[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. In the presidential race, there was an interesting analysis in the New York Times over the weekend called Where Joy Meets Anger: Harris and Trump Battle for Undecided Voters. It's based on a New York Times survey research that found there are only about 3 million voters genuinely up for grabs in the seven battleground states. They tend to be turned off by Trump's anger campaign, but also left cold by Harris's Democratic convention that emphasize joy. What they want is to figure out who is best prepared to control the cost of living. Very straightforward in a certain way.

With us now, Ruth Igielnik, New York Times polling editor, who conducts polls and analyzes and reports on the results. Yes, listeners who roll your eyes at any discussion of polls, and you know I roll my eyes at using polls too much in the media, this is one of those segments that is about the polls, but that seems like the analysis carries some important narrative information, not just horse race numbers that might be right or wrong. Ruth, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Ruth Igielnik: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure you didn't write the headline, but would you say Harris and Trump are each having some success by channeling feelings of anger and joy, respectively? Again, the headline was- where did it go? Where Joy Meets Anger: Harris and Trump Battle for Undecided Voters. Maybe they're each having some success by channeling feelings of anger and joy, respectively, but that there's a group of undecideds, people who are probably going to vote in the key swing states and may be really central to deciding the outcome of the election, who aren't swayed by either.

Ruth Igielnik: Generally, yes, but they're a little bit more swayed by Trump's anger. They're angry too, and that's a little bit more resonant with them than the message of joy.

Brian Lehrer: For example, I see part of the article is about how Trump is perceived as more extreme in general by this group of voters, but that isn't necessarily seen as a bad thing. A lot of listeners may say, oh, seen as more extreme. Well, that means they're afraid of him, but there's a different relationship that you found to the word extreme than some of our listeners might assume, correct?

Ruth Igielnik: Yes, that's right. I think you're absolutely right. A lot of people assume that extreme is a negative. When we initially saw that more voters, and especially more of these swing undecided persuadable voters saw Trump as more extreme, we thought that was a negative thing, but in fact, if we looked at this group who said that extreme describes him somewhat well, so they think he's extreme, but maybe not very extreme, he's winning that group by a wide margin. These are people for whom maybe the idea of him being extreme is actually a good thing and something that makes them more interested in him, which is really fascinating for a lot of people to understand.

Brian Lehrer: I guess this lines up with a few of the other findings. These are voters who want change and they see Trump as more of a change agent. Is that another way to put it?

Ruth Igielnik: That's exactly right. They are interested in some of the things that Harris is selling, but in the end, they want change. They want deep, systemic change, and they see that more coming from Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, Democrats and a lot of independents would say, but look, what kind of change? Making us more like Russia, or Viktor Orbán's Hungary, or more racist and restrictive of women's rights. Those arguments fall flat in the minds of voters you're writing about here, the truly undecideds?

Ruth Igielnik: Yes. I think that's important for people to wrap their mind around. We have the bases of both parties. If you think about the Democratic base, they hear those things and they think, "Oh, my goodness, this is terrible." For these undecided voters who aren't part of the base, who aren't tied to either candidate, they're just looking for change. Maybe they don't necessarily care what kind of change. They're just looking for things to be different.

Things are hard for them right now. They're feeling it very acutely and they're looking for something new. What that change means isn't entirely that important, as long as it feels like change and feels like moving in the right direction for them.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Well, right direction is [chuckles] the important part, too, of that question. The definition of this group is not that they're leaning toward Trump, if I understand your article right. It's that they're really undecided, these 3 million genuinely undecided in the seven swing states who are going to be so crucial to the outcome.

Ruth Igielnik: It does include some leaners. The way we describe this group is mostly undecided voters, but some of these persuadable voters who maybe say that they're interested in Harris or Trump, but they're not certain about their choice. They're waffling. They're considering both candidates. We included them in this analysis too, just to understand what does it mean to have this group that could move one way or another?

Yes, it's mostly undecided voters, mostly these people who truly haven't made up their minds. That can be hard in general for people to wrap their heads around because in this highly polarized era, most people have made up their minds. People think, who are these strange people who haven't made up their minds yet?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, does any of this sound like you or someone you know, genuinely undecided, looking for economic answers most of all, disliking Trump's anger campaign, despite what our guest Ruth Igielnik from the New York Times was just saying about some attraction to him being a change agent and seeing him as extreme. Disliking Trump's anger campaign, but not inspired by the joy that Harris has been trying to evoke?

