Polling collect by usc before the election. This is about 90 minutes. [ inaudible ] on behalf of the institute, Political Science department [ inaudible ] welcome to the next in a series of conferences that were holding designed to bring together political actors, journalists and academics to discuss major issues and inflection points. We have two changes. First Anthony Scaramucci who was close to President Trump phone willed to say he has been summoned to a meeting in washington. Ambassador nina [ inaudible ] who was in china when she accepted this conference put the date and time into her phone there, and so she showed up yesterday, primed and ready for the conference. But were ready today and we have an outstanding array of panelists. Our aim is to proceed, as in all of these conferences, in the president of president kennedy who called on americans to disenthrall themselves also from truism and stereotype and never enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. Or as president reagan said the ultimate determinative in the struggle will be a test of ideas. Let me introduce my friend and colleague in this venture to moderate the first panel, professor dennis trunk. Good morning. I would like to add my welcome to all of you at the usc 100 days conference on the Trump Administration and trump presidency. Bob and i hosted a conference in late november after the election and everyone who participated in that event i think was a bit stunned because of the unexpected outcome, and now were almost 100 days into the administration and i think were still probably a bit disoriented by the whirlwind of events that have been taking place, from russia to syria, wire tapping, travel ban, north korea, repeal and replacement of obamacare, Supreme Court nomination, tax reform, the list goes on. Were going to today try to make sense of many of these things with the help of an Amazing Group of experts, from the usc [ inaudible ] and beyond. In planning these conferences, principle goal that bob and i have have used is to bring together in dialogue the perspectives, insights of scholars and also those active in the world of public affairs. I think then it is appropriate that this marriage of perspectives is taking place in this particular venue which is known as town and gown. So let me provide you with a brief preview of todays event. Were going to have four Panel Discussions over the course of the day, two this morning and also two this afternoon, separated by a lunch break. Our two morning panels are going to focus on the state of Public Opinion and on domestic politics and in the afternoon we will talk about the administrations actions in Foreign Affairs and also discuss the future of the democratic and republican parties. At the end of each of our panels were going to reserve time for the audience to be asking to ask questions. So i want to invite all of you and i want to thank you again for being here, getting here on a on an Early Morning, for an Early Morning panel in los angeles is always a challenge i know. So thank you for being here, and i invite you to sit back and enjoy todays discussion. Im going to start by moderating the first panel. Thank you very much. [ applause ] good morning. [ inaudible ]. Panel one [ inaudible ]. How is that . Nothing. [ inaudible ]. So the first panel is on politics and polling, and i want to begin by introducing the panelists here. Going from left to right, to my far left is joel pollock. Joel is the Senior Editor at large and inhouse counsel at brightbart news. Hes also the author of how trump won, the inside story of a revolution. [ inaudible ] Marie Hancock alpharo is a professor of Political Science and gender studies at usc thorn site and is a renowned scholar on the topics of the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality politics. Bill carrick is a democratic consultant and chief strategist for Diane Feinstein and erik garcetti. To my right is ari captane who is executive director of usc dorn side center for economic and social research. To his right is jill darling. Jill is sur i have director for usc dorn side center for economic and social research. Ari and jill direct the usc and day break hole which has gained some notoriety for in the november 2016 election, for showing trump to be doing much better than a lot of other competitor polls. Lastly, david lauder is the Washington Bureau chief at the Los Angeles Times. He works with and reports on the [ inaudible ] poll. So were going to begin with a presentation of the day break poll results at the 100 day mark, and jill and ari will be will be doing that for us. My turn now. Good morning. So im going to start and just sort of walk of through some of the findings from the poll that we just conducted and a poll that we conducted in april, and then i will hand it off to ari to tell us a little bit more about some of the indepth findings. So im going to stay seated here because it is a little hard to see this from the dais but it is hard to stand here, too. As an introduction, these surveys that we conducted were among respondents in a National Internet panel that we maintained at the center for economic and social research. It is a probabilitybased panel. We asked questions of them before the election, in our preelection polling, and then we did followup surveys in january, february, march and april, and some of the a couple of the questions that we talk about today were asked over time in those. Mostly what were going to be looking at is the postelection result over the last two months where we polled in march and april. Were interested in mainly really looking into rather than sort of investigating the highlevel horse race numbers that headline numbers im probably going to really sort of give you right now, we really are very interested in diving a little deeper and looking at some of the underlying reasons for what were seeing and trying to get a little bit more in depth. Thats an ongoing project for us and this is sort of an opening salvo in that. All right. So to start with, basically there is still the partisan divide that we