Ve what changes are in store . Politicals to spread disinformation via social media, now a permanent part of the american election, i hope not. The Vice President for communications and strategy at the Brennan Center of justice, where she leads the and digital presence. Take it away. Lisa thank you very much. Is john on the call . Um, because he was going to be joining us to talk in particular about polling, but i do not think he is here yet, so we may have to wait for him. In any case, fortunately we have a panel here that can talk about anything. So i wanted to start out by noting that in the first 20 four 24 hours after the ballot counting started on Election Night, the media and polling classes had declared that the polling was the biggest loser. Playbook said the industry is a wreck. Lots of folks were talking about embarrassed to support trump voters that were skewing the results. Too many people are refusing to engage with posters because they do not trust the results. The president claimed on Election Night that the polls had suppressed turnout among his supporters, because they were predicting a democratic blowout. So the analytics guys say the average does not matter, posters pollsters say the average is better polls. So i am curious, which is it . What do you think was really going on out there . Karen i will take a stab at that. I work with cornell. This cycle we did jamie harrisons polling, some work for the congressional black caucus, and another one that i work on. We always have to be mindful that polls are a snapshot in time. I think we had the same problem this cycle as we have seen before, where we have seen some where we have to be careful how much weight we put into what polls are telling us. I did some polling work in the middle of the season, specifically looking for whether or not americans in battleground states thought that joe biden should select a black woman, or a white woman. We were intentional in the way that we worded those to try to get underneath unconscious biases. There is still an issue in how you ask the question can also skew the kinds of answers that you get. Again, i think the most important thing is to take it as a piece of information, a snapshot, but it also cannot be replaced by all the other information you would get on a campaign, in terms of what are you hearing when people are knocking on doors, what are you hearing when you are having phone conversations, what are you or looking to input are you getting or what are you seeing in terms of activity, like in early votes, who is turning out, where they turning out at and how is that matching up with the polling and what it is saying . And Something Else i will mention, i think that too much of our polling, we have to distinguish with what is done inside campaigns and of the sort of public polling, because those are done differently, and they are trying to find different answers. And and certainly think that one of the issues is they are very focused on the what, but not the why. When we do not understand the why, we cannot find the trends and understand what will change over time. One of the things that we did in in race, and a believer messaging. Stacey abrams, much of her success has been about valuebased messaging. Understanding the why helps to better understand the what and to get better numbers. Lisa anzo, welcome. We i glad to see you here. John, the question on the table was, you know, is the death of polling prematurely predicted . John i think that there are a couple things. Want to be a defensive poster, but it is not a good narrative. One is that, first acknowledge that polling is hard, so we are always working to innovate, given the low Response Rate to do better. He saw that we are doing better. Acknowledge that in 2016 2018. 20, different than of what isthe way perceived. It is really important. What i do or what your husband different. Is so much we spent a tremendous amount of doovation and money, what we to get noneducated white voters, rural voters, latinos, etc. Is incredibly laborintensive. It is very different than the dozens of poles that you see in the public, who are not using great procedures. They get dumped into these aggregators. I think it is a problem. You cannot see our polls because they are for our campaign, but we did not see that they margin differences. Everyone thing is that needs to google margin of error. The aggregators show that joe 1. 5 on average and he lost by 1. 5 in North Carolina. It is half of the margin of error. The spread could be seven points. I think that we learn certain these elections. Especially for democrat, talking about harrison in south carolina. I do avoid cooper. If we are not 50 , we will not win. Take a look at where jill biden was and look at his results. He got 48. 6. Michigan was at 51. There is a message to be learned. The margin is not as important. Democrats in battleground states get a pull. That becomes very important. Somebody in the questions asked something that is interesting. That itdence is there ensures Better Outcomes . Lets apply that to polling. Why does it matter . I am looking at the camera. Look, the money piece is a significant part. A lot of donors give because they want an outcome, but john just laid out why that is an improbable reality because there are so many factors. You put your finger on the most , which the most important question you should why. Get an answer to is Everything Else feeds off of the why. Problems, in my the work that i did as a , ididate and as the chairman ays pressed my posters pollsters to get at that question. With john. Of crappy lot polling. Those results, we are not going to see. Unfortunately for him, x, y, z company is doing something that they are paid to put out to sort of craft a narrative and lead the public into thinking a certain thing or a certain thing or certain way about their candidate or an issue. And then when the results come in, poor john is explaining why the numbers do not add up. And they are going, because of all of the crap put into the mix. I think the first thing that the pollsters have to do is delineate where the bad actors are. We know who the good actors are in the business. There has to be a greater exploration of that. I am engaged right now in conversation in maryland with hard trump folks about stuff that is not factually true. And i do not know what or how and they are like siding the stuff, and i am like, that is not real. No, that was wrong. You have these dual realities at play and reparable Companies Like john and campaigns that are trying to navigate in this space are having a hard time doing it. This goes back to the question of why. If you can fashion polling around that, it will be harder to muck up the answers because it will reflect more of the reality than what we have seen in 18 or 20. I think going to that point, if i may get to that question in a different way, again, i appreciate that because