Why do I keep getting these weird fundraising texts?
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Hey guys, we're dropping into your feed on a Sunday because we have something a little special for you. We're going to share an episode of Vox's new podcast. It's called Explain It To Me. Explain It To Me focuses on answering your questions in the style of like an old-timey call-in radio show, a thing that I love. Except it's a podcast, so even better. In fact, it's a whole franchise. There's a weekly newsletter. There's a video series. This week, we're answering a question that we got from a lot of you. What is it?

What is behind all of these campaign text messages? Why are you getting so many? How did these fools get your number? We're going to let you know. We're also going to be talking a bit about the question of whether you can trust political polls. They say the race is tight. It's too close to call. Can you believe them? Now, if you've got a question about the election or literally anything else, there have been some great ones that have nothing to do with politics. Send it over to Vox and we're going to have a team of reporters and editors look into it. You can call in with your questions.

at 1-800-618-8545, 1-800-618-8545. I feel like a radio DJ. Or you can email us at askvox at vox.com. I'm going to hand it over to J.Q. Hill. She is the host of Explain It To Me. Hi, it's J.Q. Before we get into the episode, I want to ask you something.

What are your election questions? We're diving into some of the ones you've already sent in today, but as we get closer and closer to November 5th, we want to know what's on your mind. So give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or shoot us an email to askvox at vox.com. Okay, here's the show. What is up with these political texts? Why are there so many? They're just kind of bonkers.

I'm Jonquan Hill, and this is Explain It To Me, the hotline for all the questions you can't quite answer on your own. Today, two of your election questions. One is about polling, those numbers we watch with bated breath the closer and closer we get to Election Day. Who exactly are those for in the first place? And the other is about texts, you know.

those texts. Hi, this is Anne from Chicago. And I am dying for somebody to do a deep dive podcast episode about these unhinged text messages and emails that we keep getting from the Democratic Party. What purpose do they serve? Who is responding to these? Why do they keep sending these out? Please, please give us some answers.

Would you mind reading a couple to me? Like, are there some where you're like, girl, what is going on? Yeah. Okay. This is goodbye. Nobody is donating to keep our Arizona ads on air. And then in bright, you know, in big font, it says last chance, rush $10 to fund our ads. Bold Democrats. And there's a link there.

I think if one of my friends sent me something like that, I'd be like, girl, I'm on the way with a bottle of wine. What is happening? Right. Like, are you okay out there? Like, this is goodbye? Oh, my gosh. Sister, please. Goodbye forever.

What's another one you got?

We're hitting the panic button. Panic is in all caps. Donations to defeat Trump have plummeted. All caps. Have you given up? And then it sends, you know, link. Democratic victory pack. I mean, like, if the point is to, like, get your attention, okay, maybe that's one thing. But...

I have to believe that like we're not the only like group of friends that's like sending around their most insane ones, you know? This can't actually work, right? Like nobody's like clicking these links like, oh, thank goodness. Okay, I'll donate, you know? Yeah. I don't know. And we have, so we have some theories too like about like why and like maybe like where they're coming from. Oh, yeah. Tell me your theories. Tell me your theories. Yeah. Yeah.

So the theory that I like the best or like seems most plausible is just that like some consulting firm like got in with the DMC and it's just like, look, here's the strategy. We send these texts and we know like the exact language and like the exact tone to use. And this is really going to work. And maybe they signed some like 10 year contract with them or something. And they're just like going crazy, sending all these texts.

There's also a hypothesis about who these texts are for. My friends and I have another theory about kind of like, it's not, it's not nice, no shade to boomers, but we think maybe this works on boomers. But also like, you know, I obviously have boomer parents and they're, I know they're not responding. They don't seem bothered one way or the other by these texts, but like,

They are not like, you know, that's not their way of donating money, right? Like they can work a computer, like they send in money or whatever. Somehow they do it, but I don't think it's like through the text messaging. So this is what's going to happen next. We're going to try to find you some answers. Is it okay if we give you a call back with what we find? Sure.

Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. And thank you so much. We will talk to you soon. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jonquan. It's been great. I like to tell people I invented text messaging specifically for like nonprofits and campaigns. Are you a good texter like in your personal life?

A good texter. I'm very prompt at responding to people if that is a mark of a good texter. I am a very signature, like, machine gun texter, though. I will send 13 straight messages that are each, like, four words. Oh, I do that, too. It's for the effect, though. Yeah.

Right. Thank you. I agree. So I am a good texter in that like you very clearly hear my like tone of voice coming through and you really can like hear me in the message. But the machine gun thing definitely bothers some people. They're like, oh my God, I just got out of a meeting and I have 40 notifications from you. What is going on?

