Zac Schultz:

Now to politics and the results of the latest Marquette University Law School Poll. Here with the results of the new survey is the director of the poll, Charles Franklin. Thanks for your time again.

Charles Franklin:

Good to be here.

Zac Schultz:

So we’re 14 months out from November of 2020 and Donald Trump is either trailing or tied with the top four Democrats in your poll.

Charles Franklin:

That’s right. We see Joe Biden with a nine-point lead, followed by Bernie Sanders with a four-point lead. But then Elizabeth Warren ties at 45 and Kamala Harris ties at 44. We asked about those four candidates because they’ve been in the top four in national polling averages. We’ll change that as the polling averages change or the candidates change.

Zac Schultz:

In regards to the neither category, that’s pretty consistent with what we saw in 2016. You’ve told us in the past, as we get closer to the elections, those people do actually make a choice.

Charles Franklin:

I think that’s generally right. Now, in 2016 we saw an unusually large third-party vote here. And we also saw nearly 100,000 fewer voters going to the polls in 2016 compared to 2012. So there are multiple ways that you can choose to vote for one of the two parties anyway, vote for a third party or stay home. We saw all of that at work in 2016.

Zac Schultz:

Now, Trump’s approval rating is also upside down and not changed since April. So is Wisconsin still the proverbial swing state that the national media is focusing on?

Charles Franklin:

I think we are the swing state. And the way to think about this is of the last five presidential elections here, three of them have been divided by less than one percentage point. The governor’s race was decided by just over one percentage point last year. So the idea that we are anything other than a swing state I think is just wrong. President Trump’s favorability ratings are a bit better here now than they were in ’16, though they are still under water, as is his job approval. So he’s in some ways in better shape now than he was then, but in other ways, he’s still falling short of that 50% approval which he’s never hit in our polling.

Zac Schultz:

And you mentioned the Democratic primary. Wisconsin comes in April, pretty late in the process. How much should we take into those numbers now and how much will be changed by what happens before then?

Charles Franklin:

All of these numbers, the primary and the general, should be thought of as we’re in the middle of the second inning of the ball game. It’s a long ways to the bottom of the ninth and a final score. But we want to watch how the game progresses. Which teams rally and which fall off throughout the course. So I think that’s the way to look at it. Not as these are predictions. In the Dem, we saw Biden in first place at 28, followed by Sanders at 20 and Warren at 17. So that’s in line with what we’re seeing in national polling. But again a long time to go. And they’ve been busy paying attention to Iowa. We haven’t seen as much of those candidates yet.

Zac Schultz:

Meanwhile, thinking about the economy, people think it’s doing okay now, but they’re not very optimistic about the future.

Charles Franklin:

They’re more pessimistic about the future than we’ve actually ever seen in our poll since January 2012. A net negative 11 say the economy will get worse over the next year rather than better. And the average for 2019 across three polls is negative three. At no point in the time that we’ve been doing the poll has any individual poll been net negative and certainly not the average for a year. Now, that’s three polls taken since January here and opinions of the economy can fluctuate. We had an okay jobs report today, for example. But I think it is certainly a warning sign that the public that has been very positive about the economy since 2017, at least, is now beginning to see some concerns on the horizon.

Zac Schultz:

And in regards to polling and how people feel about this, consumer optimism does matter when it comes to how it plays out in the economy, whether people spend money.

Charles Franklin:

It absolutely does because you need to be optimistic about what’s coming before you go get that new car or refrigerator or buy a new house. You know, the good news is our unemployment rate is still exceptionally low. But this notion that people are feeling uncertain about the future is something to worry about. It means that President Trump does not have as high an approval on the economy here. It’s 49 to 50, as he has seen in some national polling earlier in the year, when he was getting 53 to 55% economic approval.

Zac Schultz:

I do want to touch on the issue of gun control legislation and universal background checks. In your notes on the poll, you mention which mass shootings came before the poll and which ones came over. But it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. One, they’re coming so often but two, it hasn’t changed.

Charles Franklin:

It hasn’t. I think that does reflect how many mass shootings over the last five or ten years there have been. We saw a little rise in support for background checks from the ’70s to the ’80s over the last few years, but for the last two or three years, it’s been around 80% or so. It’s was 81 last time we asked. It’s 80% this time. That includes over 75% of gun households and over 80% of non-gun households. And red flag laws are similarly high, 81% support. And again, in both gun and non-gun households. It’s banning assault weapons that’s more divisive. 56% or 57% still support that. But now gun households are evenly divided so there’s more division on that issue.

Zac Schultz:

All right. Charles Franklin, thanks for your time.

Charles Franklin:

Thank you.