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March 30, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
54:03
Are Polls relevant anymore?
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You wanna listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, you know, as someone who's been in Congress, who's been in the State House, who's run for office, had their name on the ballot, I'll have to admit, years ago I started out saying, oh it doesn't matter about polls, you just get out there and tell your people what they need to hear and how they need to hear it and they'll respond to you.
The more I've got to know The more I learned I didn't know about polling.
And one of the first people that asked me to understand this was John McLaughlin.
And John's on with us today.
John is McLaughlin Associates, one of President Trump's pollsters.
He was also, I think that's probably, you know, his much more bigger claim of fame.
He's also Doug Collins' pollster in the years that we have run.
But I've gotten to know him.
And one of the reasons today, there's so much going on with polls and so much that has been said over the past few election cycles.
But the reality is that polling is still very valid.
Polling is still something that candidates base their campaigns on, they base their messaging on, and at the end of the day is not as gimmicky, if done right, as many believe it to be and that you can trust them.
So I just wanted everybody to hear this conversation today.
So John, welcome to the Doug Collins Podcast.
It's a joy to have you on.
Doug, it's a pleasure to be here, and you always made your pollster look good.
I thank you for that.
And by the way, I often say pollsters, we're only as good as the people we work for.
All we're doing is reporting public opinion.
Now, granted, the polls that you would take running for Congress were strategic documents.
Most of the questions were never released or polls were released at all.
You did it to intersect with what you believed in, With what, you know, your strategy should be so you win the campaign.
So I'm fortunate to work for people like you that, you know, make the world a better place.
So that's a good thing.
Well, John, I appreciate that.
And one thing you just said, and I want to make this very clear, because there's some people out there that, you know, there's politicians who do this.
They poll to see what they should believe.
That was nothing that I ever did.
I polled who I was and said, okay, do they like it or they don't like it?
And if they didn't like it, how do we convince them that it's better?
And that was what polling information gave to me.
And we'll talk about some of our details in polls.
I know y'all got a new national poll that just come out.
We'll talk a little bit about that.
But let's sort of, John, let's start at the beginning.
Okay, for the average person out there, Who sees, you know, the only thing they know about polls is what they see on the mainstream media or they hear about on election night, you know, these exit polls, or they hear about the polling going in.
Let's just sort of start off with the basics.
And a good friend of both of ours, Chip Lake, who is just a dear friend of ours, mine, he's run my campaigns.
Chip made this statement to me a long time ago when I was looking at polls, and one time I was happy, the next time I was sad, he said, Doug, you have to understand something.
A poll is simply a snapshot in time.
He said he catches it at that one point.
He said it's a snapshot in time.
So let's start off.
What is the functionality of a poll?
And how do you know, frankly, John, that you can trust the numbers that you're doing?
Well, first of all, I mean, Chip's right.
It's a snapshot in time.
And also, by the way, these days, there's a lot of people that are not taking good snapshots.
And you have to think about what the camera is, the lenses.
Polls are really based on the science of statistics, and it's an inexact science, where a lot of times I'll say to you, Doug, this poll of 400 voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9%.
That means 19 times out of 20, we have a swing of 4.9, 9.8 points.
It could be within that, you know, and people want you to be right within a tenth of a point.
And I have an MBA and the MBA is based in finance and quantitative methods.
Quantitative methods is heavy stats.
And stats are basically the science where you say, you know, at this point in time when you ask these questions, if it's done right, and we have three quality control checks.
One is you have to pull the sample properly.
So like when we take a poll, it's basically from a database of known voters.
And we may add new registrants, but we've definitely got a database.
We know who we're calling ahead of time.
It's also, when you build the model, it's based on past history of turnouts.
I had a running fight all through 2020 with the national media that extended back to 2016, where I'm not liked by certain people like Nate Silver and 538, because I said Trump was going to beat Hillary.
And they were saying it was a blowout.
It was going to be, you know, a lock for Hillary.
And their models were not based on previous turnouts.
All through 2020, the exit polls from 2016 said the national electorate was 33% Republican, 36% Democrat.
But then all of a sudden, CNN would come out with a poll that Trump was down 14 points.
I'd get a phone call from the president.
This was in June.
And then I'd get attacked by...
Governor Andrew Cuomo's brother, who was on CNN, he was saying, what a terrible pollster I'm in, because they had us up by 14. Well, that poll had only 26% Republicans.
So they cut the number of Republicans down by literally seven points.
And then they're saying Biden's up by 14. I want you to always look at a poll and ask for the crosstabs.
Remember that term, ask for the crosstabs and the demos on it.
Because if a pollster or a candidate refuses to put numbers out, but they won't let you see the crosstabs, there's probably a reason for that.
So, explain that in layman's terms to what that means.