212-433-WNYC. Does this sound like you or someone you know? Call and tell us a story, make a comment. Maybe you read this article in the Times over the weekend or since, or ask a question. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text.

You and your three reporter colleagues start the article with a profile of one individual, a 25-year-old airport technician in Las Vegas named Devon Howard. Can you tell some of his story? I'm not sure. You're the reporter who, out of the four of you who interviewed Devon Howard, but can you-

Ruth Igielnik: Yes, I didn't talk to Devon.

Brian Lehrer: -tell some of his story as you understand it and what you think it represents?

Ruth Igielnik: Yes. Like I said, I didn't talk to Devon directly. Jennifer Medina, who's one of my co-reporters who's based on the West Coast, both spoke to Devon and spoke to some of the people that we included in the story at the end at the baseball park. I spoke to some of the other voters around the country and other parts of the country.

I think what we learned from Devon's story and why it's valuable is we started to talk about this before, but it's that economic concern that's very deeply held by a lot of people who are undecided. They're very, very concerned. They're feeling inflation very acutely. Our research shows, our polling shows, that people on different ends of the income spectrum feel inflation differently. Lower-income Americans are feeling it much more acutely.

Devon and others we interviewed in the story is feeling inflation very acutely. In the end, he wants to know who is going to help him and everybody like him help the economy get better, basically. He's disillusioned by both sides of the political spectrum. They've made the same promises. Things aren't changing. You've got this group of voters who's deeply negative towards both parties and feels this economic burn.

They don't know who to turn to, but a lot of them are leaning towards Trump, mostly because he's making promises that he will help inflation get better, he will make the country better. They're not necessarily hearing that from Harris. That message of joy is hard to hear when you're feeling so economically down.

Brian Lehrer: Harris is going to be out there with, I gather, a big economic speech this week. Maybe it's even today. She has been out there with some specific economic proposals, subsidies intended to address inflation where people feel it. $25,000 tax credit for the purchase of a home, $6,000 tax credit-- I know the Trump side also supports child tax credit, but $6,000 tax credit during the first year of life. There's another tax credit that Harris has been talking about.

Trump has his, for that matter. He put no tax on tips out there. Harris has signed on to that, too. He's now saying no tax on Social Security, whether or not that's a good idea with respect to the deficit and everything else, and whether that turns out to be a regressive tax break because the lower-income people on Social Security already don't pay any or much federal income tax. Just saying that both these candidates are out there with inflation-linked proposals, and definitely including Kamala Harris.

Ruth Igielnik: Yes, I'm not sure all of that news is getting to a lot of the types of people that we talk to. One thing we can look at in our survey research is where people get most of their news. These undecided, persuadable voters are much more likely to get their news from social media. They're much less politically engaged and engaged in the news. Some of these things just aren't necessarily filtering down to them yet. They're not hearing this information yet.

It's possible that as we check back in on these groups over the next week or so, some of that will have filtered down, but certainly, as we've been talking to them now, people aren't feeling that. They're not hearing it and they're not feeling it.

Brian Lehrer: What do they think Trump is going to do if you've got that from these results?

Ruth Igielnik: Not necessarily. I think we get that. People think he's going to make the economy better. Not everybody has a concrete- what they think he's going to do. Sometimes for these people, it's more of a feeling. I think what can be really challenging in understanding undecided voters is people who are decided might disagree with the reasons they're making their decision, but it's their decision, and these are the things that they're factoring into it. I think that's an important thing to realize.

Even if you don't know how Trump is going to make the economy better, if you feel he's going to make the economy better, that's your choice with your vote. That's certainly how, in our survey data when we're looking at hundreds of undecided voters in these individual conversations, when we're talking to undecided voters and getting their richer, deeper stories, that's what we're hearing over and over.

We asked this question in swing states over the last week about whether Trump's policies helped people or hurt people, and whether they thought Harris's policies would help people or hurt people. Across swing states, we saw more said that Trump's policies would help people than hurt people. More said Trump's policies would help people and said Harris's policies would hurt people. People are feeling this and it can be challenging to understand. En masse, outside of just swing voters, more say that Trump's policies helped people like them and that Harris's policies hurt people like them.

Brian Lehrer: You're describing a finding of that is somewhat different from the impression I got from the article, which is that there are these 3 million or so really undecided people, persuadable people. I think the article used the word "persuadable" people in the seven swing states who could be so important to the outcome of the election, but you're deciding a leaning Trump constituency for the most part.

Ruth Igielnik: In the story, or what I'm referring to more broadly?

Brian Lehrer: What you’re referring to now, yes.