This is Lloyd Kotler. He's the founder of Banter Messaging, a company that helps progressive causes with text strategies. He's not the one begging you for money via text, but he does know the SMS marketing landscape really well and has been in the game for a while.

I got started in text marketing in 2009, 2010, working in the immigrant rights space. So we were working on passing comprehensive immigration reform and then later the DREAM Act. And our core constituency wasn't sitting at a computer all day and had to figure out how to reach people that were the United Farm Workers or home care workers, stuff like that. And text was a really natural solution.

So this cycle, it seems like everyone and their mom is getting campaign texts. Why do you think they're a good tool for campaigns?

It's, well, a couple of things, right? Email has certainly declined a bit. Facebook has made it a lot harder for nonprofits and campaigns to reach people. TikTok, you know, doesn't do political advertising at all. Some of those other channels that people used to rely on have definitely gone down. And texting is just like a really easy, cheap way to reach people.

Also for campaigns, it's a really easy place to dump a ton of money into at the end of the campaign when you're like, we have all this extra money.

What do we do with it right at that point? Like you can't buy more TV ads. You can't buy more, you know, direct mail pieces. But you can definitely buy more texts like right up through Election Day. So, you know, for campaigns, it's a good place where they can like spend a bunch of money that they have to. Lloyd didn't have the hard numbers on this. So we looked around to see what we could find. One person we talked to was Josh Nelson. He's the CEO of a progressive SMS texting firm called Civic Shout.

He said that in 2022, both political parties sent over 15 billion texts. That's 50 messages per cell phone in the U.S. And there aren't really any estimates yet this go-round, but if he had to make an educated guess, it could be between 20 and 30 billion texts this election cycle. So how did we end up with billions of these text messages?

I asked Lloyd what he thinks. Yeah, it used to be in-house, like, pretty much across the board. It's gotten away in the past few years from conversational to just, like, very transactional, right? Mm-hmm.

Pretty much folks are only using it as like cold donation asks. They're not really doing, just the campaign. I want to speak just to the campaign side there. Yeah. Are not doing, you know, kind of like voter outreach or stuff like that, right? When like the Bernie campaign and the Hillary campaign really started doing this kind of like one-to-one texting stuff, it was about voting, right? Yeah. It was like, we can't reach these people in other ways. Let's like text them about voting, that kind of stuff. Yeah.

And then later somebody was just like, well, why don't we also text people about donations? And then that just kind of became the whole thing. And how exactly do they get your data in the first place?

There are a few different ways ranging from banal to nefarious. So the kind of most basic way is they're just buying your data. They're just getting it from another campaign or another PAC or another agency who sell donor data campaign to campaign. It's just kind of regular course of business.

Next kind of level is they're doing data appends. So, you know, they got your email because you, you know, signed up for something or they had your email when the candidate ran, you know, six years ago, but you never gave them more info and they just kind of do, you know, a data append and get, you know, additional info on you. And then they start texting you from the phone number they got, which may or may not be accurate, right? Which is why a lot of people get messages that are like not or addressed to somebody else that's not them.

They can get it from the voter file, so they can totally just like pull the data from the voter file if it's there. And then kind of the most nefarious way would be scraping FEC data, which is like very illegal, but only if you get caught, right? Like how would anybody know? So that's kind of the most nefarious way to do it.

I want to get into the tone of the texts that people are receiving this year. Why does the tone feel so different? Why does it feel like an unhinged group chat?

It just feels that way. Yes, it just feels that way, I think, because of, like, the state of the world, right? Where just, like, everything feels a little more like that now, right? But, like, even as far back as 2018, right? I mean, we were seeing some, like, truly unhinged messaging, you know, the things Trump was going to do if you didn't donate $5 immediately, right? I mean, people are just, like, exasperated by it, I think, a little more now than they were back then. And, like...

It's catching up now where people are just like, this is wild stuff. Yeah. Why are some texts, you know, that tone is sort of that like urgent or I will get fired and it will be your fault and others are relatively normal. Is there any philosophy or reasoning or do some organizations lean toward one way versus another? What is going on with that? Yeah.