They're doing a poll, yes, but they're doing a poll...
In which they're sort of guiding the answer.
Would that be a good way to put it?
Well, also, they lack the quality control.
They're guiding the answer.
They're asking biased questions.
But they lack the quality control where they're under-polling Republicans.
And then at the end of the 2020 election, they meet among themselves and they say, oh, Trump voters weren't answering the calls.
So they blame it on Trump.
But they intentionally were under-polling like Quinnipiac and have 23% Republicans.
And every point that you take down a Republican Party as part of the sample, every point you take Republicans down, you're taking Trump down a point because he gets over 90% of the Republicans support him.
So what happens is you've got polls that are skewed by bias where they're saying they're not What we would call registered voters or likely voters.
I always screen for likely voters in elections.
You tell me you're not going to vote, why am I going to waste my clients' money?
And then what they do is they'll poll adults and they'll under-poll Republicans.
Who knows if they've got illegal immigrants on the phone?
I don't know.
So they have only 23% Republican, 24, 25, and the last time it was out it was 33. In the post-election survey for 2020, the media's own, CNN's own post-election survey said the electorate was 36% Republican, 37% Democrat.
A one-point difference.
And they're publishing polls where they got 10-point differences.
And then they blame it on Trump voters because they say we wouldn't take their calls.
I mean, it's totally wrong.
And then the third thing is when I get a third quality control, when I get the poll off the computer, before I talk to you or any other candidate that I'm working for, I go through the poll and say, what's wrong with this?
Is there something here where the sample wasn't done right?
Because we monitor while it's happening.
The quality control checks, not just party.
We're checking education, age, geography, gender.
We have all these quotas to be set.
so that we're in the ballpark of being right and if you pay no attention to those uh...
factors like you said the demographics or or as we put out in the cross tabs like when we would deliver a poll to you we'd ask thirty forty fifty questions and we would cross tab every we'd have a correlation between every question and all the other questions in the poll so you would get a cross tab book of A thousand pages that we would then interpret to you and say, well, this is important, what they like most about you.
And you would say things like, oh, I was an experienced legislator.
I said, no, they like the fact that you were a Baptist pastor.
They wanted their pastor to be in Congress or that you were an Air Force chaplain.
And we can see that in the cross-tamps.
People would like those things, and that would get you votes.
And here, the media, they just do drive-by polling where they set up a poor sample, they do poor quality control checks, and then they publicize it because there's a bias.
When you look at the media, just like it's controlled By Democrat operatives.
You have Chuck Todd at NBC. You had Governor Cuomo's brother at CNN. You have George Stephanopoulos at ABC. They're controlling What the questions are, who's getting polled, what's getting asked, and they bring that bias with them.
And then they expect us to believe that they're not sandbagging us, telling us, oh, there's a lock.
You know, Hillary's got a Hillary lock.
There's an electoral lock.
There's no way she can lose.
And then they were doing the same thing, the Biden blue wave in 2020. Well, the Republicans picked up House seats and Trump almost won except for 44,000 votes in three states.
But they were trying to sell us a bill of goods because they wanted their candidates to win and they wanted Republican candidates to lose.
Yeah.
And I think what you just hit there is something important as we unpack this a little bit more.
It matters.
Again, some people just think that a poll is putting somebody out there making phone calls at random.
That's not the way you set up polling, is it?
No.
What happens is, like I said, we spend the money to, we have a voter database to build a sample that's random.
We make the calls random with predetermined election units that will match up.
With what the turnout should be.
Based on past elections and what's in the database, there's databases of 180 million Americans out there that vote in elections.
It's probably even higher now.
It's probably closer to 200 million now.
But the last election was a record turnout with 160 million voters, 161 million voters, which was up from the previous record of 139 million voters.
So when you look at those kinds of turnouts, we have data where you have 5,000 to 7,000 points of information on every voter that's a pennant.
We know if they own a pet, what car they drive, we know the kind of house they live in, what their level of education is, you have a pretty good idea what their religion is.
I mean, you know all these things about the voters before you call them, and you call them, promise them anonymity, and they give you their opinions.
And so it's like You have to be really careful and you have to construct it that way.
And then the technology.
Because most interviews are being done on cell phones or on a text message.
Where you ask them to go online and compute.
The national surveys that we just got back, all of them were done online.
Because over 90% of all voters are online.
With their cell phone or their computer, they're online.
You send them an invite to take a survey, they take a survey.
Let me ask you, John, on that right there, because that's one of the things that's been, you know, if you're sitting out there, and this is a little more than just a, you know, I'm wanting this to be more than just a windshield tour of polling.
There are different styles of polling with different rates of accuracy.
You have the survey monkey kind of poll, you know, that comes up on an email and says, who do you vote for?
A text message.
