Welcome to Surfing Political Waves, a short series podcast hosted by the Pepperdine School
of Public Policy.
This is Dan Schnurr.
And I'm Joel Fox.
And we're bringing you California election insight and analysis as the country ramps
up to one of the most historic presidential races in memory, as well as other fascinating
campaigns up and down the ballot.
Today we're welcoming Mark Baldazzari to Surfing Political Waves.
I hope you're a surfer, Mark, because we got a lot of waves to go for across.
Mark is a survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California, where he holds the
RJ and Francis Fehring Miller Chair in Public Policy.
For 15 years prior, he served as president and CEO of PPIC, the Public Policy Institute
of California.
He's a leading expert on public opinion, survey methodology, and he's directed the PPIC statewide
survey since 1998, which is probably, if not the most, one of the top two polls in the
state of California.
He's an authority on elections, voter behavior, political and fiscal reform, and he's authored
10 books.
So we have the man to talk about polling, and let's start off this conversation.
Mark, welcome.
Here's how I think I want to begin.
One of the most overused quotes in politics is, the only poll that counts is on election
day.
Often used by candidates or their campaigns when they are behind in a poll.
But they're implying that the polls can't be trusted.
So tell me, how accurate are polls?
Joel, first of all, thank you for inviting me.
It's wonderful to be at Pepperdine, and I'm so glad to be part of a program that includes
surfing.
So that's a great question, and you're right, the question comes up a lot of times when
people are behind in the polls, and they're trying to make sure that their supporters
aren't getting too discouraged about that to stop working.
So what we know is that when polls are done correctly, they can accurately represent how
the public feels at a certain point in time.
So to me, I think that the key to understanding polls is that you look at the dates, and you
think about the dates in terms of how close are you to an election?
Are you close enough?
And what are the trends been?
But I think that the other thing about polls to remember is that they're a snapshot in
time.
So they're accurate, but they're a snapshot in time.
Well how about a little tutorial of modern technology?
How do you conduct polls nowadays?
When I was young, someone was on a telephone making phone calls.
That's not the way we do it anymore.
Can you give us a sort of a brief synopsis of the polling world today?
Yeah, in the good old days, you got random telephone numbers and you called people, and
50% of the people you called would answer the poll.
And then I would go around and give talks about polls during that time, and there would
always be people in the audience who raised their hand and said, how come you didn't call
me?
And how do I get my name on this list so that you're going to call me the next time you
do a poll?
It's like, well, no, that's not the way it works.
It's random.
That's why you weren't called, and that's why I can't take your name for a list.
But then we went through a period of time when fewer and fewer and fewer people said
that they were willing to be called for polls, and we had to look for other ways to reach
people.
And as more people got away from their landlines and their home, and they got to cell phones,
and when we call people on cell phones, but then that wasn't working anymore, they weren't
answering their cell phones either.
So we started reaching people online.
And today, some of the best polling is done online with panels that are representative
of the public, or if they're not random panels, they're panels that are large enough that
you can weight the data to what the population looks like at any given point in time.
So today, most of the polling that we're talking about is done online, and they're done with
panels of people who've been selected because they represent some portion of the public.
But don't people when they look, I get texts, they say we're XY survey.
And we're going to keep your answers confidential.
And we're always warned about getting texts and not, you know, being wary of phishing.
So do I just say forget it and my representation is lost?
How do you trust if you're getting a legitimate survey?
Yeah.
Well, you have to go through a lot of sampling to get to the point where you've reached enough
people who trust the process that it's representative.
Now, not everybody does polling the same way.
There are some who some polls where they will send 100,000 emails out and get 5000 responses
back and they'll send them out to people who are registered voters who you have the email
address for.
And then they'll take those numbers and they'll wait them and so forth.
That's not the way we do it.
We take people who have been recruited in previous polls and who've agreed to stay on
and give their answers to polls that are conducted by a variety of sources.
But it's a tough problem.
Every election will go through a soul searching about what's the best method.
And the last election, the 2022 election, it seemed clear to me based on the polls that
were most accurate.
And at the end of the day, it's that final poll that you do in an election that counts
the most for your accuracy.
But those polls seem to me to indicate that we had we'd gone to a point where online panels
were something that we would want to replicate.
So we're in an election year.
We're a couple of months away from the big election.
People want to know how things are going.
Let me start this way.