Yeah, you see the most unhinged stuff generally from like the most scammy organizations and PACs, right? Like you'll see...

folks that don't care about their reputation because nobody's ever heard of them before and they'll never hear of them again, right? Like, they're just trying to maximize the haul. So, like, they're going to use the scammiest marketing tactics that exist, right? They're not inventing anything new. Scammy marketing tactics have always, you know, existed. They're just, like, exploiting it through this channel, you know, in those cases, right? And that's your real, you know, like...

gross agencies who work for scam packs, right? Folks who are really detrimental to the ecosystem. Yeah, this scam packs, where does that money, is the money actually going to campaigns? No, no, that's the scam, right? It's going to, like, there's a couple of varieties of it. One scheme, right, is like, I have a scam pack. That scam pack is paying my marketing company money

to do all of the marketing for this scam pack, right? - Oh. - Right? And like you're just spending on like overhead and stuff like that. They're not spending money on candidates. They're not, you know, doing the kind of things we would expect, you know, from a pack in that sense.

Who's being targeted by these ads? Is it anyone with a phone number or is it like registered voters? Is it swing states? Because I will say, and I'm starting to feel a little left out, I have not gotten these unhinged text messages and everyone complains about them. And I'm like, wow, I can't even get a text back from a scale pack. You're going to regret saying that. I'm going to be inundated.

Right? No, so, I mean, primarily, especially for the scammiest, you know, kind of messages, the targets are unfortunately older people who are most likely to fall for it, who get tricked into, you know, recurring donations or their life savings or like, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it's the grossest, you know, it's really the grossest.

Then like the second level of, you know, kind of spray and pray. Yeah, it's just the voter file, right? It's just, you know, we're going to grab everybody off the voter file and start texting that way. And then kind of like the third tier down is like you donated to another campaign, right? And that campaign like sold your info to, you know, this campaign that's now reaching out or to the agency that works on behalf of, you know, the PAC that you've never heard of or something like that.

They can sell your information, which feels, I don't know, that feels legally sticky. It should be. I mean, the real gross part is that the agency will, you know, obviously work on behalf of multiple clients and like facilitate the sale of the data between their own, you know, clients. So you're getting from the same agency, right? Like eight identical messages from eight different candidates because they're just, you know, kind of copying and pasting their stuff over and sending it to you over and over. Yeah.

Okay, so now we have a better sense of how this whole text fundraising universe operates. But does it actually get results? That's after the break. Support for the show comes from the new season of Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. What is a crucible moment? It's a turning point where we face a tough decision and our response can shape the rest of our lives.

These decisions happen in business too. And Sequoia Capital's podcast, Crucible Moments, gives you a behind-the-scenes look, asking founders of some of the world's most important tech companies like YouTube, DoorDash, Reddit, and more to reflect on those critical junctures that defined who they are today. Tune in to Season 2 of Crucible Moments today. You can also catch up on Season 1 at cruciblemoments.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Support for the show comes from the new season of Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. What is a crucible moment? It's a turning point where we face a tough decision and our response can shape the rest of our lives.

These decisions happen in business too. And Sequoia Capital's podcast, Crucible Moments, gives you a behind-the-scenes look, asking founders of some of the world's most important tech companies like YouTube, DoorDash, Reddit, and more to reflect on those critical junctures that defined who they are today. Tune in to Season 2 of Crucible Moments today. You can also catch up on Season 1 at cruciblemoments.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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See att.com slash iPhone for details. It's Explain It To Me, and today we're answering Anne's question and finding out why so many of us keep getting fundraising texts. Lloyd gave us the lay of the land, but are people actually bringing in cash through all these messages?

Yeah, kind of fortunately and unfortunately, right? It's like unfortunate that like these kind of unhinged crazy messages like actually do work, right? You know, I mean, like they really do get significant return, right? And that's partially because texting is so cheap, right? Each text is...

you know, a couple of pennies, right? So it is, the return is really high. But like a well-done text marketing program is also like extremely, you know, successful, right? Can be really, really good at fundraising, at, you know, all your other kind of organizational priorities.

Is this a partisan thing? And who is our question asker? She's been getting a lot of left-leaning ones, but are Republicans also getting these unhinged text messages? Yes. Like, they're getting equally unhinged messages, but like...

It's much less about a guilt trip on their side, and it's much more about, like, you know, red meat culture war kind of stuff, right? And you know who also is a big Republican voting bloc is old people, right? It is absolutely bipartisan issue that you'd think something like that, right, that, like, really could unite everybody to be like, let's get behind some legislation here, right? But, like...

lawmakers are not in the habit of like taking away their own reelection money, right? And so trying to convince them to like turn off a spigot that provides them with like a lot of campaign cash is...

really, really difficult. Yeah, because I guess on one hand, there are these scammy PACs that are, you know, just paying for their own salaries with the money they're taking in. But it would also impact, you know, the legitimate ones that are funding these really expensive campaigns. Yeah, I mean, so...

Even somebody like Katie Porter, who's a consumer advocate and her whole brand is being a consumer advocate, she sold her data towards the end of the primary campaign to keep in the race. If we can't get Katie Porter to do it, then trying to get a majority of reps and senators to pass a bill like that is a really Herculean task.

