Welcome, welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My guest today is the legendary pollster John Zogby. John, we scheduled this podcast a couple of weeks ago, and in the interim the Iran War started and your schedule got crazy. So when a crisis like this happens, tell me how your world changes.
Well, for starters, this media media calling around the clock literally New Zealand, Ireland, Malaysia yesterday. But you know, good bit here in the United States, so that takes some time. And then secondly, a little less so these days because much more of our work as private sector and you know,
not non governmental agencies and so on. But in the day it was not uncommon for one of my media clients New York Post, Reuters, NBC News, Hey, can you get on the phones right away or can you get us a poll in twenty four hours?
Okay, these media outlets are calling. What are they going to ask and what information do you have to give them?
Well, my expertise is not to discuss presidential strategy or any of those sorts of things. Public opinion, what do the American people think? And I am fortunate that I can go beyond the guys at the barbershop or the folks in the grocery line. I can take samples, which I did. Interestingly, my son and I are together, and we pulled the American people after the State of the Union message, remember that one.
That was oh yeah last week.
Yeah, And so we pulled Wednesday and Thursday night then and released a on Friday morning. We asked a question about Iran. Do you support the president's handling of Iran? And it was tied forty five percent supported, forty five percent opposed. And then we went to bed Friday night thinking that, hey, there's some movement in the negotiations, right, and the negotiations are going to start again today when
reality intervened and we went to war. There is a poll out, but it's not by us, and the poll is far different than you would find normally when a president announces a war. This time, twenty seven percent support going to war with Iran a military action in Iran, and forty nine percent the pose. The rest are not sure. That's Reuters and a company called Ipsos based in France.
Okay, State of the Union happens, You're doing a pull. What questions are you asking what information are you trying to clean?
Well, for starters, we tried to stick close to the president's speech, and so we want to know overall, do you support or oppose his job as president, the job he's doing as president. And of course we ask it with a scale, so strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat opposed, strongly opposed, so we can get levels of intensity to which are very important, not just majorities or pluralities. But then how about is handling an immigration, crime and public safety, healthcare,
the environment and so on. And what we found, not surprisingly at all, because this is the state of our world, is that the president is upside down. In all of his numbers these there are more people who are opposed to him than support him. The one exception this time was on immigration, where this time he was forty seven percent support and forty five percent oppose. We have been seeing him upside down, but close like that. But the
nation is not simply split or hyper polarized. It is divided in a way that we have not seen before in our lifetime.
Go a little deeper. How is it divided in a way we haven't seen before?
So you know, there used to be some flexibility you know there were conservative Democrats. There were Believe it or not, I'm here in New York and here in California.
I think.
There were liberal Republicans Rocketype, Yeah, Rockefeller is the first name that comes to mind. There aren't, make no mistake about it. There are no conservative Democrats, there are no liberal Republicans, and so essentially we have a partisan split and little to no flexibility on those numbers. We are seeing, however, that the president's support among Republicans is that about in our last poll last week eighty three eighty four percent.
Usually could expect ninety to ninety two percent. That's a drop that we're watching. By the same token, there are growing numbers of independents, and independence are very difficult to
pigeonhole as a unit. There are so many different sources and grades of independence, but as taken as a whole, President has about mid fifties who oppose him on every issue among independence, although on some issues, notably immigration, crime, and public safety, it's upwards of sixty sixty one percent among independents who oppose him.
So tell me about methodology In the old days, Well, I'm sure people stopped at people's doors at one point, but it was phone. Now people don't pick up their landlines, then people don't pick up their phones. Then there's text, there's other companies use polls at the bottom of websites. How do you do it?
Okay, so I do go back to the days when we used everybody had a landline and sixty five percent we're happy to do a poll. That was a response rate, and we evolved, not surprisingly due to technology and social change in this country, to single digit or low double digit response rates. And so we were among the pioneers
in developing online polling. And it was a long slog. Basically, we would gather as many email addresses and a coalition of the willing as possible, that is, those who would tell us in our telephone surveys back twenty five years ago and so on, that they'd be willing to take a poll. We gathered internally at the turn of the millennium about a million one point two million.