I looked at your July poll and you did this was post the June 27th debate in which President
Biden had a little problems, which ultimately ended his run for the presidency.
But at the time, your poll was Trump versus Biden.
And it showed in California a big lead for Biden because it's a blue state.
I'm wondering if there's with a Californian now on the ballot.
Does that lead going to widen or do you anticipate things are going to stay pretty much where
they were, which was about two to one for the Democrat?
Well, that's a big question.
So let's let me answer that by saying I don't think that the results are going to change
much with a change at the top of the ticket.
We could go all the way back to 2016 and take a look at Trump versus Clinton or go to 2020
and look at Trump versus Biden in that matchup and then look at our recent polling and all
kinds of events and things that have happened in between to Trump and Biden or Clinton.
And and not see much change.
This is a reflection of the fact that we live at a time of hyper partisan politics, that
Democrats are not only voting for the Democrat, but they're voting against the Republican
and vice versa.
Very few people in either party and among the independent voters say that they haven't
made up their minds and will change.
So I don't expect the changes to be great.
But you know, stay tuned.
We'll know more.
But does polling affect an election to the extent revisiting the 2016 election?
Polling said Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president of the United States.
Her supporters might have said, well, she doesn't need my vote.
I'm not going to show up.
And Donald Trump wins some squeakers in swing states and becomes president of the United
States.
Does Kamala Harris have to fear that kind of a reaction if she builds up her lead?
What kind of lead does she need?
We already hear projections she needs to have at least a five percent national polling lead.
But it really doesn't come down to national votes, does it, Mark?
It's about the states.
Yeah.
And I think that it's so important to understand that, you know, that Clinton actually did
win the popular vote in 2016.
And Biden won the popular vote by a substantial margin in 2020.
But at the end of the day, it's in our electoral college system, winner take all state by state
with six states where the elections have been very close in the past and are likely to be
close now, that the polling, the national polling is not going to tell us much about
who is going to be the next president.
They might tell us about the popular vote if it's beyond the margin of error.
But even if so, even if it's five points or whatever.
But I agree with you that the polling can be the candidates will worry about the polling
because they worry about their their voters staying home and saying, oh, it's a foregone
conclusion.
But the reality is that most people are going to go out and vote because they want to be
part of history.
And whether it's the recall of the governor or another matchup with Trump, that if they
feel like their vote really matters and it's important, no matter what the polls say, they're
going to go out and vote for that reason.
Well, a different perspective than what about voters who don't trust polling and will either
say they're not going to respond or they'll say, well, it's a social stigma if I support
candidate A. So I'm going to say I'm going to support candidate B, but I'm really voting
for candidate A. Yeah.
You run into that.
Do you have a sense of it?
So I worry about that a lot.
I worry about who the sponsor of the poll is and what the people think of the sponsor
and whether that if if they don't like the particular media sponsor or if they like them,
that it's going to impact whether or not they're going to participate in the poll.
And I think that that has been a problem with polls in the past.
And I think that it's important to look at who is sponsoring the poll and how that is
set up in a way that might encourage or discourage people from either participating or giving
honest answers.
I was wondering about the growing independent vote in the country.
And independent voters tend to be more moderate.
I think you found that in some of your surveys.
How does that affect the strategy of the campaigns?
And do they focus on polling that deals with the independent voters?
Since we're so partisan, it seems like we know where the Democrats are going.
We know where the Republicans are going.
Tell us about the independent voters and how how you gather information about them.
Yeah, I think the independent voters are very important in national elections and also in
elections in our state.
And whenever I hear about independent voters, I think about the people who've been successful
running for governor, Democrats, the Republicans.
And that expression you've heard it a million times to paddle to the left and paddle to
the right.
Right.
This isn't so this isn't so you get your party base.
This is so you're appealing to the one in four voters who are independents, a large
number of them, let's say half of them who consider themselves political moderates.
And in a close election, you really have to think about that that group.
You also have to think, though, about whatever amount of time you're spending on trying to
get get that vote engaged and motivated, because that's where the work comes in is convincing
those voters, those people who are independents and middle of the road, that this is important
enough for them to participate in and finding, you know, that whatever it is, that that that
magical element that's going to motivate them to go out to vote when they're going to decide
in every election whether or not they're going to vote, unlike the people who consider or
Republican conservatives or Democratic liberals who, you know, they're going to go out to
vote.
