrats on one side or the other.

- I'd be interested in hearing about their approval of the court, because that was where we saw the biggest political divide, is Democrats heavily disapproved and Republicans approved more.

Where did independents fall between that?

- Let's see, so 66% of Republicans approved.

64% of Democrats disapproved, and independents, there wasn't a majority on either side.

- Oh, (laughs) okay.

- They're independent.

(laughs) It reflects their independence.

There's a lot of different kinds of independent, but they pretty much are always gonna come down in between the Democrats and Republicans, and in this case, as I say, there wasn't a majority either side, because there was a large number of no opinion, which is one way to be an independent also, which is to not have opinions about these things.

- Okay.

So we have a few questions regarding how we do the poll.

So there's a question about how we do the poll, what the margin of error is and whether our outcomes fall within them, and I think the most important question is, "Should I really trust these results?"

And the person who asked the question said, "I mean, polls seem to be wrong all the time now."

(Stuart laughs) - Well, you should absolutely trust these results.

Polls are not wrong all the time now.

That's a whole nother discussion.

Actually in 2022, polls had the best year in predicting the outcomes that they've had in a long time, but I don't wanna get into that whole thing.

But poll results, I mean, you do have to take 'em with a grain of salt.

Pollsters like to say they're a snapshot in time.

We asked... Let me go through how we did the poll.

We do a sample of 400 registered voters statewide.

We draw the sample from the list of registered voters so we know that they're registered when we call them.

A sample of 400 provides a margin of error plus or minus 5%, which means that if we did the same poll 100 times, at least 95 times, we would get results that are within plus or minus 5% of the results we got here, because, I mean, you cannot have absolute precision, because we're interviewing a sample of people, not the entire population, so there's never absolute precision in a poll.

There's always that margin of error.

And this is the same kind of sample that we've done in the Elway poll since '92 and in the Crosscut-Elway poll.

We've continued that since 2018.

So we conduct the survey by telephone.

We call landlines, we call cell phones, and we text people, if on cell lines.

And then we also monitor... Oh, I mentioned the number of Republicans and Democrats.

We monitor while we're calling to make sure we're getting the right number of people, a proportional sample across the state, county by county.

We're getting a mix of gender that's appropriate.

We're getting the appropriate age categories, 'cause we ask age, we ask education level, we ask income, and we ask race or ethnicity, in this case.

We don't always ask that.

And so we know, especially since we've been doing this a long time, we know the range those numbers are supposed to be in to get a representative sample.

So we're monitoring that to make sure that our sample is representative each time.

- Right, we have time for one more question.

And speaking of demographics, we talked a lot about political parties and how the poll responses fell between political parties, but the question was, "Demographically, what was the biggest difference observed in poll answers?"

Was there any shifts between different demographics of the poll?

- Shifts in- - Or were there differences in different demographic groups?

Men or women or different age groups?

- Well, one of the things that was...

There were.

I mean, particularly on these court cases, there were some shifts, but one of the things that was rather striking about this was the lack of demographic differences.

Usually we see more than we did.

There were several cases I talked about where there were majorities on one side or the other.

I look at, well, the trans case and the affirmative action case that I talked about.

Majorities were in agreement in every category of demographics, which is unusual.

- Okay, well, Stuart, we're out of time, and thank you so much for sharing your thoughts- - Yes, ma'am.

- -and thank you for the audience for joining me today at Crosscut Festival.

- Glad to be here, thank you.

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