At the.
Within a couple of years of email addresses that were validated demographically and behavioral characteristics.
How do you validate them by telephone?
Interestingly, so when it was one or the other, we would either use our usual telephone surveys and at the end ask if they would be willing to take a survey online and give us an email address, And so we plottingly collected that way.
Or the other way around.
We would purchase tons of email addresses and have four servers going at the same time inviting people at random to sign up to take surveys. And today we have fifteen million.
Okay, So then you called them and asked them what.
Well if the online surveys, we would send out a random sampling of the email addresses that we had, and we would ask them, well, beyond political surveys, but you know our registered de voter, they're likely to vote, what's their party identification? And then we'd get into politically the president or the governor, whatever our universe was, the mayor, job performance, job performance on a number of issues, personal
favorability of them, and possible candidates running against them. In proprietary a private polling for candidates, individuals or retail brands. We would ask what would move them, what drives you, what would make you more likely to support, what would make you more likely to oppose? And if you knew this about that, would it make you much more likely somewhat more likely, somewhat less likely, much less likely to
support or purchase or whatever. But a typical poll could be forty fifty questions.
Okay, I have never answered a pull. I remember before people meeters, they once mailed a form to us and you filled out what you watched. So in the people Meter, of course, being Nielsen in television, the question becomes there's always a margin of error, But how do you ensure accuracy?
So you start with the sampling procedure. So today talking about online polls as an example, but the same principles will hold true for those who are still doing telephone surveys. Is that we have a list of fifteen million Americans and who have been validated, and in their entirety they are representative of the American people demographically. If we're doing a poll, say we want a thousand likely voters, we will take what's called a random stratified sample of about
ten thousand email addresses from that fifty million. The keyword there random. Everybody has to have the same chance of being selected from that pool as everybody else. And secondly, stratified, we don't draw them nationally. We draw them by region.
So if thirty percent of our sample is from the south, a thirty percent of the population or the electorate is from the south, as an example, then thirty percent of our pool is from the south, twenty five percent of the northeast twenty five, twenty six per and so on.
And then we begin the invitation process knowing that we're targeting regions and knowing after all these years that those responses will come back within those levels of stratification and be somewhat somewhat representative of people in those regions by ray, by age, by educational level, by gender. It's not a perfect world, so that when those numbers do come in, there may be some groups that are slightly underrepresented, normally Blacks, Hispanics,
poorer people, normally men, young men. And what we do is we apply waiting, just simple waiting, to bump them up to what the expectation is for voter turnout or for retail shopping the adult population in general. But you never, let's say, you hardly ever get a situation where you have way too many women, or way too many whites, or way too many of any group. The waiting generally is slight.
Okay, you do a lot of market research. Steve Jobs famously said he didn't believe in market research because people didn't know what they wanted until he gave it to them. Other people say market research will tell you where you've been, but not where you're going. How would you respond to those?
Well, for starters, I've got an Apple phone, so sorry, Steve, what was the other the other question?
People say that it will tell you where you've been but not where you're going.
No, Now, we believe in and we do projective polling. Now, look, Bob, nobody sees the future, at least clearly. But there is a way of using analytics, and I might add some good artwork involved too, to ask questions about how would you respond to a certain situation, and from the tabulation of those responses on how folks would respond, or how they would anticipate, or how they would behave or how their minds would change, you get a a reasonable reading
of what people will do under certain circumstances. However, there are other variables in our world, and so look, I could have done continued my poll through Friday night about how do you feel about Trump's handling of Iran? I did not know that we'd be bombing the hell out of Iran Saturday morning.
So you're not the only Polster. You have a high profile amongst the small quadre. What is the special sauce that you bring to the table?