They've already made up their minds.
But it's that independent, moderate voter that that can be the key to winning in a battleground
state or or or for candidates who are running for Congress in this state in those districts
that are swing districts, whether or not they win.
So you acknowledge your experience on candidate campaigns.
And I know you will talk about some of the other kind of campaigns that you survey.
But with candidate campaigns, are the campaign teams particularly interested in this independent
segment?
Is that what they will you get a lot of questions because that's probably the swing of the election.
I think that they're very interested.
But from the world in which they most of them operate, they're very confused about, you
know, how to appeal to that group.
I think that the group that we're talking about, the middle of the road independent,
these are the voters who are issue oriented.
They're not looking at the party labels.
They're looking at what's what's happening in their lives.
What are the top issues in their lives, whether it's, you know, whether it's jobs or it's
inflation or it's the cost of housing.
And they're looking to see what candidates have to say about those issues that might
make a difference.
But, I mean, I heard in both the Republican National Convention speeches and the Democratic
National Convention speeches, some attention to that issue of what's in the middle and
how not to alienate that group in the middle also by saying certain things, whether it's
about immigration or abortion or guns or the environment that might alienate that group
and say, no, they're not for me.
And how important is the policy questions that you face?
Everyone says that's the most important thing.
But do the voters react to policy or do they react to personality?
And how do you test that?
Yeah.
So I think that for the voters who are hardline Democrats and hardline Republicans, they are
into the personalities and they're into the party and they're willing to accept party
platforms.
And I hear this so often.
Well, I don't, you know, I don't agree with what, you know, this candidate said about
abortion, but I'm going to vote for them anyway.
Or I don't agree with what that candidate said about climate change, but I'm going to
vote for them anyway, because I'm voting not so much for somebody but against the other
side.
But for those people in the middle, again, I think policies matter a great deal.
And let's face it, also, the policies matter a great deal for the campaigns in terms of
how do you attract the funding that you need to get your message out?
And I think that is where a lot of the candidates are thinking about those party platforms in
terms of what do I need to appeal to the funders that I need to make a go of this?
So it's been a tough election year.
It's been a lot of bickering already, of course, as there always is.
But the voters themselves have been down a little bit.
Inflation, economy, other issues.
But recently I saw a poll that said that optimism is on the rise a little bit.
What are you sensing in your polling?
I mean, I'll be looking for that this fall.
Honestly, I haven't seen much in the way of what I would describe as optimism being on
the rise.
You might see maybe among Democrats who thought that they're in better shape because they
have Harris and Biden, that that's their definition of optimism being on the rise.
But there are so many things that people are concerned about in terms of the state of the
world and the state of the country and the state of the democracy that would really make
optimism be on the rise.
It's something that they're not going to see in these elections, which is that Democrats
and Republicans are looking for common ground.
So let's take a look at California.
That's where you and I are both living and that's where you are the expert in polling,
although your expertise goes national as well.
But in a recent Cook political report, they chose 10 competitive districts in California.
And the Democratic candidate, according to what I read, leads the Republican candidate
and these are generic, I believe, two to one, 63 to 36.
So if I look at those numbers, do I say to myself in these competitive races, it's all
over?
The House majority has been decided.
How do I interpret that?
Well, I think you have to interpret that with caution because I am also looking at the aggregate
numbers for those competitive districts.
But that doesn't tell you about what's going on in each of those individual districts.
And the 10 competitive districts that we're talking about, some of them are leaning Democrat,
leaning Republican, they have incumbents in place, a lot of dimensions which are explaining
why you have that kind of margin.
But there are, let's say three or four of those within a subset, which I think are actually
going to be a lot closer and harder to determine who's going to win.
Are older, whiter voters still making policy in California?
I think that older and white voters are disproportionately represented in the electorate in California
compared to what the electorate would look like if it reflected the population of the
state.
Yes, but I think to a lesser degree than let's say we saw 10 years ago because of changes
that have been made in making it easier to vote and making it easier to register to vote.
So then let's talk about the Latino community in California, which of course compromises
36% of Californians, according to an excellent report that you put together for PPIC, I read,
on both the parties in California and the likely voters in California.
So the Latino community comprises 36% of Californians, yet only 26% of likely voters.
So that's a voter base that remains available to both parties.
Do they get it?
Do they understand?
Are they trying to reach those parties?
What's your experience about that?
I think that they get it.
