Here & Now

Noon Wednesday: Polling the Battleground States

Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to Noon Wednesday, I’m Marisa Wojcik, a multimedia journalist with Here & Now on PBS Wisconsin. So a new poll from the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is showing Bernie Sanders is commanding the lead in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin. Not only Wisconsin. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. So here to talk about the battleground state poll is Ellie Powell, she’s a faculty member at the Elections Research Center, as well as an associate professor of political science at UW-Madison. Thank you for being here.

Ellie Powell:

Thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

So why are we looking at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to start?

Ellie Powell:

Well, if you remember back to 2016, those Midwestern swing states were really consequential to President Trump’s election victory. And a lot of people were surprised that Wisconsin, in particular, and Pennsylvania, went for President Trump. And so, I think we wanted to sort of get more information. Last time we had a real shortage of public polls of these particular states. So we wanted to make sure that voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere really understood what was happening here.

Marisa Wojcik:

And in terms of the Democratic primary, your survey results show Bernie Sanders is leading in all of those three states, especially in Wisconsin. So do we know what Sanders is doing or saying that is really like resonating with Wisconsin voters, or voters from all three of these states?

Ellie Powell:

So we don’t know precisely what’s resonating that he’s doing, but his supporters are strong. They’re strongly in his favor. And I would say that he has a sizable lead, especially in Wisconsin, but it’s a lead of about 30 percentage points, so it’s not a majority. There’s still a lot of, uncertainty in the field is too strong, but a lot of divided opinion across candidates in the field.

Marisa Wojcik:

And the Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden recently said, “Demographics is destiny, “at least when it comes to elections. “It’s a big part of what we can expect to happen.” So based on the results that you’ve seen from your own poll, how are the candidates faring differently based on different demographics of voters that you surveyed?

Ellie Powell:

So young voters love Senator Sanders. He has an overwhelming majority of young voters. And that’s really one of the things that’s helping propel his victory or helping propel his lead in the polls. Older voters are more divided. Older voters gravitate towards Bloomberg, towards Biden, some of the other candidates. But we’re seeing just big age differentials among candidate support.

Marisa Wojcik:

And so, age is a particularly strong indicator of where voters might be turning in the Democratic primary.

Ellie Powell:

Mm-hmm, exactly.

Marisa Wojcik:

What about race or ethnicity?

Ellie Powell:

So we’re seeing some racial differences. It’s a little bit tough to say too much, because in Wisconsin, we just don’t have as much racial diversity. And so, we don’t have too much variation there to really talk about in our poll. But we are seeing some voters of color gravitating towards Biden, among others, but there’s just not too much information in these particular states to say too much with certainty.

Marisa Wojcik:

You did ask about are people ready to elect a female president. Are we seeing a difference in gender? Are female voters that are Democratic more likely to go for a candidate like Klobuchar or Warren?

Ellie Powell:

Yeah, so overall in the poll, about two-thirds of the respondents said they’d be comfortable electing a female president, which is a pretty high number. In some ways, that’s encouraging. We are seeing some differences in gender, where Klobuchar and Warren are attracting more support from female voters. But it’s not, gender isn’t destiny in some sense. There’s not as strong a gender relationship predicting vote choice as we might have expected.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, mostly we saw Sanders coming out really strong in this poll. Last night during the Democratic debate in South Carolina, he was under a pretty strong attack, particularly for his electability against Trump. So what did your poll say in terms of like head-to-head match ups between the Democratic candidates and Trump, Sanders in particular?

Ellie Powell:

So we see essentially across all the Democratic candidates in the three states, things look pretty close. In Michigan, the Democrats look like they have a better chance. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it looks like it’s going to be pretty close regardless of who the candidate is. And sort of all cases, the candidates are sort of tied or slightly ahead of President Trump. Senator Sanders seems to do better than some of the other candidates. You certainly don’t see sort of obvious electability concerns coming out of the poll. But these are numbers are all within the margin of error, and I think anyone would be sort of foolish to say that there’s sort of a strong prediction about who’s going to win in November. I think it says we should all be paying a lot of attention, and if you’re a voter in Wisconsin, this is your time to potentially have a big influence.