Indititionally, it was accuracy. That's where I gained my fame. I got races on the gubernatorial level here in New York that no one even came close to. I was hired by the Murdoch Empire, Liberal Democrat that I am. I'm polling for the New York Post and Early Fox in ninety five and ninety six. Then I was hired by the largest news agency in the world, Reuters, and the Reuter Zogbee Pole was born in nineteen ninety six.
And it did not hurt me at all that my colleagues at the networks and at the universities were attacking me because I was standing alone saying that the Clinton Dole race is a lot closer than people think. And when the numbers came in and the attacks continued, I got that race right to anywhere between one to three tenths of a percent. I'd already gotten some other high profile ones right and that at.
That point things just soared.
But then I went on to get other races right and ones that no one else got right in Mexico, in Israel, in Albania. And now I'm a strategic planner, and I know that you cannot keep a reputation as the most accurate polster in the world forever. So that's when we started to focus on our strategic thinking and on thought leadership, and a number of books that came out talking about the future and what we see from at that point, twenty years of polling, thirty years of polling, and so on, why.
Were you more accurate than your competitors.
There were you know, ninety plus percent of what I did was like everybody else. But some of the things that were different was that I would apply a slight weight for political party identification. Many of my colleagues don't believe in that. They called it a trailer variable, something that's very soft. So look, if I'm for George W. Bush today, I'm a Republican. If I'm for al Gore tomorrow, then I'm probably a Democrat. I believe that party is a lead variable. Many of us are born with it.
Most of us filter our information through our party identification. And so I found that some of my colleagues were actually getting much larger fluctuations even on a day by day basis in their samples. Too many Democrats, too few Republicans. I had noticed early, and again I'm a liberal Democrat, but I noticed early a tendency for Democrats to answer the phone more than Republicans. That's why I feel that to a great degree. That's the one thing that I did differently that helped propel.
Me in the last ten years. Nate Silver has gotten a lot of notoriety for pull averaging, pull balancing. What's your opinion on that.
Well, he kind of bounced me out, and so they're a little bit of bias.
But my sense.
Is I pull people, I don't poll numbers. I get a feel for polls. I mean, when when I had a call center, I would visit the call center during elections, and what did you hear? What were they really saying? These are the the telephone callers that I would talk to, and they would tell me, you know, there were people who were really soft, there are people who were not paying attention but intended to vote. There are people who
are very hard. But I got a sense that those numbers were really an aggregation of people not simply an aggregation of numbers.
I think with Nate.
There was too much emphasis on analytics and an algorithm. That are algorithms that he used that could be applicable sometimes and not so applicable. I'm sorry at other times, and then I do feel and you know, I wish him all the best he's had, all the best. In fact, that he was a bit too much like Icarus in mythology. He flew with wax wings too close to the sun, and that sooner or later, just like Zogby, you get
one wrong and people start looking at you funny. And I'm not sure he handled it all well.
That well, good analogy. Okay, many people were surprised by Trump in twenty sixteen. There was less surprise in twenty twenty four. But were you surprised based on your numbers?
Well, surprised, yes, of course, But on election night, no, And you'll find I didn't poll in twenty sixteen. We had just started a transition new company after a non compete for a few years. I sold the original company, so we were not in the polling loop. But I was analyzing the trend lines in the well, the whole election, but particularly in the last ten days, and there was clearly a momentum against Hillary Clinton, a momentum towards Donald Trump.
And I published a piece on Forbes in the early afternoon of election day saying, if anybody knows, if anybody claims that they know what's going to happen, they're lying because we don't know what's going to happen. There's a trend line here that I'm watching.
Okay, couple of questions in twenty twenty four. You may not have done research, but you're an expert in this area. If Biden had stepped decide would a Democrat, if there was a primary process, would they have won? Secondarily, was Kamala af flawed candidate from minute one?