You have the, you know, the cross-mix method, you know, you have, you know, Some parts of it being done survey-wise, some being live.
And then you have what I think is the sort of more gold standard for those of us who use polling in a real way, not the ones that are typically on media.
If we're using it, we need guidance in how, you know, where the election is really at as far as public opinion issues, but also knowing how people feel.
Explain sort of the difference there and the wide variations you could get from, say, a group of people who answered a SurveyMonkey sort of poll and one who got a call from the John McLaughlin group.
Well, the difference is they don't have the quality control checks that we would do when we're doing it because we have to be precise.
And even if you do it well, you still have that margin of error, etc.
But I guess the big difference is, like when you see these robocall polls, like when people get these IVR calls, because the biggest problem we have is people don't want to take our polls because they think they're getting sold something on their phone.
And most people are on cell phones and not on landlines anymore.
So, Congress years ago, and Congress did this to themselves, because a lot of times you'll say, oh, that's pretty expensive to do that survey.
And like, the problem is because we do make the calls, and most of the calls have to be made on cell phones, and others are being done, you know, text to message on your cell phone.
Landlines.
Most voters don't have a landline anymore, and it's getting less and less.
So, Congress passed a law that If you're calling somebody on a cell phone, you can't use predictive dialers.
So I can't have my computers call people.
I have to have a person touch the phone, which slows it down, makes it much more expensive, where people are not inclined to take the call.
And so when you're doing that, it's very expensive to take a proper scientific survey via cell phone.
The ones who only use landlines skew very old, and the younger voters they get are still living at home with mom and dad probably, and they're not...
The normal person.
So the worst thing is when you see what they call interactive voice recording polling, which is a robocall poll, where you get a call on your phone and all of a sudden it's not on your cell phone, it's on your landline, you're just pressing buttons.
The average person on those kinds of polls is over 60 years old.
So it's really skewed because they're not using cell phones.
And that's...
But in the meantime, then they'll put out a headline, so-and-so's ahead.
And sure, that person's ahead with senior citizens.
They're not ahead with the average person.
But that's where you've got to look under the hood and see how the poll was done.
Well, and explain that right there, because that was one of the surprising things to me about polling as we were going through this.
And I think for candidates out there, for people who listen to polls and think that, oh, this is just simple, fly by, we're talking a good poll in a congressional district or a statewide, you're talking, you know, you know, 18 to 35,000 or more for a poll.
I mean, this is not cheap to do, right?
Correct.
And then if you're in an area where you need bilingual interviewers, say you're in a district with a significant number of Hispanics.
You have to have bilingual interviewers.
That adds to the cost.
By the way, there's some districts where I've gone into areas where I need Mandarin or I need Korean or something like that.
The country's become a lot more diverse.
But you're right.
It's in that realm because just to get 300 completes, 400 completes, You're literally making tens of thousands of calls to get 400 people.
A traditional congressional poll is 400 people.
That's what the formula is, which is a plus or minus, like I said, 4.9%.
And then you want me to predict the outcome by a tenth of a point and be right all the time.
And things change in campaigns.
I mean, now with the Internet, When I was working for B.B. Danyahu in 2015 and Donald Trump, I'd be like, you've got to do Facebook posts on election day up until the time the polls close.
And they're saying, why?
And I said, well, 70-80% of the voters are on Facebook.
Israel's a lot like the United States, where everybody has a cell phone and everybody's on the internet.
And I was telling them, you know, we'd start at 6 in the morning.
We'll record that the night before, put that up.
And every two hours we're going to post a message to the voters why they should go out and vote.
Because you literally can change the polls in a very short period of time.
And we learned this from the Democrats.
Obama was losing to Mitt Romney.
In the final weekend, until he went after Hurricane Sandy, hugged Chris Christie, delivered the aid while Mitt Romney was flying over the Northeast.
And all of a sudden, you know, you're seeing the published polls.
They go from Romney being up by a point or two nationally to being down a point or two on Sunday and Monday.
And he was killing them on the Internet.
It was literally Facebook.
And it was the same way with Trump.
Trump, we pulled it out in 2016. I said to the president, I said, like the last day, I was telling him it was close, you've got to keep campaigning.
And when he called me after the election, I said, thank you.
I said, well, at least we didn't make you pay for a landslide.
To which he was like, what do you mean?
It was a big win, a big electoral win.
I said, no, not really.
Obama had more.
I said, you only won by 78,000 votes.
In three states at the time, where he'd won in Pennsylvania by 44,000, he won in Wisconsin by 22,000, and Michigan by 10,000.
And ironically, in the final vote counts that were certified, we lost Georgia by 12,000, Arizona by 11,000, and we lost Wisconsin by 20,000.