OK, I want to read you some of the texts that Anne and her friends have gotten this year and get your thoughts. OK, I'm going to try to do a dramatic reading. Before Kamala Harris hits the DNC stage tonight, can you confirm you're voting for Kamala Harris? Yes.

And then a few days later, we've asked six times if you support Kamala Harris, but you never completed the poll. And then there's a frowny face, but it's like not an emoji. It's like a colon and parentheses. Reply via your personal link. And then there's a link. Yeah. You know, you'd think like, okay, you've asked six times. I'm not going to answer. But like, it's honestly, the whole thing is so automated. Like you'd think a person would be

legitimately embarrassed like sending that kind of message right like I would be legitimately embarrassed like writing that message asking somebody to approve it it's like double texting a guy like oh my gosh I'd rather chew glass literally like it is absolutely but they've taken so much of the human like element out of it right like

You have like some 26 year old, right, writing this message, it goes and then like it goes to the contact center and like those people are so used to just like write phone scripts, right? They don't write any of their own stuff. They're just kind of like reading off a sheet of paper. If anything, they're less embarrassed, like sending a text that's that, you know, crazy versus having to like say that out loud on a phone call.

So, you know, because the human element is like completely removed from it, there's, yeah, there's no shame at any like stage of the process for those folks. Do you know if the organization reaching out to you is legitimate or not?

It takes like a full day's worth of research. It's like, it's a lot. Yeah. I mean, the average person is totally unequipped to do it, to be honest. You first have to like figure out who is this actually from? And then if it's like going to, you know, an ActBlue page, then you've got to look like what PAC or who is this supporting? Where is the money actually going? You can go then to like the FEC and like look up, you know, the info on...

the candidate or the PAC or whoever it is from there. And then, you know, it still might not paint the whole picture. A campaign or a PAC showing 80%, you know, money spent on like overhead doesn't tell the whole story because it could be that they're just passing money through to candidates directly. And so...

That would be legitimate, right? But you couldn't tell that from an FEC report. So, like, it really, it's a lot of digging for people to do, which is why I always tell people, like, look, you want to support a campaign, like, go directly to their website, right?

make a donation or like write a check, right? If you write a check, you will not get spam text messages for quite a while. Are there rules when it comes to sending political text messages that campaigns and consulting groups have to follow? Or is it kind of the Wild West? Are there rules? There are rules.

Are they very enforced? Not really. The main regulatory system that was kind of put in place over the past few years is what's called 10-DLC registration, 10-digit long code registration. That process is a joke. The campaign registry, which is like the group that like facilitates that, is a joke.

you can absolutely scam your way through the application process because like they're looking to like ensure you have opt-in permission, right? So they're just saying, send us a webpage to see that people are opting in to your texts.

But they're not looking to see if all these people now that you upload, right, once you're verified, have gone through that page. So you just make a page on your website that has a checkbox that says, I want to get text messages. And then nobody bothers you again, right? Oh, so it just has to, it's like, oh, we made it available, but we're not necessarily making people go through it. Yes. Or like, we're just buying their phone numbers anyway, right?

And then the platforms are not generally really investigating in a heavy-handed way because they're not taking money out of their own pockets, right? If they tell you, you can't text these 200,000 people, right? Like, then they're not getting paid for you texting those 200,000 people. And you're just going to go to, like, a more unscrupulous vendor. So it's a real problem. The regulatory system is just...

Yeah, it feels like this thing we see over and over again with technology is that regulators have to play catch up. And I'm used to that when it comes to social media. But texting now feels so archaic and old school that it's surprising that it hasn't caught up there either.

really the only people that have the incentive to do anything about it are the carriers, right? Our AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Anybody else is making a ton of money off of this. So the carriers, right, their incentive is like, their customers are really annoyed. So, you know, for them, the incentive is like, we want to shut this down. We want to, you know, take action here. But again, they're really and genuinely afraid of running afoul of lawmakers because, again, if you're looking at like

where is more of the grift coming from, right? Then you're opening yourself up to accusations of bias. TCPA, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, is the main enforcement mechanism, but that's on an individual level, right? I have to file a TCPA demand letter. There's no group action that a citizen or a civic group or something like that could really take to stop things on mass.

Yeah. What what can people do to get their numbers off of this list and to get it to stop?

Yeah, so first thing you can do is make sure you're on the do not call list. That's not going to do anything, but it does give you standing then to file TCPA demand notices and stuff like that. And then I tell everybody the best thing you can do is start suing. Sending TCPA demand letters to folks who are texting you repeatedly if you are on the do not call list is a really easy way to get them to stop because those TCPA fines are really expensive.