Those are two very good questions, and we will be asking them for years. If Biden had stepped aside, and most importantly, had allowed for a primary system to develop and for candidates to be out there and for Democrats to have a real choice, it could have been a far different election. Was and in fact, we didn't see since a final break of those battle ground states, and many of them until the very end, you know, until a few days before those were competitive. Secondly, I thought
she was a good candidate. But she had one hundred and seven days. Now, those of us who follow politics very closely, you know, knew Kamila Harris. Anew of Kamala Harris had followed her career. Yes, there were flaws that liberals would would not identify with her. Yes, there were flaws. I believe with Democrats and independence and public opinion about Gaza shifting that Kamala Harris may have done a bit better if she had shifted, and probably gotten more younger voters in the process and more.
Black voters as well.
But with that said, no, I don't I don't think that there were any built in flaws that in her persona or her career that may that pointed her out to be a loser.
Well, I would say her fear failure in the previous presidential primary circuit to get even one delegate was indicative of me. But let me jump forward. Bill Clinton selected in nineteen ninety two, it's a disaster in nineteen ninety four congressional races. Then he famously triangulates based on information. My question here is not specific to Bill Clinton. To what degree do politicians make their decisions based on the polls?
To what degree eighty.
Plus.
You know, no leader can afford to be.
Totally ignoring the public. Will the vox popular.
That's where you know, I think our president today has been playing very successfully to that hardcore base of MAGA. But there is evidence in the Reuters poll today that there's a chipping away of that built in you know, forty two percent that he Trump just gets for showing up and for continuing his style of campaigning. So I think that you know, it wasn't invented with Bill Clinton.
George H. W. Bush, to be sure, had a briefing book with the latest polling numbers from the night before every single day of his presidency, and if Ronald Reagan didn't, then Jeffrey Deaver, is behind the scenes image maker and communications person, certainly was reading the polls.
Now, these may be so questions compared to your statistics, but what do we know. You have these polls that are starting to lean against Trump. He does not seem to be changing his behavior. And in addition, there have been authoritarian tendencies we've never seen previously. So traditionally we might say the polls are against them, the person's in decline. But we have a unique situation with the way he's behaving. I could go through all the facts, but you know them.
So is this a different thing or the poll if the public ultimately is such that he's going to lose out, his party, his mission, etc. Or can we say that this is a different landscape. You know, they're talking about him controlling the elections. There are all of these things, those supersede poles.
There are other variables. Yeah.
Now, just by way of context, let's understand that Barack Obama won with majorities in two thousand and eight and twenty twelve. In between, he lost almost record numbers of seats for his party in twenty ten in twenty fourteen, his success did not translate into his party's success. In fact, he lost numerous state legislative seats and majorities during that time period. So back to President Trump. If the election were held today today, the Republicans would probably take a beating.
What do I base that on? For starters, that semi artificial reading that we take the congressional generic who was to vote for in your district today?
The Democrat of.
The Republican We know that Democrats in the polls need to have a four and a half to five point lead that's the threshold, and from there we can translate that into gaining seats in Congress. Today they hold about
a five and a half point lead. But we also know that in eleven fifteen special elections for state legislature or Congress, or mayor or courts throughout the country, that Democrats have won every one of those seats, and that there are other elections that have taken place where Democrats have outperformed Republicans in solid or outperformed their previous election to that seat or the president's vote count in that
state or district. And so evidence is pointing to if the election were held today, we'd be looking I think at solid Democratic victories that in fact, there are a number of states that weren't even on the radar screen that are now on the radar screen as possible Democratic
pickups in the Senate and also the House. But Bob, the election is not today, and one miscalculation that may very well hurt the president is not only that Reuter's number that, instead of basking in the success of killing the Ayatola and numerous other leaders, only twenty seven percent support the president forty nine percent oppose, but it's it's also in the sense that what are Americans talking about the prices at the grocery store and the prices at
the gasoline pump, And interestingly, the prices at the gasoline pump had actually come down and been coming down. Projections are very soon we're going to see the cost of oil barrel going up dramatically, and probably at the gas pump as well.
Let's go back. Why did Democrats need that four and a half percent margin.
Oh, that is the way.