Ruth Igielnik: It's funny. We've been asking that question in swing states, and some of those swing states lean Trump and some of those swing states lean Harris, but even in the swing states that Lean Harris, we're seeing more that say that Trump's policies helped them and Harris policies would hurt them. This is more widely held than just swing voters. You're right, that's not something in this article, but more recent survey that we've done in swing states, and we do see that view held more broadly.

This group, though, in general, these swing voters and we mentioned this in the story coming back to these specific swing voters, they are a swingy group. They, in the past, have leaned towards Harris in some of our earlier battleground state polls, but in our more recent national polls, this group of these undecided and persuadable voters, they're leaning more towards Trump.

Brian Lehrer: What percentage of the swing state electorate is this total 3 million or so people? There's a widespread feeling, I think, and you referred to this, that the election is all about turnout now and there are no undecideds to speak of.

Ruth Igielnik: [chuckles] Depending on how you define the universe, in this persuadable universe we're talking about, it's around 10 to 15% of voters. If you're looking at these purely undecided, not who are leaning towards either candidate, but purely undecided, it's probably closer to around 5% of voters in swing states.

Brian Lehrer: Did you determine the party voting histories of this group, more or less? Were they Obama, then Trump voters, or anything like that that distinguishes them?

Ruth Igielnik: We can't go back as far as Obama partially because, and this is really interesting, people really have trouble actually remembering who they voted for. People tend to misreport that pretty regularly. They just don't remember. Looking at this group in particular, we can look at who they told us they voted for in 2020, and that's just a little bit more reliable. This is a group that tended to lean a little bit more towards Biden in 2020.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned, in the article, Nevada as a key swing state. The guy you profiled at the beginning of the article, Devon Howard, is an airport worker in Las Vegas, as we said, and Nevada as a key swing state for this type of persuadable voter, inflation-focused, pessimistic, not buying the anger of Trump, not buying the joy of Harris because the casino industry was so hard hit by the pandemic. Is that why we're seeing proposals from the candidates, like no taxes on tips, which they both now support?

Ruth Igielnik: You have to imagine. I don't know what goes on in these campaigns, but they all have pollsters, and they are likely seeing the same numbers that we're seeing and that we're sharing with you all through our polling. That strikes me as likely they're seeing places like Nevada and, in particular, Latino voters in Nevada and Arizona who are feeling this very acutely, and they're tailoring these proposals to those areas.

Brian Lehrer: Is it in or out of your beat to describe some of the economic ways that Trump and Harris are trying to appeal to these undecided, cost-of-living-concerned voters beyond some of the examples I was giving? The other tax subsidy that Harris recently proposed that I was trying to think of is $50,000 for people starting small businesses. I don't know if in this group of economy-concerned undecideds, there are a lot of people starting small businesses. You can tell me if these tend to be workers as opposed to owners. Are you seeing specific ways that both campaigns are trying to appeal to the group that this article is about?

Ruth Igielnik: That's where I really lean on some of the colleagues that I wrote this story with, where they're much more plugged into the campaigns and what they're doing. What I really bring to the table is the voice of the people and the polling data to understand how what the campaigns are doing impacts the real people in the country.

I will say to your question about whether these are more business owners or employees, this group, these undecided and persuadable voters lean lower income, they are more likely to be employees who are impacted that way, not small business owners who are impacted through those avenues. That is the difference we're looking at here.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Gary on Little Ferry, you are on WNYC. Hello, Gary.

Gary: Hello. Thank you for taking my call. I think you're missing the bigger picture here. I think Trump's appeal is basically race to white people in the lower economic sphere who feel they've been left out of the system, who hate the media- I hate to hurt your feelings- and feel that Harris is just an establishment figure. Although I expect she'll win eventually because Trump's just such a nut job, but I think when you don't talk about race and the anger there is in a lot of the white community who don't make a lot of money, who are on the lower economic scale. You're missing the boat.

Brian Lehrer: Gary, thank you for that observation or opinion. What do you think, Ruth?

Ruth Igielnik: I think that's both true, and I will expand upon it. Yes, in general, we are talking about a lot of white Americans who are feeling angry and disaffected. You are absolutely right, Gary. I think what's different now from 2016 and 2020 is that this group of undecided and persuadable voters is increasingly more and more Black and Latino than it's been in the past. Yes, it is still a group that is largely white, lower income, and feeling angry, angry at the media angry at the economic situation. There's a lot of anger, as we say in the story.