I think that they're trying to reach those parties.
And I think that one of the things that has to be understood about the Latino vote in
California is that it's not a monolithic voting group.
It's not necessarily all liberal or all democratic.
And there are different generations are represented, different elements of being economically assimilated.
But it's a large group that is underrepresented.
And to reach this large group, I think it's a mistake to think that all Latino voters
are the same because they're not.
The other paradox I want to take a look at is that in California, very liberal state,
they sometimes vote more conservatively, particularly on tax issues, financial issues, and maybe
pretty soon on crime issues.
How does that happen when we have a two to one margin for Democrats and we have the bluest,
if, well, maybe not quite the bluest, second or third bluest state in the country, yet
the voters will turn out, they almost shocked Governor Newsom in the March election by barely
he passed that bond.
How does that happen?
The bond barely passed.
There was a bond measure that failed in 2020 for schools, surprised everyone.
And I think the thing that always intrigues me about the state propositions is that when
you're looking at the top of the ballot, you have names and you have Ds and Rs next to
the names.
When you get down to the propositions, you have numbers for those propositions and you
have a yes or a no.
And people are not necessarily prompted by those measures in terms of what their partisan
leanings are.
And they're looking at the issues that a lot of times people are looking at pocketbook
issues, right?
When you're voting for a bond measure or a tax, you're not just thinking about spending
the money, you're thinking about how is it going to affect my money at a time when I'm
thinking about the economy.
And you can have a lot of different outcomes.
Maybe the partisans, one of the reasons that they're, I think, concerned about what happens
when people vote yes or no, because they're not going to vote along party lines necessarily.
So this polling pick up on how voters perceive issues.
And I'm thinking specifically here of the crime issue.
It's been very prominent here in the state of California.
There's been a lot of videos of smash and grab, unusual, there have been some shootings.
Yet every time that occurs, there's usually a newspaper article that says, hey, crime's
down, folks, don't panic.
But the voters don't see it that way.
Is your polling pick up the perception of the voters that the voters see crime as a
real major issue?
And I guess part B is, do they hear those opposition voices that say crime is down?
Can you determine whether they're hearing that in your polling?
OK, so crime's an interesting issue because it's on the ballot as a statewide issue.
And when we look at where crime ranks as a statewide issue and an open ended question,
there'll be less than 10% of the people who say it's the most important problem facing
the state today.
That wasn't always the case.
If I look back at the late 90s, it was one of the top issues.
Today the top issue is the economy and housing affordability as a state issue.
If you ask people about crime in their neighborhood or in their local area, you'll have half of
the people saying crime's increased or they're worried about crime or they're worried about
being a victim of crime and they're particularly worried about property crimes.
So when it comes to a state proposition, people are going to look at it in terms of how is
this going to impact?
How is the state going to impact?
State proposition going to impact?
What's going on about crime in my local area?
Is it going to make me feel safer?
Is something going to be done that's going to make me feel safer?
The other side of the crime issue, I hope you appreciate this as well, but it's something
that if you go back to the fact that voters supported Prop 47, which reduced certain penalties
or punishments about crime, is that people don't want to spend the money on incarceration
and on prisons, right?
If you ask people, here's a state budget, what are your top priorities?
They're going to say, well, it's education, it's health and human services, it's higher
ed.
I don't want to see money spent on crime.
In fact, you're polling for years.
We have talked about this in the past.
You're polling for years said, what's the one we spend the most money on?
We spend the most money by millions on education.
But what did the voters tell you?
They told you prisons.
Right.
So they really don't, you know, so this is where, you know, I just love the process that
people are going to have to do to work out this issue, right?
It's a local issue to them.
It's not a state issue.
And they don't feel like their locals are doing enough to provide the public safety.
But they don't want to see more money spent on prisons, even though they want it.
So how do you resolve all of these, you know, kind of conflicting perceptions here?
Fascinating.
It is.
And the other thing that interests me and I'm going right now to your wheelhouse, which
is the initiative process, is that the legislature is supermajority Democrat, liberal.
The voters don't always come out that way, as we've already talked about.
They may not on the crime issue soon.
They didn't on some financial issues.
Affirmative action.
Twice have come out against affirmative action.
Yet they keep on sending the same elected officials back to office.
Is that a dichotomy or can you explain that to our listeners?
Yeah.