So they will settle generally, you will get paid, and then you will stop getting those messages if you are litigious because they will start blacklisting your number so that you don't get the messages and can't sue and they can keep bothering everybody else.

And is that something where it's like, okay, let me call up my lawyer? Or is it like, can I send this letter and that will be enough to spook them? Yeah, so you can just send the letter. I think it was like two years ago, a guy sued the Pelosi campaign. And, you know, it was pretty well publicized. You know, he got like tens of thousands of dollars because the campaign just like kept texting him.

So yeah, anybody can do it. And the more people that do it, the bigger the damage is on the fundraising side and the more they will have to re-examine, is this a viable channel? And then honestly, just marking as many of you get them as spam. You can also copy

and paste the full text of the message and send it to 7726, right, which spells out spam, and that directs it to the FCC. So that's also helpful. What kinds of things get flagged by carriers as spam? Like, what are the things that make it say, like, oh, no, this is not, we are not doing this?

It's kind of a black box. So the carriers don't, you know, obviously tell us ahead of time, like, what they are looking for for spam. Things that, like, we have found, though, kind of all caps stuff or lots of capitalized letters. If you, you know, start every word with a capitalized letter, that's a big spam flag. Hmm.

Sometimes talking about money. So if it's, you know, it's weird because we always think about like, I only get ones asking for money, but there are certain words if you look for that, like, you'll never see. Certain like formulations of donate asks or like even dollar signs sometimes can, yeah, can flag spam.

You are more likely to get flagged as spam if you're not personalizing the messages, right? If carriers just see 400,000 identical messages going out, that's like a pretty big spam flag.

Not including the stop language, definitely a spam flag. Bitly links. So carriers want links to be visible that people should know what they're clicking on and where they're about to land. That makes sense. So that's why you'll see that super long ActBlue link with a ref code and you're like, who doesn't shorten links, right? Exactly.

What is this? But that's why, right? And they're too cheap to buy like a custom domain for themselves. So that's why you don't see like those bitly links because that's a big spam flag. Is there anything else our listeners should know before we let you go? Are any other tips, anything at all? Yeah, they should, if they want to donate to a campaign or to something they believe in, they should do it by check. Like seriously, make them work for it.

And yeah, you should sue. Like, everybody should sue. Be litigious. Like, it's the only way this is going to stop is if it is not profitable for those folks to do this. They bother you. You might as well get paid. So people should absolutely sue as often and as many people as possible. Lloyd Cotler, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. After my conversation with Lloyd, I called up Anne to tell her about what I found.

Okay, have you gotten any more texts since we last talked or have they stopped? No, I've been getting, and especially the last couple of days, I feel like I've been getting a lot. Ooh, well you read one. Read one of the most egregious ones to me. These aren't very like, they're not quite as unhinged, but I've been getting these and I know my friends have been getting these too.

We have you in our records as registered to vote, but at least one other member of your household might not be. Please help ensure that everyone is registered to vote by checking your household members' voter registration statuses. Yeah, don't click on that. Don't do that. Here's another one that is a little bit unhinged. Kamala in the White House donated $100 to crush Trump. Donations matched 400%. That seems like a lot.

I told Anne that her hypothesis was basically correct. There is a consulting class behind the texts.

I feel so much vindication. I feel like a large part of my world makes sense, which maybe tells you about my life right now that this is a large part of my world. I told her how some firms we talked to really pride themselves on writing compelling, thoughtful messages and how they feel about the others that go for more volume. I also told her how some scammers are seizing on the moment right now and writing the coattails of legitimate fundraisers. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Everything is a scam. I feel like I have this refrain with my partner where we're just like, everything is a scam. There's a few things that are actually doing what they're meant to do, but there's just so many scammy parts to American life these days. And they just get your phone number how then?

I broke down for Anne the different ways these companies get voter information, including buying info from other campaigns. I'm not surprised. I know that voter data is like actually pretty easy to get. And I think like I don't have a problem with that necessarily because I don't know. It's it's I think it's better than not to like be able to communicate with potential voters and things like that. So that is.

That feels okay. Another question you have is if this even works in the first place. And the answer is yes. Somehow it wouldn't work on me. I'm like, I'm not giving you all money, but it does work. And you were also right about the theory that it works on boomers a lot. I knew it.

Yeah, boomers and boomers on like every side of the aisle. Okay. Well, yeah, I can't say I donate that much to political campaigns, but I do feel like I want to pass this along to the boomers in my life. You absolutely should. And they definitely have checkbooks. Yes. Yes. Before saying goodbye, I told Anne what she can do to make the text stop.