i agree the why matters. But you brought up something important, the poll matters. It is from the Sugar Company and it says that sugar is good for you, you know, we have to be as consumers of information, we also have to be mindful of where the information is coming from. And johns point was well taken that internal polls, what youre are seeing internally, that is used that is important to democracy because it is used by campaigns and the candidate to get a feel for where the voters are and what the climate of the environment that you are running in is like. For some candidates, black women have a hard time raising money in part because polling it is used to show viability and it is not the only thing that should be used. We are all talking about Stacey Abrams, i worked for her early on in her gubernatorial race, when nobody was giving her money because they said the polling showed it was impossible. It cannot be done. No way georgia will ever turn blue. God love her, she had not just polling, but other data to show why the why that she believed there was a case to be made. So part of it is the source and the intention of the polling. When you are talking about, if we invest in a 10 year plan, we can turn georgia blue, that is different from saying that we are trying to sell a narrative that says a certain narrative that we want to be able to go out and sell, and using polling as a messaging tool rather than an instrument to try to understand, again, what is happening. Not to say we will not do that message testing, but to understand what resonates with people we have to understand that its important to democracy, but it is used in different ways and we have to be aware of that as well when we are looking at the results and trying to understand what they are telling us. You made me think of this, karen, that every state is not the same. Some states are really difficult to poll. Florida is one of them. The Latino Community is not homogeneous. You have to use bilingual phone banks. Higher percentage of cell phone than any other ethnic. You probably need to do text and web to get younger africanamericans, for example. Florida is like five different states and a couple different countries, in terms of how you approach it. For some reason, michigan never really, what we would consider a good batch of state public pools. Do not know why, but that is the case. You could say the same thing about nevada. Some states are just for again, i could give you theories, but they are easier to poll. Georgia was basically dead even and it turned out to be a dead even race. But there were some dynamics going on that i believe was a hangover from Stacey Abrams, where africanamericans wanted to settle the score about a race they feel like was taken away from them. And you do not have the volatility with whites. If you can get to your 31 , you probably will not go further, right . Where in michigan you will see the movement away with noncollege whites. Every state is different and has its own quirks on how to approach it. And some states have a bigger universe of, if you want to say swings, than other states. Lisa you have played the senior role in many races over the years, working with the Republican Party, did you see anything in the selection that surprised you, you turn you did not expect a turn you did not expect . Thank you for having me. It its always great to have a discussion after the election, something that starts the conversation for the next battle, but in a good way it brings combatants together to express ideas that are not in 140 characters. So, thank you. I have talked to a lot of republicans and we thankfully we thought that public polling was off, so we were counting on having a plan for a close election. Um, people the challenge when i talk to republicans is there is frustration. Campaign so that is really your compass. And i believe every thing john is saying to be accurate because you won, and winners get to say that, but there is a lot of of lot frustration with republicans because the republican results of 2012 were disappointing, and we blamed the polling. Told they did not have enough cell phones. So, in 2014 we fix that. When the pulling was off again, wheres battlegrounds, we were told we did not have the right mix. In 2016, we did not work on education. So, i think that has been a huge frustration for the republicans. And i know that there is a lot of folks saying, no, we had it right, but if you look at the decisions on spending, the Republican Party has to reconcile that we have been outspent, we have been outspent ever since barack obama got into the campaign. That was a big moment for american politics, we saw a big explosion. I think we will be north of 15 billion spent on campaigns this year. If republicans want to continue to govern as the majority party, they need to think about two things, one is so there are no blowouts, and if youre going to get out funded, you have to have better data and better looks into where the electorate will be. It is easy to say now, as a republican we had good numbers internally, but then you look at last minute spending decisions after labor day and columbus day. Maybe reflect on places where we could have spent more efficiently. It doesnt mean that we should throw all of our pollsters out, and they are all bad. What it means is we need to crack this. It is frustrating on the strategy side when you feel like you cannot trust the numbers. I agree with the sentence from sentiment from michael that polling has become supercheap with digital polling, it is superfast. You can get 1000 personal samples for less than 50,000 and generate interest at your website. And people start looking at the averages say that this is the truth, this is what is happening. And it is frustrating for professional polling because, you are right, you can engage sentiment, but when people say head to head this is where they were on a media poll, i do not think anybody serious really takes that into account. But the problem is you have seen the weaponization of polling. And that has become a problem that the classic case was the race for governor where there was polling all summer and right before the election came, polling said it was going to be a close race, and are candidate was underfunded and lost. But there is a sense among republicans that with the polling continuing to show a bias against republicans, that it is unreliable, but also designed to suppress donor enthusiasm first, and then voter enthusiasm second. And the real frustration is, even the republican posters have heard that is where they see this where it says the candidate is up or down 10, they get a poll that says their candidate is only down two, so they turn the dial to get closer to herd. That is incredibly frustrating. Againste willing to go the herd. This as anay isictment, but it frustrating when you see republican polling for firm that are consistently with