Marisa Wojcik:

Someone else who was under quite a bit of attack on the debate stage last night, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He wasn’t in your head-to-head match ups with Trump. But he is being compared to Trump for his wealth, his status as a businessman. So far according to Bloomberg News, he spent $500 million in campaign advertising. Do we know, is he resonating with voters?

Ellie Powell:

So we’re seeing some interesting things. He’s obviously spent a tremendous amount of money. We really don’t have a precedent for this level of personal spending. He’s on the air in a lot of states that other candidates aren’t on the air, and so I think that’s really helping boost his poll numbers in some of these early states. And so we’ll see what that translates to in Super Tuesday. And he sort of has an unlimited opportunity to make his message known, whereas the other candidates are facing some pretty severe budget constraints, and they aren’t going to be able to run commercials for some of the really expensive media markets that are coming up on this coming Tuesday, Super Tuesday. So states like California and Texas are both incredibly large states, but also really expensive states to run commercials on. And Bloomberg’s been on the air there for weeks if not months, and the other candidates really haven’t had the money to spend anything there. And so, it’s going to be pretty tough for them to reach voters directly.

Marisa Wojcik:

Do we know how much that has an impact on people’s kind of direction of preference?

Ellie Powell:

So it’s always tough to directly link sort of spending to vote choice. I think historically, candidates that self-fund haven’t had a ton of success. In part that’s because often candidates choose to self-fund do that because they can’t fundraise elsewhere, like they’re struggling. And so, it sort of often is a sign of weakness. We’ve never seen a candidate spend this much money, especially this much money more than all of his opponents. And so, we’re really in uncharted territory here in terms of the ability to target sort of technological change, but also this level of spending inequality is just really unprecedented. Which is I think one reason why so many of the other candidates have been focusing their energy in the debate on Bloomberg, as I think there’s a lot of resentment about his ability to get his message out, relative to the other candidates.

Marisa Wojcik:

We have seen he’s already been laying the infrastructure in Wisconsin for sure. So, we don’t know exactly why specifically Sanders has such a resonance with people in these three states. But you did ask why respondents to your poll preferred a particular candidate. What did they say?

Ellie Powell:

A lot of the narrative of that has been that voters are most concerned with beating President Trump, and so we sort of thought that that would be the sort of outcome that we would see. Instead, the answer the most frequently given by respondents was that they chose that particular candidate because they shared issue positions and ideological similarity with the candidate. Some voters were also concerned about beating President Trump, but it seemed like ideological similarity and issue positions was really what was driving candidate support.

Marisa Wojcik:

Do we know what those exact positions or specific issues are?

Ellie Powell:

So we didn’t ask that in the poll. And the other research suggests things like some voters being drawn to Medicare for All and some of, Senator Sanders sort of strongly held liberal progressive positions maybe attracting sort of his base in particular. Although, it’s worth noting there are other candidates who share some of those ideological views. Senator Warren also shares a number of those positions. And so, it’s not, although voters seem to say that policy position, ideology was driving their choice, it’s not totally clear that that’s the sort of sole predictor of what’s going on here.

Marisa Wojcik:

So does that make poll results more important if people really do care about who’s going to beat Trump, do they want to see who’s kind of leading the charge in order to gauge who’s maybe the toughest person to go up against?

Ellie Powell:

Exactly, I think voters want to see the poll results to try to extrapolate what’s going to happen in November. That’s always really tough to do, to know sort of how things may change and what candidates may fare best many months from now. But I think voters want to see that from the poll results. I think voters are also interested for those who sort of have yet to make up their mind, or are sort of interested in some of the more centrist Democrats, some of the more moderate Democrats, trying to figure out who’s still going to be in the race, who’s going to be viable. For voters who might not be supporting Senator Sanders, this is their sort of opportunity if any candidate is going to try to launch a serious opposition to Senator Sanders’ run to the nomination, this is the time. But voters haven’t really cohered with a sort of single alternative to Senator Sanders. There’s a lot of division and I think a lot of voters are unsure if they know they don’t want to support Senator Sanders, who has the best chance, even if they have their preferred candidate among their group.