Get on the do not call list, forward the messages to 7726, and if all else fails, send out TCPA letters. Do you think you'll try any of these things? I think I will probably forward to that number that you said. So I could do that. Okay.

I don't know. I'd need more time, maybe in the summer, maybe during winter break. I could start suing and getting a little bit of money on the side. That could be my summer gig. Yeah, that could be it. That's your side hustle is suing scam packs. Yeah. For democracy. It's for democracy. Exactly. It's for democracy.

So the biggest takeaway for boomers is that if you want to donate, do not click that link. Just take the extra three seconds, go to the website or get your checkbook because I know it's in your purse. Yeah. You still have a checkbook. Use it. Yeah. I know you want to balance that thing. They love to balance a checkbook. They sure do. After the break, we tackle one of our most frequently asked questions. What's the deal with polling? Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to Explain It To Me. I'm your host, Jonquan Hill. And I'm here with our very talented producer, Sophie. Hey, Sophie. Hi. Okay.

OK, so as you know, we've been asking people to call in with their questions about the election. Yes. If you have a question, let us know. Call 1-800-618-8545. There's one topic that we keep getting asked about over and over and over again, and that's polling. Polling. People want to know about the polling. Speaking of polling,

Specifically, how accurate the current polls are, how polling has evolved to make them more accurate since our 2016 moment. And then my current favorite just says, election polling methodology reliability improvement.

To get some answers, I called up my colleague Christian Paz. He's a senior political reporter here at Vox, and lately he's been covering the election with a specific focus on young voters and voters of color. He eats, breathes, and sleeps the polling numbers.

I wake up in the morning in a panic. I open Twitter to see because I've turned off push notifications, but I still have like alerts set on the Twitter on the X app for various kinds of polling updates, fundraising updates, new media, you know, ad buys that campaigns are making other political news. I do this in the morning. Oh, my gosh. All the greatest hits over your coffee. Literally. I want to lay some groundwork before we jump in.

Why is polling happening in the first place? What is the point in all of this? The function of polling, I think, fundamentally, is to give us another tool to measure public opinion, to measure rights,

how people are feeling at any given point in time and how to essentially correct our own biases about what is happening in terms of what issues are in the conversation or, in this case, what is happening in an election. It's a useful statistical, mathematical tool for us to figure out what's going on around us, to move beyond just

analysis of vibes to get beyond just what we're seeing on social media, to get beyond our bubbles. Is that what you would say the role of polling plays in your reporting? Like, not too long ago, you were in Philly, like, hanging out with people doing outreach programs in both the Harris and the Trump campaigns. Like, I'm curious what the role of that polling plays in your reporting. Like, how does it fit into all of that?

I'm not even worried so much really in my political writing about what specific percentage point increases that looks like. I care about a trend. Is there like a broader shift happening?

But for my purposes, it's a grounding for a trend story, a grounding for a greater story about what's happening in America. And it supplements or at least gives a basis for the kinds of reporting and conversations I want to be having with people. Yeah. It sounds like for you, you know, the polling is a way to say, OK, there's something going on here. Let me go talk to some people and find out what the deal with that is. How do

do we know if a poll is accurate? Because it's, I mean, it's easy to kind of get the answers you want from who you want them from. This is one of those things that I'm sorry to say I'm not going to be able to have a perfect answer because polling isn't perfect. Like it fundamentally has error involved in it. When I think about how a poll is accurate, how a poll is right, and taking into account

a few different things like who's running the poll? Are they aligned with a specific party to begin with? If it's a Democratic firm or a Republican firm, there's probably a different reason behind them making that information public. Maybe they want to change

juice fundraising or attention from national media. Or maybe they just want to give the impression, right, that the race isn't as out of the realm of possibility for them to win. I think the other thing I'm also looking at is something really basic, but it's margin of error. You know, that's the window in which a poll's result kind of exists, where if it's like 51-49, but it's a margin of like...

three percent you could say that the person who has the 51 is up but really it could be plus or minus you know three in one direction or the other direction so is that really a lead no it's better to just say it's tied and so I think that question gets into a lot of other conversations about what exactly you want a poll to do because like I said for me a poll is is accurate looking at all these things but you can only really judge whether it's accurate after the fact

One of the most recent stories I wrote, which was, can we trust the polls, right? Are polls accurate? The first response I get from pollsters and from analysts who analyze these polls is to remind people that polling is a blunt tool, that it's not like a precision tool that you can use. It's not like a scalpel. It's not an exact science tool.