That districts are reapportioned or gerrymandered. You know that in states every ten years, the mandate from the courts are that those seats have to be reapportioned basically on demographics and so on. And that Republicans have controlled state more state legislatures than Democrats have for the last twenty some odd years, certainly the last two censuses that have been taken, And so there are many more solid red congressional districts
than there are solid blue congressional districts. And so if we're trying to extrapolate that onto a national vote, that's the average that Democrats need. That's kind of the threshold point.
Let's pull the lens back a little bit. Talk about the populace at large. Is I supposed specifically Trump? Okay, there are some people say that we really agree on many things and it's only the the number that we don't agree on. Then other people say, no, there's a real battle between the elites and the not as educated. Shall we say? Then they say, well, you know, it's almost like the Mason Dick line. There's a different mentality in the South than there is in the north. What's
the temperature of our country? How does it break down? Is any different than it used to be?
It's very different than it used to be. Now, I'll go back to the twenty twenty election if I can, and very close election, let's call it a tie. But in a poll that I did in late two thousand and three, I did a national poll on cultural values, you know, God's guns, that sort of thing. And what I discovered when I broke down my polling sample into those who were from red states those who were from blue states, I found, no matter how close those state votes may have been, that in a red state, sixty
one percent said that they possessed a firearm. Thirty five percent of those in blue states possessed a firearm. You know, seventy plus percent identified God in red states as an all powerful, all loving God who's watching over me. There was about thirty six thirty seven percent of those in blue states. We had real differences red and blue. That would include at that point in time New Mexico that that Gore had won by about two hundred votes, or New Hampshire that Democrat won by a few votes, and
so even closely contested. So yes, there are real differences. And now the two sides have nested, and that has been enabled by our political leaders in this sense that we elect good people, but those people have to serve their party and balance that somehow with serving their district. And but when they balance their party, that mitigates against
crossing the aisle. We've gotten real hostility taking place, the kind of hostility inside the Congress, inside congressional staffs that we haven't seen since the eighteen fifties and that ended up in a civil war. So yeah, there are reasons politically to fear. However, fundamentally, there are many things that Americans can agree.
Upon, and.
You know, national leadership can address that, or they can take advantage of the divisiveness. We just happen to have leadership right from the very top. That's taking advantage of the divisiveness.
Well, it's clear what's going to happen for the Republicans the next presidential cycle. It could be Trump, even though the Constitution says else other things. But there are a couple of very clear people Vance, Rubio, whatever. Democrats, it's more wide open. My question here is not the specific candidate or what's going on with Newsom. My question is establishment. People have been saying you have to run to the center. Those disillusions say no, we have to do something more
similar to Bernie. Let's Bernie's a lightning rod. The word woke is lightning rod. But we have younger generations. Leaving out the issue of celebrity, which way should the Democrats go?
The way of problem solving and clarity that is pan ideological. There are things that we agree on despite labels. And the bottom line is you saw zorin Mamdani win on affordability and with a plan for housing, a plan for childcare, a plan for public transportation, something that appeared to New Yorkers to be popular and addressing the issues.
More and more.
Voters are younger, are forty five and less. That's the cutoff point for millennials forty five to about thirty and then under thirty gen Z. And those are people who are saying, I don't care what you label it, just show me the path of resolving it. And I think what polls are showing today is, or what they showed in twenty four was that people were tired of the Democrats. They were tired of the preachiness, the wolkeness, they were tired of a president who in effect should have stepped down.
I don't think there's any argument you'll find anywhere that suggests that he should have stayed in the race. But what it was tantamount to was somebody lying and a cadra, a small cadre of people who were lying about the president's health. What can work despite the label on the left or the right, is the path of least resistance to resolving issues.
What do you say to people who have no faith in polls the general public? Let's put it this way. It was lawyers and Watergate, then politicians and polls. Many people have no faith in the system, and they have no faith in polls. Starting with polls, what would you tell.
