Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is the pollster, John Zogby. Mr. Zogby is the founder of the Zogby International Poll and with his sons, Jeremy and Benjamin, he serves as senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. He's also the author of a recent book, it's titled, “Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should”. Mr. Zogby, welcome to the program.

John Zogby: Hey, Grant. Good to talk to you again.

GR: Good to talk to you, always good to see you. So, my questions are going to be driven by your book and also your background. They'll also be driven by my own background, as you know, I’m a political scientist. So, I'm going to draw on some of the discussions I hear from my colleagues when we're talking about polls and surveys, get your take on those. And then I also wanted to ask you some questions about some recent survey and poll data that's been out there and has been in the news. So let me just start with a basic question here, one question that always comes up a lot regarding polling in recent decades is how all the big changes in communication technology have complicated it. I mean, let me just throw out a couple things. You know, landlines are basically gone, people don't answer the phones if they don't know who's calling them when they see the number coming in or the person. It may be harder to find certain demographic groups to tap for their opinions and so on. So, I just wanted to get your sense as a pollster, what in your view are the biggest challenges for polling that have arisen since those golden days when we all used to have landlines and answered the phone when it rang?

JZ: Well, of course it's technology and non-response, or low response rates. When I started in business in 1984, response rates averaged 65%. Two out of three that you reach, actually reached by phone we're willing to conduct a survey. However, change has been part of this business from the beginning and the pace of change has increased greatly. So, you know, imagine in the 30s, 40s and 50s, folks like Gallup and Roper and Harris would develop sampling points throughout the United States, identify people in each of those sampling points to travel to those sampling points, mail envelopes to them with survey questionnaires, instructions on First and Elm Street, fifth door on the left-hand side, and conduct the survey over 3 to 6 weeks, mail the surveys back. And that's, you know, providing everything that went out came back, then you'd get results. Well, our world got faster, things move more quickly. We moved to the telephone. As you pointed out, that was a perfect world. 95% of people had a landline telephone and socially, they welcomed a long-distance call, making them feel important. And then that all dissipated. The answering machine, *69 when they would call you right back and find out who you were, call waiting, that sort of thing, and we had to adjust. You know, by the mid to late 90s, response rates had plummeted to 15%, in major metropolitan areas, 7%, 6%. So, we have always had to adjust. The internet was not welcomed just as, incidentally, the telephone wasn't welcomed in the beginning. How are you going to know who you're talking to? Same thing with the internet. And now, of course, you know, technology has changed rapidly and people who conduct polls can't wait 3 to 6 weeks. Frankly, Grant, they can't wait 3 to 6 days. They want their data and analysis right away. We've had to make those adjustments. So, for every advance, and it has been an advance, there have been detractors.

GR: So let me ask you a question about the phones specifically and how things work today. Has there been discussion, among you and your polling colleagues about simply just moving away from phones entirely to, say, the internet? I'll just tell you, political science research in recent years has essentially done that. That all political science survey is done by the internet, but that has introduced a whole new set of problems. But how are you folks dealing with it? What do you do with that?

JZ: We have well, we had a very large 124 phones call center in Utica. We don't have that anymore, we farm it out, you know, to call centers. I mean, that's obviously one change, but we encourage as much to be done by internet, by email as possible. We also use text to web, so we'll send out emails, we'll also send out texts, but ultimately inviting people to a secure web site to conduct the poll. To answer your question directly, there are still some applications where you really can only do it by phone. If it has to be spontaneous, if it has to be ultra confidential, not to say that the internet can't be confidential, but there are applications, very small areas or very targeted audiences, you know, may require the phone. But I would say, you know, of our survey work, 85%, 90% is online.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is the pollster, John Zogby. He's the author of a recent book titled, “Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should”. So, polling regarding the elections always involves this subset of people that are called likely voters, whether that's likely voters in a primary or likely voters in a general election. How do pollsters identify those people, and does that introduce some kind of inevitable error or challenges? I'm remembering, I think I'm remembering this right, but you correct me, I believe that was one of the problems in the early polling that thought Dewey was going to beat Truman, right? Was the guess about who was going to be voting in that election. So how do you folks deal with that?

JZ: Well, first of all, that's 1948, a long time ago. And, the last polling was done two weeks to ten days before the election. And so, those who have read about it or may even remember it, that's when Harry Truman was on his famous whistle stop, and he had built momentum at the top, you know, two weeks before the election. He felt he was going to lose the election. That's why he manically, you know, traveled throughout the country. ‘Give ‘em Hell, Harry!’. And so, there was the issue of timing as well. And to a great degree, there still is the issue of timing. So, first of all, likely voters we ask, we have 3 - 4 question screen that we use to determine if they’re likely voters. Now, of course they could be lying, but it has served us well. You know, what does anybody get out of lying to a pollster? And then how do they create a conspiracy of a thousand people who are also lying? That's, it doesn't happen. You know, I think folks like to beat up the polls and say, oh, you were five points wrong. But when you're talking to 1500 people, five points wrong ain’t so bad. You know, when you think about it, you at least get a direction. So yeah, we poll likely voters when it comes to politics and policy because they're the ones that matter.

GR: And you mentioned some of the pollsters getting beaten up recently. And I wanted to ask you kind of a more specific version of that. There has been a lot made of the supposed inaccuracies of polling in very recent years, and particularly regarding Donald Trump and elections that either he's in or he's been heavily involved in. And there's been a lot of different kind of effects that have been hypothesized to be going on that might be driving some of that, maybe people, you know, a bias and who's responding and not responding. And like you said before, maybe not necessarily a conspiracy, but a general sense of, you know, I'm going to tell the pollster some garbage because they don't like Donald Trump or whatever. What do you think's going on there? Is there anything real in that? Is there a Donald Trump effect of some sort?

JZ: No, I don't think so. I think if we close our eyes and picture, you know, the red, ‘Make America Great’ cap again, Donald Trump has a lot of people who are ready to jump and scream and write and attend rallies and be proud that they're for Donald Trump. That secret Trump effect, maybe you could have said at one point on college campuses. A professor may not have seen it in his or her best interests to be wearing a MAGA cap, or to sit at lunch, in a...

GR: (laughter) That's putting it lightly. I can tell you from my experience at the university. Not that I would put on a MAGA cap, but I could just tell you if someone did, their life might be in danger. But anyway, go ahead.

JZ: But, you know, there hasn't really been anything measurable. Donald Trump finishes strong. And the thing is, many of the pollsters conduct their last poll Friday or Saturday before the election. I try to keep the lights on longer, so I'll go till Monday night. Sometimes I've even gone into Tuesday morning, meaning, of course, Election Day to capture that last minute spark or whatever happens, or the last-minute lack of spark where you begin to see. Let me give you a prime example, you know, in January 2008, the focus in New Hampshire was Obama having won the Iowa caucuses against Hillary. And usually a candidate gets a big, huge bounce after Iowa, and then there's two weeks into New Hampshire. This one year, Iowa was on Thursday and New Hampshire was on Tuesday. And so, there was momentum up to Obama, you know, by Sunday night leading by 12 points. And then, Monday night, Obama is still leading by 12 points, we get to 5:00 and our last 125 calls had Hillary leading by six. So now what do I do?...

John Zogby on the Campbell Conversations