Now I'm remembering the line from Veep where one of the numbers guys is like, all sciences are exact. So exact science is kind of repetitive. But like polling is not exact. And part of that comes from the fact that there are different ways to run polls. It depends on if you're looking at a national poll or you're looking at a state specific poll. Some states have unique quirks that make it more difficult to run polls there.

or to then correct for any potential errors in your sample. Like Wisconsin, for example, doesn't provide data in its public elections in terms of its voter registration, in terms of race and gender or political affiliation. So then it becomes difficult to correct some of the errors that you might have in how you're polling.

Christian and I recorded this two weeks ago, the same week that a new New York Times CNN poll came out. Before we got into it, I wanted to know the context. You know, we didn't fall out of a coconut tree.

All the polls are telling us right now is that it's an extremely close national election, statewide election. And if you look at polling averages, not much has changed since the conventions. If anything, we did see a little bit of a bump for Kamala Harris after the first debate. And since then, things have remained pretty standard. The polls have not moved that much. Favorability for Kamala Harris has really shot up, which is

one big reason why this remains competitive after it wasn't that competitive once Joe Biden's campaign was fizzling out over the summer. We had assassination attempts. We've had indictments and still numbers haven't moved. And what all that reveals is polarization is real. You know, people have picked their sides and Republicans are backing Trump. Democrats are backing Harris. And we're moving toward what one pollster once told me was like, OK,

a reality, a world where like no candidate will fall below 47 percent by the end of the day. Oh, wow. That's it's going to be like it's 47, 47. And then everyone's just battling out over that remaining single digit of support that's left. Yeah. So it's like five people who are going to determine who the next president of the United States is. Yes. I mean, this election is going to come down to like less than 100,000 votes and like

Three to four states like. Wow. And so that's what makes it hard to get a good sense of like just specifically how close the margins are in various states, especially at the battleground state level. It looks like Pennsylvania is going to be the place that the election may end up getting decided.

But this Times-Siena poll that you mentioned was really interesting, I think, because it has a few things that we assumed. And we look at it and you're like, yeah, that makes sense. And then some things that you look at and you're like, that doesn't make a ton of sense. Right. So the first thing is you have results that show nationally that Harris is up by three points within the margin of error, but that she is overall keeping this really competitive.

That fits with the average lead that she has in other national polls and polling averages. The second is they polled Texas, right? We haven't really gotten that many polls out of Texas. Yeah. That also looks pretty normal. It's Donald Trump is up, leading solidly out of the margin of error by about six points. And so that's naturally how we kind of expect Texas to look like. And the third one was Florida, which...

Over the years, it no longer is a swing state. It's becoming more and more conservative, more Republican. And so the expectation we get, right, is it's probably going to be Republican. But I think an interesting thing emerges from there where it gave Trump like a 13-point advantage. Oh, wow. Which was pretty significant. Yeah, that's huge. A lot of people see that and they're like, oh, see, so polling is broken. That can't possibly be true. Oh, yeah.

I feel like if you're a super red state, why wouldn't that be true? And that's that's the interesting thing, because what that poll is telling us, the New York Times itself, Nate Cohn did a write up about explaining some of these results and what makes it different if you're super, super nerdy and want to torture yourself about polling. I love torture. Methodology. But they use a different metric to weight their polls than other other pollsters do.

Christian says that that's an important factor to consider when trying to understand one poll's results in the context of another poll's results. So weighting is a practice that pollsters use. It's not universal. Every pollster kind of has their own formula that they use. But it's when they go out into the field, get the results back, and then I'm going to try to correct that sample for what the electorate might look like or the electorate looks like to begin with.

So I can do that for gender and sex, you know, make sure that I have a representative kind of balance of women and men. Same in terms of education. I might try to do that in terms of age and in terms of race. So waiting is essentially a backup technique and practice that pollsters use to make sure that whatever result they get doesn't look just completely impossible to believe that it kind of aligns with what electorate exists there or the electorate that might end up showing up.

Let's say we have some data. We're looking at it. What are you looking for? What makes you go, huh? So I think I would break it into two things, right? First is like, how much do I want to trust this? Again, who's behind this? I check the ratings of a pollster. At this point, I'm beginning to look at likely voter data. So in the past, because it was so far out from the election, most of the polls we were getting were about registered voters. So that's just like anyone who can possibly vote in the state.

Likely voters, you know, has a little more weighting involved there because it's a pollster's best guess of the electorate that will end up showing up to vote. Then I'm also looking, obviously, at the margin of error to make sure that any conclusions that I'm getting are, I can actually say are real and are tracking a trend. And then that's the last thing on that front that I would say is I'm comparing voters

But still, there's a question nagging at me. Who are polls even for? The candidates? Political sickos like me and Christian? Voters?