When you think about it, out of 161 million votes, it was decided by 44,000 votes, where You know, that's why you campaign instantly, and that's why polls can be wrong.
Like, I got a great story from the Washington Post.
President Trump, a week after the election, calls me up, and he says, it's 6 a.m.
in Las Vegas, and he had done a rally until after midnight the night before, a week after the election.
And he's in Las Vegas, and he says, what's this Washington Post poll that has me down 17 points in Wisconsin?
And I said, well, you know, my firm hadn't polled from Wisconsin recently, but I said, all the recent polls had you dead even back in September when my firm had polled.
I said it was dead even.
Wisconsin's a toss-up state, just like Georgia.
For every one Republican, there's one Democrat.
And I said, it's going to be a dead heat.
And he says, why would they put out a poll saying I was down 17?
I said, well, first of all, there's eight points too many Democrats in it.
They also polled from certain areas that were more Democratic that the independents would skew as well.
And he's like, why would they do that?
I said, in Wisconsin, among COVID, being really cold, and if it's snowing, if there's long lines for in-person voting, they know the in-person voting is two to one Republican.
They know the Democrats have banked the mail-in vote, two to one for them.
So they're trying to discourage...
Your voters from going out waiting online for you to go vote, you know, on a cold November day in Wisconsin.
He says, they would do that?
I said, it's the Washington Post.
What do you think?
It's like, they're smart.
They know exactly what they got.
Yeah.
Well, and looking at the polling, the data and everything that you look at in a campaign, if you're going day to day and you're looking at these numbers and they're moving, in your experience in campaigns, I think it's interesting to see is that The concept of polling and breaking later,
you talked about the Obama-Romney race in 2012, and you go back to the Reagan-Carter race of 1980. Is that becoming more and more of a phenomenon now, that you see the break coming later in the polling, that you could sort of get the truer picture, or maybe is it the opposite?
Can you see the trends earlier now?
Well, like I said to you, technology is a big factor because people can get a message out through the internet.
By the way, the big story is, right now everybody's talking about Hunter Biden's computer again.
And during the campaign, when the New York Post broke that story, Twitter and Facebook censored them.
They literally took the oldest publication in the country, as far as newspapers goes, that Alexander Hamilton founded, journalists who checked this out, found out it was real, it was Hunter Biden's.
They censored the story.
And on election day, we did a poll for Media Research Center, 36% of the Biden voters did not know about Hunter Biden's computer and the corruption that was involved in what was reported in those stories.
And if they had known, 14% of them, which was 5% of the overall electorate, would not have voted for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden would have lost.
He would have lost decisively.
And literally, they interfered right going into the election.
So with polling, when you're saying things can break with information, absolutely.
And a lot of times, the undecided is not undecided.
Like right now, we have a poll where...
When you look at the national poll that we put up on our website on mclaughlinonline.com, and this is brand new, we put it up today, just for you.
You could be the first news break of this.
I mean, Joe Biden is still, his job approval is only 41%, his disapproval is 57%.
It's been that way for the last three months, and what the big news is, 65% of all voters think the country is on the wrong track.
But if they're undecided for Congress, the Republicans, by the way, for Congress on the generic ballot are ahead 48-44.
But if they're undecided for Congress, they say that the country's on the wrong track 75-16.
They are not voting for Democrats for Congress.
The Republicans could get over 50% of the popular vote for Congress.
And also, when you ask them about Biden's job approval, if they're undecided for Congress, They're 70% disapproved.
So I would look at that and I would say, if that was true in your district when you were running for Congress or in the state of Georgia, I would say virtually all the undecideds for Congress, you know, in that election where 8%, I would say 6 points out of the 8 are going to vote for Republicans.
And you make that prediction based on that.
Usually what happens is, when you were an incumbent congressman and you say, oh, we're at 70% in the district, you were trying to run to make it unanimous in your district.
When you'd be like, it's 70%, etc., I'd say, that's all we're going to get.
And you're like, why?
Well, everybody knows you.
You're an incumbent congressman, so an incumbent rule is whatever you have, You're going to get whatever you don't have will probably vote against you or not vote.
So there's an analysis factor then.
Well, yeah, and looking at that, John, I think that's one of the interesting things that people think about polls is there's so much that go into polls, and it goes back to our comment a few minutes ago about it being a snapshot in time.
And what you're taking a picture of is the mood and environment of, number one, of the people that you're actually talking to, of what's actually been going on if it's a candidate, what that candidate has been doing to influence those folks before you ever get there.
And talk about that for just a sec, because we used to use polling, you know, what we felt we wanted to do, and then we just wanted to see where it was at.
But you also use that to say, here's what people, I think the influencing poll, everybody understands the election poll, you know, the race, the, you know, who's winning, who's not winning.
