Peter Pomerantsev visited Penn State at the end of March, when he was just back from a trip to Ukraine. He joins "Democracy Works" to discuss what he saw there, as well as how American media is covering the war. He also talked about the similarities between Ukraine and the United States when it comes to being vulnerable to Russian disinformation — and how both countries can strengthen democratic media.
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Better but not stellar: Pollsters faced familiar complaints, difficulties in assessing Trump-Harris race
Nov 21, 2024
An oracle erred badly. The most impressive results were turned in by a little-known company in Brazil. A nagging problem reemerged, and some media critics turned profane in their assessments.
So it went for pollsters in the 2024 presidential election. Their collective performance, while not stellar, was improved from that of four years earlier. Overall, polls signaled a close outcome in the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
That is what the election produced: a modest win for Trump.
With votes still being counted in California and a few other states more than a week after Election Day, Trump had received 50.1% of the popular vote to Harris’ 48.1%, a difference of 2 points. That margin was closer than Joe Biden’s win by 4.5 points over Trump in 2020. It was closer than Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory in 2016, closer than Barack Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012.
There were, moreover, no errors among national pollsters quite as dramatic as CNN’s estimate in 2020 that Biden led Trump by 12 points.
This time, CNN’s final national poll said the race was deadlocked – an outcome anticipated by six other pollsters, according to data compiled by RealClearPolitics.
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The most striking discrepancy this year was the Marist College poll, conducted for NPR and PBS. It estimated Harris held a 4-point lead nationally at campaign’s end.
‘Oracle’ of Iowa’s big miss
In any event, a sense lingered among critics that the Trump-Harris election had resulted in yet another polling embarrassment, another entry in the catalog of survey failures in presidential elections, which is the topic of my latest book, “Lost in a Gallup.”
Comedian Jon Stewart gave harsh voice to such sentiments, saying of pollsters on his late-night program on election night, “I don’t ever want to fucking hear from you again. Ever. … You don’t know shit about shit, and I don’t care for you.”
Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host, also denounced pollsters, declaring on her podcast the day after the election: “Polling is a lie. They don’t know anything.”
Two factors seemed to encourage such derision – a widely discussed survey of Iowa voters released the weekend before the election and Trump’s sweep of the seven states where the outcome turned.
The Iowa poll injected shock and surprise into the campaign’s endgame, reporting that Harris had taken a 3-point lead in the state over Trump. The result was likened to a “bombshell” and its implications seemed clear: If Harris had opened a lead in a state with Iowa’s partisan profile, her prospects of winning elsewhere seemed strong, especially in the Great Lakes swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The survey was conducted for the Des Moines Register by J. Ann Selzer, a veteran Iowa-based pollster with an outstanding reputation in opinion research. In a commentary in The New York Times in mid-September, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson declared Selzer “the oracle of Iowa.” Rachel Maddow of MSNBC praised Selzer’s polls before the election for their “uncanny predictive accuracy.” Ratings released in June by data guru Nate Silver gave Selzer’s polls an A-plus grade.
But this time, Selzer’s poll missed dramatically.
Trump carried Iowa by 13 points, meaning the poll was off by 16 points – a stunning divergence for an accomplished pollster.
“Even the mighty have been humbled” by Trump’s victory, the Times of London said of Selzer’s polling failure.
Selzer said afterward she will “be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that (discrepancy) happened.”
It is possible, other pollsters suggested, that Selzer’s reliance on telephone-based surveying contributed to the polling failure. “Phone polling alone … isn’t going to reach low-propensity voters or politically disengaged nonwhite men,” Tom Lubbock and James Johnson wrote in a commentary for The Wall Street Journal.
These days, few pollsters rely exclusively on the phone to conduct election surveys; many of them have opted for hybrid approaches that combine, for example, phone, text and online sampling techniques.
Surprise sweep of swing states
Trump’s sweep of the seven vigorously contested swing states surely contributed to perceptions that polls had misfired again.
According to RealClearPolitics, Harris held slender, end-of-campaign polling leads in Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump was narrowly ahead in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Nevada.
Trump won them all, an outcome no pollster anticipated – except for AtlasIntel of Sao Paulo, Brazil, a firm “about which little is known,” as The New Republic noted.
AtlasIntel estimated Trump was ahead in all seven swing states by margins that hewed closely to the voting outcomes. In none of the swing states did AtlasIntel’s polling deviate from the final vote tally by more than 1.3 points, an impressive performance.
AtlasIntel did not respond to email requests I sent requesting information about its background and polling technique. The company describes itself as “a leading innovator in online polling” and says it uses “a proprietary methodology,” without revealing much about it.