Marisa Wojcik:

And an article published in The Conversation yesterday was titled “America is Drowning in a Sea of Polls.” And it called reporting on polls horse race coverage. So for someone who is not a political junkie, who has a lot of other things going on in their life like a lot of us do, what’s the most important takeaway from some of these polls, if we feel like there’s just so much coming at us from debates, polls, all of this coverage? What is cutting through the noise?

Ellie Powell:

So I think I would sort of generally encourage people to, you want to look at multiple high-quality polls. You don’t want to sort of base any decision off of any one poll. I think things to look at that seems clear across a number of these results is that it’s going to be a close election in November. That folks have strongly held positions, and sort of regardless of who the candidate it is, in a lot of these battleground swing states, it’s going to be close. It looks like right now the Democratic candidate might have a slight edge, but this is within the margin of error. And really, given the uncertainty of the world and whatever news story is going to break next, we really don’t know what’s going to happen. And so I think everyone should be prepared for a close competitive election over the next several months.

Marisa Wojcik:

Your results did say that Michigan is going to be the best predictor, based on the timing of when the poll was released, and then when the primary is. Are a lot of things going to change outside of the Michigan predictiveness? And we have a convention in July. The general election’s not until November. How much could things wildly swing away from Sanders?

Ellie Powell:

Well, if we’ve learned anything from both 2016 and the new cycle in 2020, is things happen and things can change quickly. So we’re certainly going to keep an eye on what’s happening. Wisconsin has one of the later primaries. We’re not voting until April, and so one of the questions for Wisconsin is going to be sort of which candidates are still in the primary race? When Wisconsin rolls around, I think a lot of the candidates outside of Bloomberg are going to face some serious fundraising challenges if they don’t improve their poll numbers, if they don’t improve their delegate performance across some of these early states. And so, the voters’ choices in some sense may be limited by the time we roll around to Wisconsin.

Marisa Wojcik:

You mentioned lessons learned from 2016. As someone who conducts a poll, what do you think is important to learn from 2016 that’s being done differently in 2020?

Ellie Powell:

Well, I think one of the most well-known things about the 2016 results is a lot of the polls, people didn’t expect Wisconsin to be that close. And some of the polls got Wisconsin wrong in terms of understanding what was happening. And one of the reasons, there’s been a lot of like diagnostics of postmortems of like what went wrong in terms of polling in places like Wisconsin. Well, one answer was we didn’t have that many statewide polls, so we sort of had a dearth of information, which should have led to some of this surprise. So that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to conduct this poll to sort of get more information out there, so people are better informed about what’s happening in Wisconsin. The other big thing that came out of the 2016 sort of election polling postmortems was a lot of the polls there weren’t paying attention or waiting on education. And in 2016, one of the things that was really unusual was vote choice was unusually closely related to education. And so, a lot of pollsters are sort of trying to make sure that this time around we take into account education and some of these other things that are strong predictors of vote choice.

Marisa Wojcik:

And there are two more polls coming from the Elections Research Center. When are those coming out and will they be a lot different from what you have been asking in this first one?

Ellie Powell:

Well, we’re going to have one this summer around the time of the Democratic Convention, which of course is going to be held in Milwaukee. And then we’re going to have a general election one in the fall. And I would say the big change for both those polls relative to this poll is this is sort of a primary poll. It’s before the parties have settled on their candidates. Presumably for the later ones, we’ll have candidate choices. And so, we’ll really be more focused on the sort of general election match ups for both of those later polls.

Marisa Wojcik:

All right, Ellie Powell, thank you very much.

Ellie Powell:

Thanks so much for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

For more from Here & Now and PBS Wisconsin, you can visit pbswisconsin.org. And thank you so much for joining us on Noon Wednesday.