Yeah, why do we put ourselves through all of this? I mean, part of it is, like, there's, like, an empirical scientific nature to it of, like, just wanting to know what's happening around us. Part of this is useful for people in advocacy or movements trying to get a sense of how many people support this policy, how many people support this ideology, how many people would be open to this kind of message on healthcare, reproductive rights, you know, minimum wage. And on that front, I think...

Frankly, issue polling is much more useful than horse race candidate polling. It's for journalists, for sure. It's for media to be able to, you know, this has been written about so many times, but like the way that political journalism is fundamentally kind of

is to create narratives about what's going on. And polling is incredibly useful to be able to set some of those narratives. So that's one thing. It's definitely useful for the candidates, and that's why they have public and private polling, internal polling. Useful for the parties to get a sense of where they should be sending money, where it's useful to be sending volunteers and staff

It's useful for activists and volunteers who want to participate in something. Like if they see that a particular race is close, they might want to sign up to volunteer and help in that particular area. And I think fundamentally it's also for...

Honestly, like a Vox reader or a Vox listener. You don't want to feel left out. You don't want to feel like you don't know something. And in some cases, you might feel anxiety or you might feel stress and you just want to get a better sense of what will happen. Do polls at all seem...

I guess, obsolete to you. You know, if we want to figure out where to ship flu vaccines, we're not going to call 1,000 random numbers. We're going to go to Google Analytics and see where people are searching for flu symptoms. Like, why are we doing this with politics when we don't do it really with any other aspect of life? That's a great question. And it's like asking me to like

I'm the ice cream guy and you're asking me if ice cream is obsolete. Should we get rid of ice cream? I would never say that. FYI. Ice cream forever. Sorry, it's like a random comparison that I made. No, I love it. I think...

It's not obsolete. It's still useful. It's still describing things. It's still people talking to real people. Like pollsters aren't making these numbers up. They're talking to Americans and getting a sense of what's going on. In terms of like in the election space, the answer that I get when I ask the pollsters is yes.

Like, what would we go off of otherwise? Like, would we go off of yard signs? Would we go off of crowd sizes? Would we go off of just fundraising numbers? This is what a lot of people in this analyst universe call the fundamentals, right? Like,

Who's raising more money, who's bringing, who's holding more events, who has more volunteers, who has more people showing up, who at their rallies, who has more yard signs that they're giving out. And all those things are really, really subjective and are fundamentally less objective than what a poll tries to do.

So on that front, I don't think polling is obsolete. I think it's gotten less precise, but that's OK. It's still giving us a directional sense, right? Still giving us a sense of how things are changing, how things are moving, if not exactly predicting who is going to win or by how much they're going to win. Yeah, I keep imagining a world where we don't

have any polling numbers where we kind of don't know the direction it's going to go. We just have debates and talks and stuff and there's no numbers. And then we just wake up on election day and we're like, I guess we'll see. And it's breaking my brain. I'm not going to lie to you. But maybe, but no, it's just staring me out. And maybe that's the point. I don't know. It makes me feel funny. That's kind of the point, I think. Right. I mean,

If all the good pollsters stop doing polling and we stop relying on good pollsters, there's still going to be bad pollsters out there and people who are trying to push specific narratives. And the incentives are already there. Like, we exist in a world where an outlet will run with whatever is out there if the good pollsters aren't out there putting out good information and being transparent about what they're trying to do. And, I mean, I don't know. I love vibes, but... Man cannot live on vibes alone. So true. Yeah.

Well, Christian, thank you so much for explaining this to us. Always fun to nerd out and God save us all.

Christian Paz is a senior political reporter at Vox. FYI, during our conversation, he also gave me a list of the pollsters he trusts. I wrote about it in Vox's Today Explained newsletter. You can find a link to sign up in our show notes. That's it for this episode of Explain It To Me. Thanks to Anne for calling in to find out what was going on with those unhinged texts. Like I mentioned before, we want to know what's on your mind the week of the election.

So while you're getting ready to vote after you finish up or any other time, give us a call if you have a question or an experience you want to share with us. Our number is 1-800-618-8545. We'd love to hear from you.

This episode was produced by me, John Glenn Hill, and our producer, Sophie Lalonde. It was fact-checked by Caitlin Pinsey-Moog, mixing, sound design, and engineering by Christian Ayala. Carla Javier is our supervising producer. Jorge Just is editing our show. And you make our show possible when you support Vox's journalism. Please consider becoming a member today. Go to vox.com slash members to join today. Thanks for listening and talk to you soon.

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