Its founder and chief executive is Andrei Roman, who earned a doctorate in government at Harvard University. Roman took to X, formerly Twitter, in the election’s aftermath to post a chart that touted AtlasIntel as “the most accurate pollster of the US Presidential Election.”
It was a burst of pollster braggadocio reminiscent of a kind that has emerged periodically since the 1940s. That was when polling pioneer George Gallup placed two-page advertising spreads in the journalism trade publication “Editor & Publisher” to assert the accuracy of his polls in presidential elections.
Underestimating Trump’s support again
A significant question facing pollsters this year – their great known unknown – was whether modifications made to sampling techniques would allow them to avoid underestimating Trump’s support, as they had in 2016 and 2020.
Misjudging Trump’s backing is a nagging problem for pollsters. The results of the 2024 election indicate that the shortcoming persists. By margins ranging from 0.9 points to 2.7 points, polls overall understated Trump’s support in the seven swing states, for example.
Some polls misjudged Trump’s backing by even greater margins. CNN, for example, underestimated Trump’s vote by 4.3 points in North Carolina, by more than 6 points in Michigan and Wisconsin as well as Arizona.
Results that misfire in the same direction suggest that adjustments to sampling methodologies were inadequate or ineffective for pollsters in seeking to reach Trump backers of all stripes.
Campbell, is professor emeritus of communication at the American University School of Communication.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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We need bipartisan cooperation to protect the internet
Nov 15, 2024
Your internet access is dependent on the security and resiliency of garden-hose-sized underwater cables. More than 800,000 miles of these cables criss-cross the oceans and seas. When just one of these cables breaks, which occurs about every other day, you may not notice much of a change to your internet speed. When several break, which is increasingly possible, the resulting delay in internet connectivity can disrupt a nation’s economy, news and government.
If there were ever a bipartisan issue it’s this: protecting our undersea cable system.
Nearly all internet traffic goes through this cable system. The fiber optic glass at the core of the cables allows the internet to operate at incredible speeds. The alternative — relying on satellites — is nearly five times slower. That’s why protecting these cables is essential, especially for countries with fewer cables.
The hundreds of cable systems around the world are not equally distributed. Whereas the United States has dozens and dozens of cables on both coasts, some countries have less than a handful, or none at all. Those latter countries are especially vulnerable to diminished internet upon a cable break. Take, for example, Japan in 2011. The tsunami that struck the island nation caused seven of its 12 transpacific cables to break. If one more cable had been severed, internet traffic between Japan and the U.S. may have come to a halt.
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Reducing the vulnerability of this system is not easy. It’s not a matter of governments simply laying more cables. For lack of a better phrase, governments are not in the cable laying business. Nearly all undersea cables are privately owned. Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are the ones laying cables at a historically unprecedented rate.
It’s also not as simple as sending out more repair ships. There’s only a couple dozen ships outfitted to repair cables. This small fleet is made up of a small, aging labor force.
Finally, it’s not as straightforward as hiding cables from bad actors who might want to intentionally break them. Making cables harder to find might actually increase the number of breaks. The plurality of breaks are caused by fishers accidentally dropping nets, anchors and other equipment on cables. If fishing boats do not know where cables are laid, they may cause breaks on an even more frequent basis.
All potential ways to make the undersea cable system more resilient come with tradeoffs. New Zealand and Australia, for example, have developed cable protection zones, in which all cables must fall. These zones decrease the odds of unintentional breaks by making more actors aware of cable locations. Yet, by concentrating cables in a single area, the odds of a single storm or bad actor causing several breaks increase. Cables made of more resilient material may withstand more severe storms, but upon a break may be even harder to repair. This is just a short list of proposals that come with pros and cons but merit more investigation.
While the next best step to protecting undersea cables is unclear, what’s obvious is that the status quo cannot persist. The public must make this an issue. Elected officials on both sides of the aisle ought to prioritize this critical infrastructure. And, cable owners like Google should embrace the public service they are performing by making the cable laying and repair process more transparent and participatory. That’s a tall order for each set of actors; it’s also one that should inspire and motivate us all to rally in defense of the undersea cable system.
Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.
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Election Countdown, with guest Issac Saul of Tangle News
Nov 04, 2024
Scott Klug was a 32-year Democratic member of Congress from Wisconsin. Despite winning his four elections by an average of 63 percent, he stayed true to his term limit pledge and retired.
During his time in Congress, Klug had the third most independent voting record of any Wisconsin lawmaker in the last 50 years. In September 2023, he launched a podcast, “Lost in the Middle,” to shine a spotlight on the oft ignored political center.
