Here & Now

How Balanced is Wisconsin’s Media Diet?

Frederica Freyberg:
All eyes are on Wisconsin, especially after a close statewide race in an election that just swung the other way only a year ago. The UW research team that includes journalism professors and the author of “The Politics of Resentment” Katherine Cramer just published an article titled “What Makes Wisconsin Swing?” digging into why voters in this state so readily change up their votes. UW-Madison Professor of Journalism Mike Wagner joined us on this topic earlier. Thanks very much for joining us.

Michael Wagner:
Oh, it’s my pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:
So what does yet another squeaker of a statewide election in the race for the Supreme Court say about Wisconsin’s status as a tight swing state?

Michael Wagner:
I think it says it’s extraordinarily likely we’ll be watching Wisconsin late into the night in 2020. The map looks a lot like the Evers-Walker map did for the State Supreme Court race and less like the Trump and Clinton map. So some things are fundamentally shifting in the state and it largely becomes a turnout story. There was greater turnout in Green Bay, Marathon County, Waukesha County, those kinds of places which helped Hagedorn in the State Supreme Court race whereas lower turnout in Milwaukee really hurt Neubauer.

Frederica Freyberg:
It’s no accident, obviously or mistake that the Democratic National Committee chose Wisconsin for its convention.

Michael Wagner:
It is a bright shining “we’re sorry” sign flashing saying we know we needed to do more in this state in the last election and this is a way to rectify it.

Frederica Freyberg:
Now, we’re really here to talk about your research, and according to your team’s research, in a recent article titled “What Makes Wisconsin Swing,” 12% of voters in Wisconsin split their ticket. Now what’s an example of this?

Michael Wagner:
So what we’re saying here is, just over 1 in 10 Wisconsinites voted for Tammy Baldwin and Scott Walker in 2018 or voted for Leah Vukmir and Tony Evers. Although most of the people that split their ticket were Baldwin-Walker voters in Wisconsin in 2018.

Frederica Freyberg:
Now does Wisconsin stand out in this regard. How unusual is it?

Michael Wagner:
It’s becoming less common so as the country has polarized over the last 20, 25 years, there’s less split ticket voting than there used to be. There used to be this really robust literature in political science, why do people split their tickets, are they trying to balance the presidency and the majority in Congress to keep them you know honest with each other or is it something else? And then that literature sort of faded as the country has polarized so much and most people vote a straight party line ticket but 1 in 10 of us still split those tickets when we vote.

Frederica Freyberg:
So Wisconsin does kind of stand out in this regard?

Michael Wagner:
It stands out and it stands out in a really unique way that has a lot to do with communication. So the more that people who get information from a source that is not so likely to tell them that they’re right, so the liberal who watches some Fox News, the conservative who watches MSNBC, the more likely they are to split their ticket. It doesn’t harden their preferences, it opens them up to the other side.

Frederica Freyberg:
In fact, you called this an information diet.

Michael Wagner:
Right.

Frederica Freyberg:
And say that 40% of Wisconsinites have balanced information diet. Describe what you’re talking about.

Michael Wagner:
Right. So we fancy the information diet as where do people get their information? Are they getting it from mainstream television networks and public television and public radio? Do they get it from local newspapers, national newspapers? Do they get it from ideological sources on cable television or ideological web sources? Do they get it from Facebook and Twitter on social media? Where do they get their information and what’s kind of the partisan tilt of that, and, what’s the actual individual’s perception of the partisan tilt of the information that they’re getting? And we kind of aggregate all of that together to get a sense of what’s the information people are being exposed to? Is it liberal, conservative, balanced? How does that influence what people know, what they believe to be true, what they want, how they participate, all that sort of thing.

Frederica Freyberg:
40% of Wisconsinites that you surveyed, though, having a so-called balanced diet in this way sounds like a high number.

Michael Wagner:
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s reasonable to interpret that as good news. That people are willing to hear from multiple points of view before they try to make political decisions. And they want to get their information from more than one source and to get their information from a source that’s not just going to tell them they’re right. Now, the more extreme one is in their partisanship, the more likely they tend to just get information or get more information, I should say, from a source that tells them they’re right and the other side is not just wrong but dangerous, evil and all that sort of thing.

Frederica Freyberg:
In fact, you often say that voters with the most polarized views mostly talk amongst themselves, right? Family and friends.

Michael Wagner:
Right.

Frederica Freyberg:
Otherwise voters who are less had polarized, who are they talking to?

Michael Wagner:
So that’s another part of the information diet. It’s not just the sources that are talking at us about the information but also who we talk with. And so as people especially when they talk to their co-workers. You know, you kind of can self-select your partner in your life and you tend — people tend to marry people whose views are similar to their own but at work, all bets are off. So the more you talk with a diverse set of people, and the workplace is one place to find a diverse set of people, the more people are willing to split their ticket when they vote and the less hardened partisan attitudes they have. They’re less extreme about Governor Walker or President Obama, depending upon which party they’re in. They’re less extreme about attitudes towards groups like the Tea Party or labor unions. The more diverse sets of people we talk to, the more moderate opinions we have on average.

Frederica Freyberg:
Now, again, just to wrap this up, you say where people get their information about politics could play a decisive role in 2020. How so?

Michael Wagner:
Well, when you have a State Supreme Court race with 5,000 votes or so separating the winner from the loser, and roughly 10 to 12% of the people getting information from sources that are telling them they might not be right, that’s a mix to where between 10,000 and 40,000 votes could very well did decide the election in Wisconsin and for president in 2020. So that small group of voters could be decisive.

Frederica Freyberg:
Michael Wagner, thanks very much.

Michael Wagner:
My pleasure.