But I think polling is much bigger in the sense, though, that you can also use the polling to understand, like, if I had a strong pro-life stance and there was a bill or something we asked about and you could see some hesitancy, you could actually sort of see why there were hesitancy in that.
Isn't that true?
Yes, sir.
And we would also, so you would, you know, and usually you did very well pro-life owners and your district was pro-life and Georgia, there's more pro-life voters.
But you would use a poll, this is a strategy document.
This is like most polls that are published, never really the kind of in-depth poll that you would look at.
You would base your whole campaign On basically what you believed in, and by the way, I used to work for, in 1982, I started a poll, I worked for one of Reagan's pollsters, Arthur Figelstein, and he would say to a candidate, where do you stand on that issue?
And the worst thing would be, he says, what does the poll say?
And that was the worst position for a candidate to have because it meant they believed in nothing.
And those candidates tend to lose.
So what you've got is a poll does really, you know, it helps you use the resources in your campaign like the way a company would use market research.
So you have the candidate, whatever your image is, whatever your strengths are.
You have money in terms of whatever you raise.
You better spend better than your opponent.
You have organization and volunteers, the quality of people involved in.
And then you have And then you have time.
And time, whether you're Donald Trump or John McLaughlin, we're going to race against each other.
The only thing we have in common is who gets the most productive day out of it each day until the election.
So the information you get out of the poll helps maximize the other four resources.
And then when you're looking at the poll, I would always tell the candidate their chances of success are winning.
And I'd be honest with them, too, in terms of if it didn't look like they were going to win, I'd tell them, You know, it doesn't look too good.
Let's figure something else out.
But the idea of what you alluded to, cutting issues, it's not just one of the most important issues, but what gets your votes.
You know, right now, if you ask the top issue in the country, they wouldn't say, you know, biological men participating in women's sports.
But on the other hand, when you ask about it, 70-80% of the voters are now opposed to it.
And that might help you get votes.
So it's the cutting issues.
It's the idea of your strengths and images.
Most people, when you first ran for Congress, they knew you were a state rep, but they didn't know that you'd been a Baptist pastor, that you were an Iraq war chaplain.
So those were important character references that we let people know.
Then there's also the idea of You know, key voter segments, building the coalition to get to 51%.
The idea of how do you allocate resources.
I mean, it's really important to know how many people in your district regularly are on Facebook.
Are they watching, by the way, Fox News?
Fox News is more of a bargain now than broadcast news.
Because if you're a conservative or Newsmax, I'm going to Newsmax for daily news about Ukraine.
More than I am going to the broadcast news.
Because I don't trust the broadcast news.
So Republican primaries, I'm on Newsmax, I'm on Fox News.
And then you get an idea for measuring progress, where most often the first poll is...
But the next poll is more important to show that you've made progress.
So there's a big strategic element to why you're doing that first benchmark poll and then what you're doing in future tracking polls to make sure that you're on your way of winning.
Is it safe to say, John, and I'm being very broad here, and I get that from a math petition standpoint, it's probably not the best, but most of your public polling done by media organizations and others are...
They're good, but a lot of them, and I'm saying a lot, not all, but a lot of them have inherent flaws like we've talked about, which I think over time has caused people to not trust polling.
And I'll give you an example.
This morning I was on, I do a radio show, and we were talking about Polling in Georgia.
And one of the interesting stats that came up, and this is about the discussion of elections and election integrity and all this kind of stuff, was, and I had been given some poll numbers by a reputable firm that had basically said this, and I'll just generically state this.
That among Trump-identified voters, you know, this is something new that I've seen in the last few years that I haven't seen before, and that was, are you a traditional Republican or a Trump Republican?
And they'll ask about that.
And among the crosstabs, like you talked about, one of the crosstabs basically said that among Trump Republicans, down here in a governor's race, Brian Kemp was actually leading David Perdue by five points.
And so we just said that, made a statement as a, you know, here's what the number said.
And we started getting texts and other things from people who were listening saying that those are fake news.
Polls are fake news.
Why is it, besides the old just general fact, if you hear something you don't want to hear, you call it fake.
What has caused some of the more, besides what we've seen in probably the presidential sides, the distrusting of polls?
And does that hurt overall perception?
I think it's part of the overall media bias.
Because the mainstream media that's biased against Republicans, biased against conservatives, biased against President Trump, It uses polls to inflict their bias on us in that regard because they're trying to manufacture outcomes in elections.
In one extreme case, I gave you that Washington Post poll.
But I would think most media polls have been wrong.
In that, you know, in the 2020 election.
And that's why there was a big conference of the American public opinion and researchers.
And that's why they came up with the solution that, oh, Trump voters weren't going on the, you know, on the polls.
But they allowed their bias to impact Trump.
You know, the science of polling because they wanted to manufacture an outcome.