“The podcast was born,” Klug told Madison Magazine, “out of the sentiment that a wide swath of the American public, myself included, can’t figure out how in the hell we got to this place. And more importantly, is there a way for us out of it.”
And now with the election upon us, Klug and The Fulcrum present a series of podcasts titled “Election Countdown.”
Today we offer the third episode, featuring veteran political journalist and podcaster Issac Saul. Nobody does better work than Saul’s Tangle News. In this episode we get his insights on the state of the election and the mutual concerns about America’s mainstream press that he shares with Klug.
Sixty percent of Americans say they are worn out by so much coverage of the 2024 presidential election, according to the Pew Research Center. And then there are the nagging questions of fairness, when only 7 percent of journalists identify as Republicans.
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Enjoy this episode:
The mission of “Lost in the Middle” is serious — finding a way to something resembling common ground as a country — but it’s not solemn.
“I’m having fun,” Klug said. “I spent 14 years on TV. It’s telling stories. Getting out there and talking to people. Aside from my personal commitment to the issue, it’s just a lot of fun. I enjoy listening to people and telling stories.”
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This election night, the media can better explain how results work
Oct 30, 2024
Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network. Penniman is the founder and CEO of Issue One and author of “Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It.”
Watching election night on cable or network news is a great national tradition. Memorable moments arise as the networks announce their projections in key states. Anchors and commentators demonstrate extraordinary understanding of the unique politics of hundreds of cities and counties across the country. As the results of the most consequential election on the planet unfold, there’s a powerful sense of shared witness.
But our polarized politics has revealed a serious flaw in election night coverage. As disinformation abounds, it is increasingly important for voters to know how the actual, legally certain election results are determined. And right now, voters are not seeing enough of that information on their screens on election night.
Projections by CNN, Fox and other outlets serve an important function. They give voters a statistically based prediction of who the actual winner will likely be once states complete their careful processes in the weeks after Election Day. But these projections have no official status, and news anchors typically don’t do enough to make that clear. News programs also need to include segments that explain how the actual results are verified and certified.
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Four years after November 2020, we still have a dangerous level of disagreement and uncertainty across America about the critical fact of who won that presidential election. By far the main reason for this uncertainty is the unwillingness of Donald Trump to accept his defeat, a defeat confirmed by multiple audits and recounts and by the outcome of more than 60 court challenges across the swing states.
But we should acknowledge that uncertainty arises in part because America has a very complicated presidential election system that can be hard for citizens to really understand. Different rules in every state create differences in how Americans vote and how and when vote counts are verified and certified. Court cases play a critical role in the legal certainty of results but are hard for voters to learn about and understand. And the election happens in two phases — the vote of the people and then the vote of the electors the people have selected — and that combination creates confusion.
There is a risk that network projections on election night can add more uncertainty. Something called a “projection” inherently implies uncertainty, since it could possibly be reversed. And projections suggest subjectivity, since different news outlets reach different conclusions about whether a state is ready or still too close to call.
We cannot let who won the presidency be a subjective question, a matter of opinion — it must be understood as a matter of fact and law. For that to happen, we need to help Americans see and understand the legal processes that do in fact render a certain answer to the big question of who won.
These are the reasons we have cosigned, with a broad, bipartisan array of organizations, an open letter to election reporters and election news anchors. The letter is an initiative of the Election Reformers Network developed with bipartisan support from The Carter Center, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Issue One and other organizations.
The letter asks that news organization use some version of the following phrasing every time a state result is projected:
- "This is just a projection. The actual results will be final when every vote is counted, officials verify and certify the outcome, and any challenges are resolved in court.”
The letter also urges reporters to reassure voters that accuracy matters more than speed, by using a phrase such as:
- “Counting the votes takes time, and election results are not final until officials verify and certify the results. We expect [STATE] to certify its official results by [DATE]."
Lastly, the letter encourages election night programs to include brief segments that explain the upcoming post-election verification and certification phases in the key swing states. Such segments could also provide brief explanations of the reason behind the timing of release of results so that delays do not cause creating concerns. Pennsylvania law, for example, does not allow election officials to pre-process absentee ballots before Election Day, as other states do, and for this reason results may be delayed there and networks likely will not be able to project a winner in Pennsylvania on election night.
There is of course a serious risk that the 2024 election could result in the same division in public opinion that plagued 2020, with one side refusing to accept the legally validated outcome. But even if that happens, how reporters and news networks talk about the real results process could have a significant impact on reducing susceptibility to ungrounded claims.
Americans learn a lot about our country on election night, as anchors zoom in on the political details of pivotal swing counties across the states. This year it’s time for Americans to also learn a lot about America’s election process on election night.
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