I think what's really interesting and different and what we have seen in our polling data that's really striking is the rising share of Black and Latino, and younger Black and Latino voters who are falling into this undecided and persuadable category. That's different than what we saw in 2016 and 2020 around a lot of more white voters that were angry and disaffected.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Kirk in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, you're on WNYC. Hello, Kirk.

Kirk: Hello, Brian. Thank you for taking the call. Can you hear me okay?

Brian Lehrer: We got you, Kirk. Go ahead.

Kirk: I just want to suggest and would love to hear anyone's reaction to this, that if you ask people who are not thinking really about their decisions, but feeling about their decisions, and that's what this group seems to be, right? They don't know quite what they're going to get. They don't know how they're going to get it. They just want change, and that it's the wrong methodology to approach them with rational questions.

What's coming out here is they're unconscious and you need a different methodology to get it, why do you feel the way you do and how exactly do you feel? It really doesn't come clearly. If you ask somebody a rational answer, you're engaging their rational minds. This is not entirely rational.

Brian Lehrer: I think you're raising a really interesting topic here. Ruth, I'm going to guess that in your job at the Times, you largely agree with Kirk and that you're trying to gauge the attitudes and what would sway these undecided voters to one candidate or the other when these are people who are largely not very engaged with politics.

Ruth Igielnik: That is exactly right. It's a real challenge for us because I do agree. Some of the typical questions we ask don't necessarily engage how they're making their decision. It's really hard to get people to tell you the psychology of how they're making their decision, especially when they're not really thinking about it.

It does bump up against a limitation of surveys. We can do these deeper qualitative interviews where we really talk to people and understand what they're thinking and they're so valuable, but on a large scale, that's very challenging. We are trying different methods to understand these voters. Some of these are these conversations that we're having that are deeper. Some of them are we're just letting them talk. We say, "How are you feeling about the candidate?" and then we just let them talk for a while. We read through that and try to dissect it.

I think you're absolutely right. It's a real challenge to understand these voters. Part of our challenge as pollsters, because part of our goal is to show the public what lots of different kinds of people, people not like them, are thinking and getting really into people's thinking and understanding how they make their decisions is just incredibly difficult.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe this explains, to some degree, why we're not hearing more detailed economic proposals from Harris or Trump, or whether they're not emphasizing them. Again, this may change with Harris's economic speech this week, but because even though your finding about these undecided voters in the swing states is that they're "transactional," your article uses that word, and they're most concerned about the cost of living, that they're not responding to specific policy proposals in any detail. They are responding at the feelings level, as the caller from the Berkshire says. That's why Trump is emphasizing anger and Harris is emphasizing joy, as the headline of the article frames it.

Ruth Igielnik: Yes, I think that's right. We did have a good quote at the end. Like I said, my colleague Jennifer Medina went and spoke to some voters at this baseball field. I think this is a really nice quote that you got when talking to someone. I think people want to feel that joy. They do, but he said, what am I supposed to do? Feel joy for inflation, for rising rent? What am I supposed to be joyful about?

I understand that people feel this duality. They want to feel joy, but they're also feeling frustrated and angry. How to have those messages meet each other is challenging. I'm not a campaign strategist, so I can't tell people how to do that, but I do think it's important to hear that people are having trouble, people in this group that we're looking at undecided and persuadable voters. It is a feeling. It is a vibe, as they say, but they're having trouble latching onto some of that joy.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, we have a few minutes left with Ruth Igielnik, one of four New York Times staffers on the article over the weekend, Where Joy Meets Anger: Harris and Trump Battle for Undecided Voters. Susan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Susan.

Susan: Hi. I think that both the joy and the anger obfuscate the issues. I don't know really, and I just think that's not a good way to approach people. Also, I was just thinking that anger and negative feelings, they say the brain tends to focus on them more than positive feelings.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, Susan. Thank you very much. Did you ask questions in conjunction to these particular voters about race? We know how Trump is running and they're choosing, even against the well-established facts with respect to Haitian immigrants, for example, we know how they're running. They must feel that this is landing. Do we know if this group of largely undecided voters, not responding either to joy or anger all that much, are demographically mostly white or in any way more susceptible to the racist appeals than other voters? Do you get at anything like that?

Ruth Igielnik: Yes. This survey that we were drawing on for this was conducted before some of the comments that Trump and JD Vance made about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, but obviously, these are the comments that have been happening for a while.

The group is a little bit more white, but what I think is interesting is compared with undecided and persuadable voters in the past, it's a group that is increasingly more Black and Latino than it's been in the past. I will say, just to the caller's point, I completely agree on issues. As a pollster and somebody who studies public opinion, all I want is for a campaign focused on issues, but I also have to ask the questions about the campaign that's going on right now. The campaign right now is really more about these feelings for people. We're trying to cover what's actually happening.