the herd, getting consistent results. Data, it ise bad extremely frustrating. I have spoken to are extremely frustrated and do not know what to do. They do not know how to combat it. Results. Ve good at a previous panel, there was discussion about how the message is not working. It is hard to do that when the polling is not credible. It is hard to, as a strategist, to drive a candidate in a certain direction if they do not believe what you put in front of them. So i laid out all those frustrations, but i will close on a positive note, which is when i saw joe biden in georgia, i thought, they must be crazy, why does he have biden in georgia . I knew it was going to be a close race, but i congratulate him on keeping georgia tighter than i thought, because i thought that that would go in our favor. And they got it right. You are throwing me one bone. Thanks, rob. It is good to be king for a minute. But you went to a point i think is interesting for this other piece of our discussion, which is looking at social media. If polling is click bait, as rob said, we do not have a journalist here, but we have people that have spent time on tv talking about it. We have patrick here, who spends a lot of time inking thinking about this. What should the media be doing differently when it comes to reporting on polls . Patrick as a person that studies Public Opinion for a living, certainly looking at all the public polls and academic polls that will be coming out. I think there are good and bad things to draw from this election. Postmortem study to figure out what went wrong with polls. The problems they found were peopleey were not enough with a College Education and there were a lot of late deciding voters. I do not think either of those of high we had a lot with matching samples to estimates. The exit polls that i have looked at did not show any evidence of voters moving towards trump. I do not know if you saw anything different in your private poll. What that suggests is there was a problem, and it makes sense isause the pandemic disrupting how people vote and disrupting how they decide to the. Even in what we think are going , the the highest quality best indicators of independent polling research, it is about is answering the phone and who will pick up the phone. Educatedcollege professionals. Other thing is, this is an incredibly high turnout election. On the one hand, there were good butrts to solve the problem 2020 in the polling presented some tough challenges that evidently did not overcome. Polling results with actual results. Ohio, iowa and michigan. So far off that you have to wonder how it happened and how it seemed to happen in a pattern that we saw. It is probably too simplistic of an answer that you did not voters. Gh and he wouldback not get any different. You have to do better than that. I do not know. You never know how they do their process, but it was about getting the right type of College Educated voter. Too many people in the service industry. Factory. O work in a toin, we do a lot of work make sure that we are getting the right makes. The second is, we found that when you are getting verl interviews, they are to educated. That is a problem. Intervieware given an and the educational level is too high. . Ow many the best you can get is doing cell 30 of phones. , 60 of cell crosstab and at a look at those results, which are want republican you your clients doing multiit is difficult to figure out what that makes is. Looking at it, pick the senate race. The difference between cell phones, landline, text to lead and online, you want that. Probably one of the few they hadposters good results for biden. Did you see evidence of latebreaking move for trump . That is the other thing i was going to point out. Where there states from the second to last poll, where we saw movement . Yes. Been continuing to be movement down. Florida is the perfect example. There are a couple things that i think that we need to take on. I said this and somebody thought it was brilliant, but i do not think it is brilliant at all. You are asking one of the things i have found is the reaction people have to the answer, that language does not resonate with me. Places,found in some sometimes there was a reaction to the language. I would just say whatever. Where yes, in places they intended to vote. They were not sure how it works. Say as our country becomes more diverse and our electorate is more diverse, we need to be we need to bring in a lot of different thoughts about what questions we are asking. Questions about a white woman versus a black woman. They are not going to answer that question that way. There are things that you have to do to give the person little bit of cultural distance because you do not want to answer that question. Not not racist, but will necessarily get the answer. Math betterw the than i do. I know messaging and understanding the why. Of the things that we found out after was when people were saying they were buried about their childs economic future. They were talking about what trump was saying. Those people are taking their college. Ir slots in if the question youre asking is, are you worried about the future of the economy you get an answer and you get a number, but you do not necessarily understand what is going on in terms of the voting impact behavior. I do not necessarily want to get into the minutia, but i will share what i did on this very point. Hy it makes a difference , decided to run for the u. S. Senate federal race. Federal versus state race is very different. You need to understand the difference. Asked myot into it, i pollsters. We went back to back. Raceties into the bradley in california and the Virginia Governor race a few years before. The first question was, would you vote for an africanamerican for United States senate . The answer came back 74 yes. The second question was would your neighbor vote for an africanamerican for the United States senate . [laughter] that came back 43 yes. I knew where i stood. I know that i could not get you would you vote for a black man . Why will you not vote for a black man . I knew that i could not get into that. That was not a conversation starter. The way you ask the questions as pollsters is important and to be quite frank, you have got to have people in the room who think like that to ask the question. You cannot have a bunch of men i dont care if they are white, black, or otherwise asking questions about women. You cannot have a bunch of women asking questions about men. You have to get the right mix in the room in formatting the questions so that you can get as close as you can to the right answers when you go out into the public and you are trying to do this cross polymerization of players. Gay, lesbian, white educated, uneducated, suburban, and putting those together we can get closer to how an electorate feels on any topic at any time. Going back to how we started the conversation, you are