Them, Well, if you're expecting a poll to be correct to the one tenth of a percentile. Every time a poll comes out, then don't you know we can tell you the direction that things are heading. You know, some folks don't poll past Saturday or Sunday night before an election. That leaves Monday, Tuesday, and part of Wednesday where things
can change. And believe me, they have. You have up to ten to fourteen percent who tell us in polls that they've finally made up their mind for sure in the polling booth or that day as they were heading to the polling booth. So have reasonable expectations for polls. That's for starters. Secondly, go beyond the horse race. Every poll publishes many other things. Maybe all the media don't pick it up.
Maybe they just.
Pick up that horse race only. But there's so much to be gleaned, so much to learn, you know, about the American people, or the people of anywhere, the people of your city from poles, So they're very useful.
Okay, So we saw resistance in Minneapolis, never mind elsewhere. We have this war that based on your numbers, the public doesn't favor. Can we anticipate something akin to the mass protest of the sixties. Can we anticipate a rupture which we have seen in other countries but not in America for longer than a century. Or is the system going to hold?
Okay, I don't know that that's necessarily an either or Okay, of the system is a broad term. But mass protests, Yes, we've had mass protests in recent years. There are mass protests actually going on right now. This war with Iran, which is going to take President admits at least four to five weeks. That doesn't play in his favor, but it's going to be more than four or five weeks. How do you build a new system? We're not good
at that. Incidentally, building new systems in different places. We got our butt handed to us whenever we try that. But that's going to coincide with the spring, and that's when those mass protests really begin. This has been a particularly cold winter witnessed Minneapolis, and look at the numbers of people that came out in Minneapolis and in Portland and in Memphis and so on, and so yeah, I can anticipate this was a big one. Going to war with Iran. There is no ayatola caucus in this country.
I said that before, but there is a sense that you just can't go around decapitating a government. What does Vladimir Putin have to say about that? Is there a target now on Vladimir Zelensky? What is President she have to say about that? With Taiwan just across the straits, you know, this is a bad policy. It's not supported by the American people. We will not tolerate. And I'll give you some polling numbers in a second. We will not tolerate anything that's protracted.
Okay, those numbers, Yeah.
All right, So I'll go back for starters till late September two thousand and one. That's when I got my folks back on the telephone after nine eleven, and I wanted something for the historical record. So we asked, do you support a war on terrorism? I'm shortening these questions, support or oppose a war on terrorism? Ninety one percent said yes. What if that war on terrorism were to last a year to two years? Seventy seven percent said yes. What if it were to last more than two years?
Fifty seven percent said yes. Remember how numb we were still in late September of two thousand and one, and already there was a sense we're still in the post Vietnam War era. If we go to war, win it and win it quickly, we don't have any patients. And of course that's what happened both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now,
we got a sneak peak on Iran last year. My son and I we asked this was about taking out Iran's nuclear reactor nuclear program, and we asked, do you support the United States going to war to take out the nuclear program? Only fifty percent said yes, they supported, forty five percent of posed. What if it takes six months to a year, it went down to forty two percent support and a majority of posed. What if it takes more than one year, thirty five percent support, sixty
percent opposed. So we have a strong sense from polling data that first of all, this isn't even popular right now after we've gone to war. But this will certainly not be popular as you go down the road. And what's the resolution, what's the what's the end? How do we get out? Do we make things better? Those are questions, Those are questions that are hanging in the air.
Well, I know that you have to go, but I have one final question before we let you. We had World War One based on the assassination of one person.
We had the.
Arab spring, we had an over educated fruit vendor. Is it possible something like that could happen in America? A match lights a small fire that nobody foresees and it turns into a conflagration.
You know, for most of my life, I've been the optimist in the room, and I am the optimist in the long haul. I have great faith and millennials in gen z they're not steeped in our crap. You know, they start with not tabula rasa, but they start with a different culture and different.
Set of values. But yes, it is possible. It is possible.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with my audience.
John.
I know you know we have this crisis and your time is valuable. So thanks again. We've been speaking with legendary pollster John Zogby in the middle of a crisis. There's more information to get, but that's all we have today. Thanks again, John, Thank you, Bob.
I really enjoyed this.
Until next time. This is Bob Left SAIDs