We do ask questions about issues in every survey and try to get people to engage on issues. It is actually very challenging right now. A lot of people are more interested in the personalities and attitudes of the candidates than they are in the issues at hand. That's a challenge of this particular election cycle.

Brian Lehrer: Here are a couple of text messages that are coming in that are of the piece, with a few others that we're getting. [chuckles] Now a few more texts just came in and it flashed off my screen. Sorry. "You mean the whole shebang comes down to the votes of people who don't seem to care enough to make an informed decision?" writes one listener. Another one similar, "I worry too many people believe the president can solve all their problems when it really has to happen in many ways and involve many people." One more like that. Well, let's let that first one stand for this group, "You mean the whole shebang comes down to the votes of people who don't seem to care enough to make an informed decision?"

Ruth Igielnik: That's democracy [laughs]. Yep. Everybody gets one person, one vote, and different people are engaged in different ways. Because we live in such a polarized, such a closely divided country, so many people who are informed have already made up their minds. We are looking at this small group. It's a small, idiosyncratic group that is ultimately right there on the edge between these two candidates, and they're just generally less informed. That's an interesting, challenging part of American democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Here's the other one I was looking for. It says, "As Goethe once said, there is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action. That describes perfectly these undecided voters. If they remain impervious to the truth, they should do us all a favor and stay home with their video games and not vote." We have a few along those lines coming in.

Before you go, let me ask you one question that always comes up from listeners. Again, we have a few texts and callers who want to ask you a version of this question. With all of the inaccuracies that the presidential race polls, and we're talking less about horse race and more about the narrative of this group of apparently undecideds in the swing states today, but with all of the inaccuracies and the loss of faith in polling generally, and the fact that they used to be conducted largely with representative samples chosen by where people's landline phones were, and now, not that many landline phones exist, and a lot of people don't respond to pollsters, how do you even try to get accurate results today?

Ruth Igielnik: Well, I will say we continue to be one of the last pollsters that call on the phone, and we do get representative samples. There's a crisis in trust in polling, and I very much understand it. Obviously, the last few cycles have been very difficult. One thing that I always say and we struggle with is that polling these incredibly close elections, polling is not great at answering that very specific, very difficult question.

If you want to know if 60% of Americans support abortion rights, polling is great at telling you that, but for whether it's 51% or 52%, we talk a lot about margin of error, those are right within the margin of error, but these close elections come down to those very small margins. It's very difficult for polling to really answer, is it 51% or 52%, because that really does fall within the margin of error.

I think one thing we at the Time Sienna poll do is we spend a lot of time making sure the people who do answer their phone are not different from the people who don't answer their phone. What we care about is, are the group we're talking to, are they representative of the whole country? We spend a lot of time doing that. We do methodological studies. We talk to broader groups. We did a survey where we were able to get a much higher response rate, and we saw that the people who answered were largely similar to the people who we talked to with our lower response rate telephone surveys.

All of that is to say, I think polling has been largely pretty accurate. In 2022, for example, our Time Sienna poll, we were within one percentage point in every race that we polled. I think we, as an industry, have done a lot of thinking and methodological innovation and soul searching after 2016 and 2020. We continue to try to work on things, because in the end, what we want to do is give you, the public, a representative view of what all Americans are thinking, but I think we also struggle with the limitations of polling to answer this very narrow, very specific horse race question on whether or not the result is 51% or 52%.

I think what polling tells us now and what people should take away from all these polls is not, if you see one poll that's plus three and one poll that's plus one for Trump, let's say, you might think, wow, those are totally different. I see that and think those are almost exactly the same results because they're right there within that margin of error. In fact, what we take away right now is in any of these swing states we look at, this is a remarkably close race, one of the closest races we've seen in a long time. That's what polling should be telling you right now.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, any poll is just a snapshot of the moment. It's not a prediction of the results. We've been talking about that group that, by definition, is undecided, and therefore. any poll conducted on them today is inconclusive. What we learned from what these genuinely undecided voters told the New York Times and Sienna researchers is definitely informing the campaigns and how they're going to run, at least in part, these last few weeks.

The article is called Where Joy Meets Anger: Harris and Trump Battle for Undecided Voters. Ruth Igielnik, New York Times polling editor, is one of four New York Times staffers on that article. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Ruth Igielnik: Thanks for having me.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.