revealing more of the why. I wanted to touch on the question one listener asked. You will have the answers to this as well. She asked about given the money and power polling organizations have has there ever been an instance where the organization intentionally gave erroneous information in an attempt to manipulate the outcome . Let me start this by saying [laughter] i do think this is important. Pollsters who are running campaigns have to get to the right answers. It is not like they are going to push away the bad information. They need to know, as michael noted, the real answers so they can help candidates. Do you want to take this one and then i will move onto Something Else . I think karen made a point like if you get a poll it is a little different. I think it is tricky. People called me this year and said, hey, i think it should be this or that. What do you think . I think this number is too high, too low, and it is not they are saying i want to give the world or my campaign or my clients that intel, it is just tough. John highlighted in 30 seconds the challenge of michigan polling or getting an accurate tell. I think the independent cell was corrupted the past year in public polling because of economics. It is expensive to find the right mix of independence and set up some algorithm and turn it loose. I think it is in the quest to be right you see things like herding or weighted numbers because they are trying to get it right and they are afraid something came back that was inaccurate. Ive never talked to a pollster who said, man, i regret giving that answer. I think they trying to the best they can. Listen, with your client you want to be as frank as possible. One of my oldest clients loves to tell the story he introduces me as the guy who told him he was going to lose. That is where you have to be to make good decisions. I think rob pointed to it earlier. Polling is also helping make resources which is really important. Again, media firms are doing polling to be nostradamus. Right . We are doing polling for message development. Yes, we want to get it right. Rob brought up the cunningham race which is really important. For my entire career, i have done a lot of blue dog, southern polling i live in montgomery, alabama. Not saying i understand it much better, but heres what i have learned. If you are looking at a bunch of North Carolina data in october, you might see cunningham up by a couple of points. The media is saying that is a lead. He is going to win. No. If you are a seasoned pollster you know that of a democrat in North Carolina is not a 50 , youre going to lose. That is what we believe, right . Again, you do not get any points for that, but that is what we are telling clients because we want to be honest with our analysis. That is never going to be the spin of a media poll in North Carolina on tilliscunningham. End of story. He got what he polled. It was not that the poll was off, it was how you interpret that. Let us talk about social media and the role it plays. There have been and are currently claims being made there was a blue wave and that depressed turnout. They were much more serious things in our social media over the last six months. U. S. Intelligence officials warned us because of the pandemic, it would probably take some days for the results of the president ial election to emerge and foreign adversaries might exploit that to spread false information. At the same time conservative media, breitbart and a constellation of right wing influencers have been part of a disinformation powerhouse spreading that information. Today in realtime, president Trumps Campaign is planning a messaging blitz that is unsupported by evidence that the second term is being stolen from him through corrupt counts in battleground states. What do we do with the social media that has the power to make these claims . Do you see we know that facebook and twitter, late in the game, took aggressive steps to label misinformation. More americans than ever are getting news on social media. What do we do, in a democracy, to try and to make democracy work when we are faced with this flood of misinformation . Can i say one thing . I do not think many of us that there was going to be a blue wave. I thought that was a media narrative. [laughter] maybe that was my ptsd from 2016 and 2018, but i did not think there was going to be a blue wave. I think the reality is we had some tough house races and it looked good. I think the bigger story is the voting wave we got, frankly. In the middle of a pandemic, americans cannot devote and voted by mail in record numbers. How do we make it easier for people to vote Going Forward so that we get that kind of turnout again and again and again . That being said, i think your question about social media is very troubling. I think i read somewhere at this point trump has 87 million followers and he tweets Something Like 1000 times a week or something. Each tweet is retweeted 17,000 times. Think on order of magnitude, the universe, in terms of controlling access to information, and i have seen some research that says followers get their information from that. They do not look at outside sources. I think it is very troubling, and it would be good to see organizations take some steps late in the game as you pointed out, but i think we are going to need i hate to say the r word but regulation or measures in place. These platforms now provide information that people make life decisions based on. I think there is a real responsibility to try and assure the information they are getting is accurate. The same you would expect when you call a nurse at the hospital for medical advice. You expect if my daughters temperature is at this point, should i bring her in . You should have some way of knowing again, we have to be discriminate consumers, but things that are flat out not true like the lizard people and qanon. [laughs] there has to be a line somewhere. There are not alternate facts. Lets put it that way. I think the social media piece relative to campaigns, policymaking, polling, all of the various pieces that make up our political system and more broadly speaking culturally is a blessing, a curse, and a cudgel. It is a blessing and that more of our citizens are engaging. They are getting out there and expressing opinions that were kind of reserved for the end of the bar conversation at 2 00 a. M. Now it is expressed at 2 00 p. M. Over and over again. The fact is there is greater engagement and better conversation in some sense that people are having. They are kind of broadening their horizons in that standpoint. It is a curse and how narrow those horizons can often become. We then trap ourselves into this Tribal Community in which venue is or platforms like facebook become the home base for a group of us who kind of all think alike and feel alike and sound like, talk alike, walk alike. There is this environment in which learning