They wanted Trump to lose.
And I gave you cases on that.
And when you look at it in Georgia, I mean, by the way, that question about traditional Republican versus Trump Republican, I mean, President Trump In this national poll we have, 68% of all Republican primary voters nationally want Trump to run again, Republican primary voters.
And if he does run again, they're going to support him 82 to 14. And in a field of like 14 candidates, he leads 55%.
DeSantis is a distant second at 15%.
13. And then he's beating Biden 48-45.
He beats Kamala Harris 50-42.
He beats Hillary Clinton 51-41.
The only media poll that recently came with similar numbers was the Emerson College poll.
And they're not even in the NCAAs.
Their football program doesn't qualify.
But what do they do?
They do polling well.
But there's a lot of colleges.
Think of all these universities that do polling.
And they do it to give publicity, to get students.
And, you know, they still do it wrong.
Does that surprise you too?
And I know we've had some conversations, this is sort of personal, that we had the AJC would co-op their polling out to the University of Georgia.
And I'm not, look, the University of Georgia is my home.
I have two boys who graduated from there, go Dawgs, with national title.
But yet...
We were seeing some inconsistencies in the numbers and the crosstabs on their polling.
Are we training a generation to not know how to do this or are we just trying to let AJC and others get off cheap?
By the way, I thought theirs was getting a little better because I had to go through this with our good friend Chris Riley, who was Governor Deal's Chief of Staff and Campaign Manager, where he's like, he once told me in the 2014 election, you tell the Governor Deal we're going to a runoff.
And I said, I'm not saying that.
And we won it decisively by eight points.
But remember, they were putting out polls saying we were headed for a runoff.
And I'm like, that's not going to happen.
And Chris was saying he's not going to let it happen.
But it wasn't even close.
And the factors were, back then they were wording the questions in such a way and they were building the demographics to give the Democrats an advantage.
They've gotten a little better since then, but just like you said, the first thing I do when I look at a media poll, I look at the demographics in terms of age, race, geography, all those things, and then I'll look at party affiliation and ideology, etc., and see if it matches up with the last exit poll from a statewide race.
And if it doesn't match, if something's skewed, then I've got to find out why.
But, you know, you can't compete with them when all of a sudden the AJC releases a poll and it's a headline and then it's on the TV news all across Georgia.
You know, it's too late if there's something wrong with that poll.
But fortunately for us, most voters just discount it and vote.
They go and vote.
Is it also the use of polling like that?
Doesn't that, John, in many ways, coming from the polling industry like you do and the polling, you know, the real polling, doesn't it also lead even more so to this media mistrust?
Yeah.
And ultimately, I think it undermines the democracy.
We're because they manufacture all these polls that say Republicans are going to lose, that Donald Trump's going to lose.
Turns out to be a close election.
And it creates a situation where voters believe there was fraud.
They, you know, so it's, I mean, it's not good.
And, you know, and then you find out something like, oh yeah, by the way, there was no Russian collusion.
Yeah.
The New York Times wrote last week, Hunter Biden's laptop really existed.
I mean, it was a revelation to them.
You know, you're the expert on the Russian collusion.
It never existed.
And they won Pulitzer Prizes on that, the New York Times, that they're not giving back.
I mean, it just, it really has a terrible impact.
That kind of partisan bias and ideological bias has a terrible impact on the fundamentals of our democracy.
And we see this kind of We disconnect with the voters all the time where they're becoming more cynical, more distrusting, and we've got serious problems in this world that we need to be fixed, and they're not helping.
Before we get into a little bit of fun part of this, you just hit something.
I did want to talk about this.
There's always this discussion of trying to disguise or fool the polls.
In other words, like a...
I'm a big believer that there's no truly independent, quote, voter.
I believe there's independents who say they're independent, but they lean right or lean left.
And if you looked at their patterns, they're left or right.
They just like the term independent in looking at this.
But is there ever...
This goes back...
You remember years and years ago, Limbaugh saying, let's go to Democratic primary and vote for Hillary.
You know, this guy.
On polls, is there...
Is there any way to do that without it being a really somehow discoverable process to say, hey, we're trying to skew poles?
Because a lot of people try to throw that up, but reality is you just don't see it, do you?
Yeah, but you're right.
Technically, we could see that.
Like, Fox News was one that used to, during 2020, publish polls.
And they'd say X amount of Republicans, X amount of Democrats.
But when they'd throw in the leaners, the Democrats would have an 8, 10-point edge.
And so their polls were not favorable to Trump.
Because the leaners that they picked were not favorable to us.
But also, the other factor is...
Like, we'll screen for likely voters, and we'll model it based on past turnouts.
When you get these polls of adults or registered voters, it's a much bigger universe.