saw before the election continues to persist after the election in the sense that people who are voted for donald trump and in all of these slides that going to be designated in red as is now traditional and people who voted for Hillary Clinton are the blue bars in these charts. So you can see when you ask about just this very general question that pollsters like to ask because it is actually pretty useful, and it doesnt always but this time very much closely tracks this partisan divide. But we see that theres a lot of optimism being expressed here by trump voters and the opposite feeling among people who voted for Hillary Clinton. Ill talk about third party voters a little bit later on, so right now im sort of going to be going through this divide and talking about how we really are seeing a country where two groups of people are seeing things very deeply from one another. This is the talking about the we asked them to tell us about how they saw things improving or whether they were getting worse or staying the same over the next 12 months in a variety of issues that we asked about. You can see that for this, this is expecting improvement, theres sort of guarded optimism among trump voters for and i cant see the list from here so let me just get it off my page here so i can tell you exactly what those are. The list the list that we asked about were the rights of minorities and women, individual freedoms, threat of terrorism, jobs and unemployment, health care and health care reform, Race Relations and the environment. There was quite a bit of optimism among trump voters about jobs and employment, a small among about clon ton voters as well. You can see this is very different from the response that we got from the clinton voters and this is now the percent that said things are going to get worse. So, you know, rather than people thinking that things are going to stay the same, you can see clinton voters really feeling like the month ahead and we are talking about the short term here, 12month outlook, looks pretty bad. Theres sort of a guarded sense of i dont know if it is optimism, but i would say the plurality of who thought things would stay the same or get better, the majority think it is going to get the same or better about unemployment, perhaps looking toward infrastructure spending, in that category. So we also asked about asked them to say worhether or not th would attribute a series of positive characteristics to trump, and those were keeping promises, speaking for people like me, inspiring confidence, bringing needed change to washington d. C. , representing american values, if his ethical and trustworthy, and bases policy on facts and good data. As you can see, he had extremely high levels of endorsement among his own voters and very low endorsement among clintons voters. So, once again, a view of the president that is just strikingly different from one another. And this extends then to, of course, the deep divisions that we see when you rate rating his job as president , where once again we have pretty much equal levels of approval and disapproval depending on whether who they voted for in the election. This neither category, which is neither approve or disapprove, was much higher a month ago. So we saw some consolidation across here, and particularly among trump vote ofrs, trump vos who were maybe waiting to see what the president would do over time moved into the category of approval just really over the last month. So we also asked about keeping promises. You know, thats one of the themes that has come up around the 100 days mark, you know, has he accomplished what he said he would do, and people who voted for donald trump, the majority, 81 , thought that he accomplish as much or more than he said he would do. You can see that the majority of clinton voters disagreed with that, but 20 , one in five, said he had at least accomplished as much as he said he would do. So theres a certainly amount of giving trump some credit for at least working towards what he said he would do and perhaps not holding him responsible among his supporters for not accomplishing some of the sort of large scale things that he said, they can see him working towards it. So we in sort of trying to get at the idea of whether there was a difference between whether people liked him personally and approve of his policies, we actually asked that question spread out this way. Did they like him personally and or like or dislike him personally and or approve of his policies, and we also gave them an out in not being sure about his policies. As you can see, we had a High Percentage of but not lets see. I cant even see that number and i dont remember it off the top of my head. Was that 53. Thank you. 53 of republicans who said that they like him and approve of his policies. So not overwhelmingly so. And another 19 there, one in five, who said they like him. Theyre not really sure yet about his policies. Again, theres sort of a sub set of wait and see. And then another 17 who said that they dislike him personally but approve of his policies. Of course, we did see some of that in the preelection polling as well, that people were saying that they were voting for him based on issues rather than rather than personality. The feeling among clinton supporters, of course, seven out of ten disliked him, disapproved, and 20 said that they disliked him and they werent really sure yet about his policies, they had to wait and see. So we dont have a lot of optimism among the excuse me the third party voters either. 