stops. Information gets stunted. Things begin to germinate in a way that create the kind of crazy that we have seen play out conspiracy theories have equal relevance as the news of the day. You find our legitimate Media Outlets on how people see political orientation. Having to battle in this space to get correct information in front of the country which is being buffeted by incorrect information, and that leads to the cudgel. It becomes a thing that beats the crap out of people, politicians, candidates, political parties, and beats them back so badly they find themselves frozen in place. That affects how policy is actually made. When you are looking over your shoulder and saying, i cannot get out here and stand with my republican colleague, or my democratic colleague, to advance this issue because they are all these people on social media with his cudgel that are ready to beat the mess out of me if i do. In those rare instances where it works, and i could tell you for example, on the criminal Justice Reform and other issues like that, the opportunity zones the background work to smooth out the edges with the basis so this side does not get excited and that side does not get excited because it may skew more this way or that way, while that may be good, it also tells you a lot about the power of social media that is being used by various constituencies as a cudgel to beat down a lot of the progress and opportunity for civic minded leaders to get into that space and govern. It is going to be a challenge for Vice President , now president elect, biden. Instead of a President Trump with a twitter account it is former President Trump with a twitter account. All of those followers being stoked. We saw what he did after it was disproven, it reached such a state that there are still people who believe president obama was born someplace other than the United States. That is the power of it. Can i add, michael, the twitter account is the tip of the iceberg. When you are in a president ial campaign you see a lot of things you do not want to see which is disinformation by race and ethnicity coming from trump and his allies. This is not like the water to pinocchios you see in the washington post. This is bad, bad stuff made up on a personal level etc. We see patrick knows this a small amount of it. It is different for every ethnic race. Whatsapp is a place where misinformation has been spread with latinos. I believe it is an epidemic. I do not know what you do about it. I do not know if you can do anything about it, but if you see the reports that some of these firms put out on disinformation, it is really distressing. Incredibly distressing and not, oh, bidens tax policy. No. Right. It is bad personal stuff. The disinformation war room that was put together by the womans organization, particularly to focus on the attacks that we knew would come on whoever the woman vp would be, certainly kamala harris, and i cannot even repeat some of the things that people would say. You would never what your child to hear or see such a thing. It was so disgusting. As john said, it is going to continue. It is living in an environment i do not know how you stop it. It is really distressing and the best way, in some ways, to stop it was ignore it. It is much deeper. There is a whole misinformation chain that goes from fox news street to right wing sites, fringe sites, that is really distressing. Rob, can i ask you a question . In listening to this and thinking about the power of social media, what impact does this have . The far reaches of social media are not necessarily representative of the Republican Party. But what impact does this have on a post trump Republican Party . Is there no post trump Republican Party because of the social media issue . I mean you have got to be a little careful here. We are hearing what i would say is the centerleft critique of social media. I could make the same critique on the right side. The misinformation, whether it comes from cbs, nbc, and trickles down or from a bot with 12 followers, you see it in a bipartisan way. So many times you will be on twitter or social media sites and the mob has decided and every site is dominated by users that they have decided something to be fact. Something that was a person who raised their hand and said, i disagree, is discounted, destroyed, and later turned out to be right. It is frustrating to see some of that as a republican. We talked to republicans and that is a big concern. Private Companies Act as public utilities. In the last week, they are censoring and throttling the president of United States, throttling republican senators. It begs the question, what is free speech and who has a right to say, in a private company, making decisions . It is their property and they can do what they want. That said, i think you are going to see the rise of tribal social media. Is that good, is that bad, i do not know. Im kind of in the air. I have a huge family and friends around the country. The discussion on both sides are not super helpful and not super factbased, but i get the texts and calls, and i think it is corrosive. In some ways it is great people are engaged in thinking of the country and who they believe. But i think it is really hard because people get so passionate about it. I think if they felt comfortable with their news source, be it left or right or center, they would not be searching for the truth. I think that is something we have to think about. I also think the one thing that is kind of freaked me out the last five years is how much i have learned about peoples personal opinions who are journalists. I do not know. I guess they have a right to free speech as well, but when people hire us they know my biases regarding politics and they choose to hire for not. I do not know if that is a good thing for democracy or journalism. It does make it easy for critics to say, heres a tweet from one year ago when somebody said something that was personal therefore we can discount their body of work and story. I do not know. A line between advocacy and education getting blurred and that scares me. I think it is critical, i think it is important, i think we need it. Were not getting rid of it. I do not really know how to fix it, but i do feel like you are starting to see some groups say, let us take a ban or fast on social media. Im not sure if that is ever going to happen, but im sure we all have that friend that just needs to get off twitter and walk outside. It is driving yourself crazy. I will stop there. But it is a challenge. Democrat that lives in montgomery, alabama, i get the other side. [laughter] do we need a fairness doctrine for social media . Is that possible . I think the market corrects itself. It does on tv it did on radio and you have to believe in the free market. I agree. Somebody who looks at the National Media and has the sense that it is liberal is right. [laughter] this goes to robs point, journalists