And when you think about how the size of the universe of voters can change, like looking at midterms, in 2010 you had 90 million voters go out.
Okay.
2014, another Republican good year, only 83 million come out.
In 2018, it was 118 million voters.
So all of a sudden, the size of the electorate expands, and you are getting more Democrats and more independents who lean for the Democrats coming in, which is why that was a good year for the Democrats to take back the House.
I mean, Mitt Romney and Obama, there was only 130 million voters.
There were 90 million voters who were eligible that didn't vote.
And Trump, at some point in June, said to me, June of 2016, how are we going to win all these polls that I was losing?
And I said, well, first of all, we're going to maximize the people that are anti-Hillary and anti-Obama.
Second of all, we're going to siphon off the Libertarian vote, because that Libertarian, Gary Johnson, was getting like 10% of the vote.
Pull some of that off.
But I said we're going to bring more voters out because of the 90 million that didn't vote.
There were working class conservatives, right of center voters that didn't vote.
So we increased the turnout to 139 million.
Then you're looking at 2020. And the Democrats have it figured out.
And it was published, by the way.
I don't know why the Republicans didn't catch on.
You know, Barack Obama's old campaign manager was working for Zuckerberg.
And David Plouffe publishes a book in March of 2020 that he wrote before COVID that...
Okay, the Trump people won because they got more voters out in key states.
We're going to get more Hillary Clinton-type voters who didn't vote and, you know, register to vote and make them, you know, Biden voters, in effect.
And if a handful of counties in the swing states, where he literally says he's going into Georgia and Fulton County, etc., they say they're going into Milwaukee and Certain parts of Wisconsin, they say they're going into Arizona, Maricopa, Pennsylvania, or Philadelphia, and they're going to turn out voters, and they're going to do it where making it, you know, they basically had the prescription to have drop boxes, have unsecure voting, have lots of ballot harvesting, and...
It was there.
I don't think that many Republicans read it.
And certain states we fought, Texas, North Carolina, Florida.
Florida, they have secured drop boxes.
Now in Georgia, you all have secured the drop boxes and you have voter ID. And the thing about the 2020 election that's relevant is not what happened back then as much as the Democrats want to repeat it this year.
And it's very hard to poll people that don't exist.
Yeah, that tends to be a problem.
John, you said you've been doing this for many, many years, and politics, campaigns, and everything else.
We've done a deep dive into polling and how it works and what you're looking for and the realities of if you're going to get an accurate poll, you have to do an accurate sample and everything else.
What are some of the more interesting stories that you have from campaigns where you've looked at, say, a campaign you started off with, you were polling, and you said, like, wow, this just isn't going to work, or just candidates who have...
Because people, you know, you see campaigns and candidates from a different side.
What's some of the interesting stories you have for that?
Well, again, I already gave you some with Trump and Netanyahu, but as far as, I think some of my most interesting stories are about to happen in this November and the election after.
Yeah, because as technology moves, you've got a very volatile electorate.
I mean, when you have 65% of Americans say the country's on the wrong track, when you have 57% disapprove of the job that Joe Biden's doing, I wish the election was tomorrow.
Because my friend Pat Caddell, who was a great pollster, he passed away a couple years ago, he was Jimmy Carter's pollster and then helped Trump, he said often that the Democrats are the crooked party and the Republicans are the stupid party.
And, you know, again, you can see it's going to be a bad election for the Democrats, and they're trying to undermine the rules of voter ID, and they're trying to undermine the rules of, you know, to enable ballot harvesting again.
And so that's going to make a very interesting, you know, between now and November, because right now, if the elections were held tomorrow, the Republicans would win in a wave.
People said to me, Joe Biden, don't you think his job approval went up after the State of the Union?
And I said, yes, until you decide to go pay for gas or food.
And, you know, this is like the 70s again.
So, those of us who worked for Ronald Reagan, I volunteered and then I went to work for Arthur Finkelstein, used to do polling for him.
You know, for us, the 70s weren't as good and much fun as that show, the 70s show.
For us, it was a challenging time where You know, America was weak in the world.
There was rampant inflation.
People weren't sure about their jobs or their livelihood or their children and grandchildren's security.
And now here we are back in that moment again.
And we've got an election coming up.
We've got lots of primaries.
We've got an election in November.
And I think a lot of history is going to be written between now and November and also between now and 2024. So I think the more surprises are to come while they live behind us.
Yeah, I think you're right on that.
I've said this before, and we have, of course, politicians all over the country, but Georgia's become sort of a center for the last 14, 15 months, 16 months, 18, however you want to count it, back to November of 2020, on elections and how the state is going.
I believe that, and John, I've said this many times, I believe that the election cycle in Georgia is one of the most...
Confusing election cycles that we've seen in a while.