59 disapproved of his the job that hes doing. He had a high proportion saying he is on the wrong track, disliking trump and being not sure about his policies and predicting things were getting theres a certain amount of optimism but not a lot in predicting things would get better in jobs and employment, 56 saying things would stay the same. We didnt see much optimism about things Getting Better among this group, and when you see this almost exact division between people who voted for clinton and voted for trump, the reason for overall low ratings that youre seeing in other surve surveys than we saw in ours for approval and right track and optimism about the future, really it is the tipping the balance are the folks who voted for third parties, the independent and people who didnt actually vote in the election but were not showing here. We did see some small changes since march as i mentioned earlier among Trump Supporters. We had a 10 point increase among trump voters that brought them further into the job approval category, and we saw some improvement among not Much Movement among clinton and third party voters. We saw sort of an interesting effect too that it was sort of more detectable in terms of downward ripples and positive attributes for trump in among his supporters, people feeling like they werent as enthusiastically endorsing that he had kept his promises, that he was bringing needed change, perhaps because of the blockage that had been going on, but on the other hand quite a bit of the Movement Towards approval from neutrality was among people, the other group of people who really did see him as keeping his promises and bringing needed change. So thats sort of a division among that group of trump voters as well. Oh, yeah. So we did see we have seen, you know, that in many ways really opinions have changed little. We still have the postelection era that generally you have a honeymoon period for president s who you know, where you have support from both sides, or at least sort of a positive level of waiting and seeing. In this case because of the rhetoric that weve had since the election and all of the events that have gone on, were seeing this persistence and ari is going to take it from here and tell us a little bit more about some of what has gone on. Thank you. So im going to show you some more red and white red and blue, i think thats sort of in the nature of what we do today. I will start with a i would say with brown and yellow. So we have done this poll for quite a while, and the underlying data of the panel has been around for about three or four years. Sometimes i will talk about things we know from a few years ago and then finally i will talk about what we found just a few weeks ago. So one of the things we asked a number of times starting in august was how happy would you be when Hillary Clinton would be president and how happy would you be if donald trump would be president . It seems, as you know trump got elected im only going to talk about trump here. If you look at august, you know, quite a bit of the respondents said they would be very unhappy if trump were president. These are the people who gave zero on a zero to ten scale, and a small number said they would be happy if trump were president. Right after the election you see quite a bit of change. You see that people who thought about really bad if trump would become president , it drops from 40 to 30. The number of people who say they would be very happy is going up. We dont really know why this is, but you can sort of imagine how this happened. After the election always thought it was terrible if trump would become president and you wake up and hes actually president. And maybe you decide life is not as bad as you thought, but it is something that we dont quite know what happened. And if you look after that, so you look at sort of the brown bar are the people that would be very unhappy. Then after the election really not much has changed on either. So the people didnt like the notion that he would be president , that number hasnt really changed. What you do see though is the yellow bar seems to be going down a little bit. We seattle bit of slipping if you like in support for trump. You can also look at this in a different way. So what you do here is we look at just the average score on the zero to ten scale. I said people can give a numb fwer between zero and ten, zero is bad and ten is very good, and we blake it down by who they vote for in the election and you see among the trump voters theres a bit of slippage. On zero to ten scale, about threequarters of a point on average the support has gone down. And then for the clinton voters theres really no change, no change thats worth talking about. Among other voters maybe a little more and then among [ inaudible ] theres a little less. So all together my [ inaudible ] would be theres not thatch change. Theres another way to look at that because we also asked people if the election were today who would you vote for, and what you find is that the vast majority of the trump voters say they would vote for him again. And as a matter of fact so, by the way, you may have noticed that jill sometimes couldnt read the slide. The reason is were actually looking at what you see is actually the number of people who would say they would vote for clinton again is a little less than the people who say they would vote for trump again. So in many ways, you know, opinions havent really change willed as much. People are pretty much fixed in their preferences, and theres some movement from people who voted for johnson or stein. One of the things that jill talks about a little bit, optimism and pes michl, optimism and pessimism, we would ask how dow feel about the situation and we would ask dow think it is going to be better next year. You see that, and this is about one or two years ago. It is one or two years ago because not everyone answered this question at the same time but way before the election. What you see there is that clinton voters, the clinton voters were definitely more optimistic about financial future than trump voters. Now we ask this question in april and you see a stark reversal. Now you see not only trump voters are much more optimistic and for example the clinton voters are more likely to say their future financial situation will be worse than today. But as that number has shrunk to only 5 for the trump voters. About the same, theres not too much of a difference. We can still also show it in a different way. What i do here is simply look at the difference between the percent of between the clinton and trump voters. What you see is sort of the dark red, thats before the