often identifies liberal. Even though most journalists do a great job of maintaining remaining neutral in the reporting and presenting the news, there is the sense that the establishment, with regard to media and academia, is for liberals. So the side that is presenting the facts is also the side that is stacked with liberals. I think that is one of the reasons social media has such appeal to anybody who feels disenchanted or disengaged on the national conversation. It has a kind of rhetoric and attitude and prose that feels really out of touch. That, i think, is one of the big currents in American Culture right now. Patrick made the point excellently, as academics should, right . It goes to the why. Why . Why have conservatives found their first love in talk radio . Why have they found their home now in the space of social media . No one really cares the answer to the why. When everybody was fawning over uncle walter and Walter Cronkite and all the media giants in the 1960s were telling us about the war in vietnam and the economy and the social change that was hitting the land, we did not hear our voices in the conversation. We were not part of that narrative. Nobody ever bothered to ask a conservative in the 1960s. How do you feel about the war, or how do you feel about johnsons explosion of Government Programs known as the Great Society . It is going to cost us billions and billions of dollars. Nobody bothered to ask them. At a certain point you just kind of go, ok, i will just check out. I do not care. You see the system is tilted against you. These are not new narratives for conservatives. This is a 50yearold story from the dawn of the media age, where it was decided by somebody that that part of the population would not have anything to contribute or have anything to say or not going to spend the time or money putting that voice in the narrative. You want to understand why there was a Rush Limbaugh . Because he took the risk, im going to take these three hours every day on this network and talk about the things that matter to us. I remember starting my political career in the 1980s listening to Rush Limbaugh, because i felt this was the place where i had e. Me residents resonanc what Ronald Reagans was talking about what Ronald Reagan was talking about, he was contextualizing it into the economy and into social constructs, into politics. Social medias the next elevation of that for a lot of conservatives, because in many cases, they dont see or hear their voices represented in the media. That is why i am on msnbc. We try to have these discussions. The last four years have been about personality more than policy. Okay . What i am excited about in the biden era is that when you come up with crazy, im going to talk about it, im going to have a debate about these policy ideas on these platforms. I think more and more, conservatives and centerright citizens out there feel these networks and these platforms are giving equal time and share to their point of view, i think you tol see less dependency robs point. I think there is something really interesting since 2016, former obamaof folks got together and started crooked media. Along with groups like super majority and other groups, representing more people of color, ran really powerful get out the vote campaigns. Look at what Stacey Abrams did. I know talking to john favreau and others, they very much told themselves, we need a counter to fox news, but its going to be this. Not a tv network. That is what they created. Maybe this was corrective. Maybe this was providing more opportunity. Sarah you have a notion on this . Sarah picking up the practical reality for anyone who is trying to reach audiences, whether it is a campaign or a candidate, or selling a product, media is so fractured in the way we get our information, it is so diverse, it is as much about understanding who is using what source, and how do you trust which source youre getting it from . I get a lot of information from twitter but i do not put a lot of stock in it because i cannot check it out for myself. That being said, i go back to us as political consultants. If this election reminded us of nothing, its that we are a diverse country, whether we like it or not. Black and brown people are still here to stay. Lgbtq. And social media does provide new channels and ways for people to find each other and communicate with each other over the issues they care about. We all see ourselves reflected in mainstream media. We started with misinformation, disinformation. That is a real problem, but a big part of the way we solve that is understanding how people are using social media and what their expectations about what they are going to get from social media is. Like the misinformation war room, part of the goal was to teach people how to not be part of problem, be part of the solution. Do not share disinformation and misinformation. Do not share something that says joe and to the joe and the ho, do not share something because you think it is funny. Because it is not. Someone who does not get that it is funny sees it. Part of it is about understanding, a, these platforms provide content for more diverse audiences. Part of our task, if we are going to let the market decide, then weve got to give people the tools to be responsible consumers. We know there can be dangerous consequences to what happens on social media. This is the part where we get to take some questions from audience members and from some of our fellow panelists, in particular what i must turn to. He is dying to say something. I want to make a quick comment, this notion of liberal media bias. I want to take it on. In 2016 on a friday night, the access Hollywood Tape of donald trump came out talking about grabbing women by their genitals, on friday. There is a study of Media Coverage throughout the campaign. In the next nine days, the media covered Hillary Clintons emails at a 31 ratio over the access Hollywood Tape. So i think if there was a liberal bias, it would have surfaced in the final 10 days, and you had great footage, film, commentary, and it didnt happen. We all need to be careful about that. If i could put a question after that comment quickly to patrick as the academic, should the media stop reporting on these horserace numbers in a all the polls when it comes to learning what is going on in a race . Should the media stop reporting it and report the other rich data in the polls . Patrick yeah, joel. I definitely agree with you. We put too much emphasis on reporting the horserace numbers, as we get more and more data points and sophistication and in how the data points are put together. Theres been far too much emphasis put on it. One thing that is interesting i think this is particularly true in 2020 you lose any conversation about what kinds of policies americans want to solve problems. This is what most people call a valence focused election. Whos going to be the best