I mean, I know that you're working some here in Georgia.
Are you sensing that as much as I am, that the common, what I'll call it, the common...
General perception, however you want to call it, is sort of being turned on its ear in Georgia.
Georgia is not normal right now.
And from a polling perspective, do you see that and how does that affect your polling?
Well, Georgia, I said last time it was going to be the center of the universe.
It's going to be the center of the universe again.
I used to say this to you.
I used to say it to Governor Deal.
I said, you guys were making the elections look easy at a time where Georgia was...
The two parties were in equilibrium.
There were as many Democrats as there were Republicans, which was different than, say, fifteen years ago, it was a four to three Republican state.
And it's really now a total toss-up state because you've attracted your successes.
You made it such a good economic and quality of life place to live, you attracted a lot of voters from other states That don't know how you got there, and they brought some of their bad voting habits with them.
So it's totally a toss-up state, and now you've got control of the Senate hanging in the balance again.
You've got a hot governor's race, and it's going to be the center of the universe for the presidential election in 2024 again.
So I think when you're looking at the election, they're going to spend a billion dollars there.
And right now, like, we're polling for Speaker Ralston and the House majority, the Republican majority.
They should win.
But when you look at, they've passed an election law that secures honest elections, which is more popular than ballot access, because people want to ensure that they have an honest election.
But the media doesn't tell people, you know, they don't tell people that, okay, you got voter ID. Okay, you have...
By the way, you have no excuse absentees because you have voter ID. You have secure drop boxes.
They want to make them less secure right now.
They want to undermine the election law that promises honest elections right now.
And the Speaker and the Republicans are fighting for that.
So you've got a real challenge with the...
You know, what the Democrats want to do.
And it's all because they know that Herschel Walker has a slight lead on Ralph Warnock right now, and that Biden and Warnock have net negative job ratings because of the direction of the country.
So get your helmet on and get ready for another close election.
It definitely is.
It's going to be interesting in the primaries down here as well.
And I think that's the thing to me that sort of throw the Georgia election.
Right now, Democrats are basically in Georgia are quiet.
They're not having to do anything.
Their slate sort of is set.
And Republicans are having to go through a very heated primary process down here.
And I think that's going to be interesting to see.
I'd love to see the polling, and I'm sure you and I will talk, and I'll have you back on.
We'll talk polling in Georgia, North Carolina.
I mean, I think we just saw an interesting run here in Alabama concerning the Trump endorsement and now the removal of the Trump endorsement.
I think that's an interesting part because...
What I see among polling, and again, like we talked about this morning, the polling is saying one thing, whereas the fervent Hope of the hardcore Republican grassroots is saying another.
And my concern is, and do you see this or do you share this concern, that if it was to go the opposite way of conventional wisdom among the hardcore conservatives in Georgia who are very frustrated about what happened in 2020, do they come back out or do they stay at home?
I'm very concerned that they're willing to let a candidate they don't like not have their support.
Well, I think that has to be a concern.
But then on the other hand, going back to 2020 for the U.S. Senate race, your listeners and viewers can probably guess who my prejudice was, who the Senate candidate should have been.
And I think we would have had a very different outcome historically, and the country would be in a better place today.
But anyway, so, but I wouldn't inflict that upon you because you're a good friend.
And I want to see your happiness.
Well, I think it's interesting, too, in Georgia.
Yeah, I'm happy right now.
But Georgia in 2020, we also had a governor, in fairness, who put a special election on a November general ballot.
And that hurt a lot of things as well.
John, before we get going here, one last thing.
If you were to tell people who were skeptical about polling, what would you tell them to say, hey, look, polling is like any other thing.
It's what you put in.
How would you explain that to the voter at the Waffle House down here in Georgia?
What I would tell them I would say is make sure you vote because you're going to enjoy proving those polls wrong and in most cases that skepticism is well founded because if you don't believe a poll, if you think something doesn't look right, check the source and look under the hood and that person's skepticism might be right.
So I would say the ultimate thing to protect our democracy and preserve our freedoms is to go vote.
And if you don't like the results of that poll, don't let it discourage you.
Just go vote and prove them wrong.
Because I think you and I have made a career out of proving them wrong.
We have definitely done that, John.
Folks, you don't get a better pollster, in my opinion, than John McLaughlin.
He's honest.
He shoots down the middle.
Believe me, he's brought me information sometimes I didn't want to hear.
And then he's brought me information I did want to hear.
But the thing about John was consistency and doing it right and trying to get it right every time.
And that's what the polling community needs.
They need more Johns in the world who are actually out there checking and double checking.
Because it makes a real difference in our polling and it makes a real difference in our elections on how we can actually communicate to have a better democracy.
So John, thanks for being a part of the podcast.
Thank you for the opportunity.
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