So in our state, you know, if we were looking at states that had gerrymandered like legislatures
that you said that, well, that's, you know, they don't really reflect the public will.
It's the party in power has joined the districts.
But in our state, we have independent redistricting now.
So I don't think it has to do with these legislative districts, you know, being drawn in a particularly
funny way for political reasons.
But it has to do with communities that people live in and where whether the communities
are predominantly Democratic voters or predominantly Republican voters, we now have a top two primary
system where sometimes people are choosing between two Democrats or two Republicans also
in their district because, you know, we just it's again, I think, a reflection of the fact
that we live in a polarized time, but also we live in a time in which there's political
segregation in this state.
So let's talk about the initiative process.
You're writing a book about it.
And it is changed a little bit because now a proponent of initiative has the ability
to pull that initiative off the ballot.
They didn't have that power once it qualified in the past.
They do now up to a certain point.
Now we're seeing initiatives being filed, which forces the legislature into some kind
of a negotiation in which a compromise can be achieved.
And then the proponent pulls their initiative.
We're going to see a lot more of that.
Are we seeing the changing of I like to phrase it as the changing of lawmaking in California?
How do you perceive it?
I think we're if current trends persist, we're heading towards what I would call a different
form of hybrid democracy than we've had in the past.
And it's one in which the legislature and the governor have a lot more ability to intervene.
And as a result, certain initiatives and referenda won't actually make it to the ballot if there's
a settlement between the proponents and the legislature.
I have concerns about that.
And I've written about that and suggested that, you know, there were there were over
a there had been over a dozen cases since the law changed.
There's only been one case in which the voters actually had a chance to vote on the compromise
bill because it actually turned out to be a constitutional amendment that that was needed.
I think you're probably aware of this, the property taxes measure, which then narrowly
passed.
But I'd like to see more examples of either the voters having a chance to provide some
input during those negotiations or some circumstances, not necessarily everyone, but on certain
important things where the legislature brings that back to the voters for a vote and sees
if that compromise is something that the voters want.
But you see you're going to see more of this happening.
I think I think we're going to see more of it happening from from the people that I've
spoken to from what we saw in this election, where there were seven measures, either withdrawn
or removed.
The ballot measure is removed, as you know, because the governor and sued to get the measure
off and the court agreed with it.
I think that you're going to see more examples of the legislature and the governor acting
to try to do what they can to keep things off the ballot and to get bills that are more
to their liking.
Are they are jealous of sharing the power of lawmaking?
I think that that there's always been that that that tendency to want to keep it keep
it inside.
I want to go back to what the roots of the the direct democracy we have in California.
And that's about making sure that the legislature and the special interests don't get together
and make decisions on everything, that the voters have a chance to do that.
I don't think that that having compromise bills are necessarily aligned with what what
the intent of the direct democracy system is.
The one thing that I will say, though, about our initiative system is that, as you well
know, it takes a lot of money to put things on the ballot.
And that means that most citizen groups don't get that chance.
And I'd like to see some more done to make sure that citizen groups have a chance, whether
it's extending the time for volunteer signatures or something that gives citizens more of a
chance to put initiatives on the ballot.
Well, it's been a great discussion.
I'd like to just give you one last opportunity to close up if you have an interesting anecdotal
story in your polling career that you would like to share with the audience.
I'm blindsiding you with this.
So if you don't have one, it's understandable.
But you got something you can tell us?
Well, I think that, you know, for for those of us in the the polling business, we're we're
always amazed at how many surprises there can be on Election Day.
And the areas in which I've consistently seen the most most surprises are around the state
propositions in California.
And we have 10 measures on the ballot this time around.
But I can tell you that, you know, over time, my my surprise at the flexibility of voters
and their wisdom comes in how they handle the state propositions.
Oh, that's a good positive note to end on.
Mark Baldazzari, thank you for surfing political waves here at Pepperdine University.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you.
Thanks for joining us for this conversation on surfing political waves.
For more engaging dialogue on politics and policy, visit Pepperdine School of Public
Policy on YouTube at Pepperdine SPP.
Offer upcoming community events.
Go to public policy dot Pepperdine dot edu slash events.
Thanks for joining us for this conversation on surfing political waves.
For more engaging dialogue on politics and policy, visit Pepperdine School of Public
Policy on YouTube at Pepperdine SPP.
For upcoming community events, go to public policy dot Pepperdine dot edu slash events.