at running the economy or solving coronavirus were both . America faces a whole series of challenges that require intense policy solutions that are going to require consensus for us to move forward. I dont think this campaign really moved us much along in that way. I would agree that the conversation would improve is if we move more toward what americans think about the cost of solutions to climate change, solving the deficit, reducing income inequality. Theres a lot of difficult choices we have to make as a country. Theres not a good sense, if theres a consensus, about what it is. Ive got a question from one of our listeners on exit polling. How do you assess the validity of excess polling considering the high number of mailin ballots . If mailin ballots remain as a primary mode of voting, how do you think excess polling will adapt . Ive got to tell you, theres always been a problem with exit polling. Now that there are mailin ballots, it is not just exit polls, consortiums. Its not just people standing, waiting for people to come out of the polls. They are now doing large samples of phone interviews. Maybe some onlines, i dont know. They are actually using polling techniques in the exit polls equation. What we often find is, once an election happens, you have to wait a certain time for what we call the voter file to be appended, and you do an analysis of who actually voted, you are going to see gaps between what you see in the exit polls and what you see by the rich Data Analysis that you get from just knowing exactly who voted on the file demographically, geographically, etc. I always really caution people to take the exit polls with a grain of salt. And you can see it right now. You can see it with the suburban voters. Its not perfect. People take it as perfect, and it really is not. The should speak up for exit polls as a proud member of the nbc decision desk this year. John is right. Polls are not designed to tell us who won. They are designed to tell us eventually who won and why. They really only become insightful once theyve been weighted to the final result. This year, particularly difficult, because we are seeing such a huge change in the margin on Election Night and what ultimately will be the margin once the votes are all counted. I would take all the exit poll data with an extra grain of salt. At the same time, we are already seeing evidence the exit polls were picking up things we are not seeing in the geographic vote. Like the movement of trump was with latinos. It is across the board with mexican americans, venezuelan americans in florida. It is certainly not a year to throw out the exit polls and i just want to reiterate, the last exit polls have done a lot of work the last few cycles to make sure they capture people who are not voting on election day. I have maybe a slightly different take on exit polls. Im not a fan. Im sorry. I think they are disruptive. They aren some sense, somewhat disingenuous in terms of what ultimately happens. They feed a narrative sometimes that can come back to bite you in the behind. I get why they are there, because it is filler, because you dont have a result. And everybody is rushing at 8 00 to Start Talking about the exit poll numbers as quickly as they can while they would for results. Even before that, some start early and pushing out some exit polling numbers. The problem is, theres another part of the country that is still voting at 8 00. And so, when you start dropping all of this ill just use the affectionate term i have for it crap into the mix, you are impacting a vote, in the twohour time zone, threehour time zone behind you. I think theres got to be a lot of tempering of all of this data, and pushing it out, and trying to configure it, be the first to claim what happened and what the result means. Take a drink, chill, and that the results across the country unfold the way they need to. We can, a day or two later, some exit polling analysis to get to where we started this conversation around why voters chose who they chose. I dont need to know at 6 30 in the evening why trump voters what they said on their way out of the polls when i know my cousin out in california is still voting, etc. , because that is not going to tell me ultimately what voters decided to do and why. I think this also and i think watching nonstop television for three or four days after the election, i think this first election where we saw this incredibly broad use of mailin ballots, which may well prestage a real return to this, but everybody counts differently. It took days for the networks and for everybody who was talking about this to understand that just because they started counting those ballots early in arizona didnt mean they were doing it every place else. It fed a narrative that i think was very simple for some folks to inject bad faith into and say, well, it went to the early narrative. Somehow, mailin balloting was fraudulent. It is not fraudulent, lets say that clearly. Its been studied endlessly. I think those who are on tv, like all of you, next time around, it will be much easier for people to understand what it means when mailin ballots are counting and how that is different in different states. I have another question i wanted to ask. We still have a little time if you guys are still ok. Is there a noticeable heisenberg effect . Where people shift their votes on the basis of public polling . Ive seen it suggested that in some red states, biden voters split their ticket and voted for Gop Senate Candidates after polling indicated there might be a democratic trifecta. I believe in it. I believe in it. That is part of what joel was getting at. The fact that theres a media narrative about the headtohead horserace. It was overblown, which is lets just agree on that. And that people do, and we see this in focus groups, go into a checks and balances mindframe sometimes. I think it potentially did help down ballot republicans. Just a theory. I dont think theres any way to really get a diagnostic on it. But i think it is a reasonable thing. It can happen in the reverse. Is it necessarily bad for democracy . Im not saying one way or the other. I think it really happens. If people want to balance government and learn something from polls that one thing is very likely to happen, one can argue it is good for democracy for people to be able to make a rational decision based upon those expectations. Ive got an insider question for you. He wants to know if you found a difference in voters you got by methodology, phone or other . No doubt about it. If youre answering a landline, you are going to be older. You are more likely to be caucasian. If you are looking, just for an example of generic ballot, its going to be more conservative, more republican. If youre answering by cell phone, you are more likely to be disproportionately not a ton democratic, because we are now getting 65 on cell. But again, if you are looking at panels text to web, if you are doing a headtohead on your phone or you are going to that is what we call peertopeer, or you are going to an online version, where you dont have a phoner giving you a certain social pressure, we find those to be more conservative and republican, as well. I think they are important. I think we capture voters we wouldnt capture by just doing one mode. Is kind of a big, tough question. How do we get people on each side of our political divide to come to a consensus on what is true versus not true . Any ideas . Ill take the first bite of that apple. At the end of the day, it is about our leaders kind of agreeing on that. You know . I am almost certain that during the biden administration, there will be a lot of republican standing up quickly to say that is not true. And i am sure there could have been more, during the Trump Administration. In my view, a lot of the behaviors we are seeing being played out politically, in my estimation, i may be on this island by myself, but i believe from my own experience being out across the country, what i saw and felt and came to learn as National Chairman in the 20092010 cycle with the emergence of tea party and all of those elements, is that the leadership across party lines matters, and a lot of people take their cues off of that. I can tell you, i will use a the mask situation as an example. If the president of the United States had come out and emphasized the wearing of masks, you would not have people aboutng to the capital taking their rights. If that was reinforced across the aisle by the president , chuck shumer, you would not have an antifa backlash. The ongoing conversation and the tenor and tone of that is going to be set by national leaders. We have been built that way as a country over 244 years. When our leaders remain silent, or they are off tone with the american people, that is going to get filled in by a platform called social media. They will replace those voices absent in the public space that should be giving affirmation or condemnation, support or no support to these big public narratives. Lisa anybody else on that . Rob i will jump in. I think, in a weird, messy american way, we just had an election, with record participation, record votes. Maybe we did get to the truth. With all the disinformation, our has all the disinformation we as people who watch this, if our goal was to fully engage in the electorate with stark choices put in front of them. Maybe, it was not done the way we would like to have had it done. Maybewe come to this, and there are said is that show the more closed minded you become when youre older, maybe it is not perfect, but maybe in all this mix, we kind of, as consumers, karen said she keeps sees stuff on twitter, but until she verifies it, she is suspicious. I think we have a lot of consumers. The challenge we have not talked about is the rise of bots on twitter as a dangerous thing. It creates a sense of herd that may or may not exist. Nightd myself on election going to a lot of data scientists tweets, trying to figure out what the herd was saying. Maybe we all ought to do that. It takes time. Im constantly amazed at the rise of Rush Limbaugh, joe rogan, and cricket media. People thatlot of invest in the truth and take the time to say it. You have to believe, we see the bad stuff, but theres a lot of good going into this. I have a lot of friends in school who have probably never voted ever and they voted and got engaged, they said ill stand up and i will stand up and voice my support for this or that. That is not the end of the world. It shows is the dynamic marketplace. It is an ugly, gross, painful, looseleaf kind of marketplace, e sometimes, but it does not change the fact that it works in a very inelegant way, but it does work. We have to be able to decide. Im concerned that, for example, as we saw in 2016, black and brown voters were targeted as the subject of disinformation campaigns. One of our friends happened to be on a radio show the week before the election. A black family, saying, if joe biden wins, you are going to legislate lgbtq, etc. It was clearly language that was coming from a bot, or somewhere that was not true. Even the top cop language. When i have done focus group work, we dont really talk like that, that isnt really our wording, but when you see that i think we have to be a little careful on that. I think we are suffering from a crisis of two different things. There cannot be alternative facts. We started the Trump Administration with a discussion about alternative facts, how many people actually attended the inauguration ceremony. Theres a number of people who attended the inauguration ceremony, period. End of sentence. How you want to spin that is fine. But i do agree with michael to some degree, that our leadership ought to take some responsability. We have to have some agreedupon, actual facts. The sun is shining, that is an actual fact, that is not my opinion. That is not just my truth. That is a fact. Within that, we can accept that there is subjective truth about how we see that, and certainly there is, as a diverse nation, what theogan sees truth is is going to be different than rachel maddow. But there has to be we have to at least have a place where we can say, here is, like a High School Science class, here is the fact, then you work the problem around the fact. We may have some subjective truth about how we see the fact, but can we at least get back to agreeing on that facts are not subjective . There has to be some set of facts that we can all agree on and start from. Lisa i want to thank you all. I wish we were seeing each other in person. I cant believe no one has commented on robs beard. That is a primo beard. Rob talked about social media. It looks like a jack dorsey beard. No politics, just the beard. 97 for the other guys, ive got to hide. We are nice. Lisa anyway, thank you all for participating today. Let me turn this over to ellen. Let me add my thanks to the panelists for your brilliant moderating and i want to thank cspan for covering these two days. It increases our audience. I hope the audience, we will see you back tomorrow at 12 30 42 more panels. The future of the Democratic Party and the future of the Republican Party. Thanks to the panelists for their insight and wisdom, and to the panelists, ill see you in 15 minutes. Thanks. Bye, everybody. Good night. Have a lovely evening. Cspans washington journal. Every day, calls live on the air on the news of the day and we will discuss policy issues that impact you. Tuesday morning, a discussion of the Senate Leadership elections with rollcall. Then we will talk about the Affordable Care act case being heard by the Supreme Court with katie keith of georgetown university. A discussion of the biden president ial transition with karen holt, virginia techs Political Science professor and white house
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