Hooray! September's "Ask Away" is here!
I answer your questions about survey scales, downballot races, and Bluey.
Welcome to Codebook, a newsletter that decodes our world through polling and research. Subscribe here to get Codebook in your inbox each week!
This edition—"Ask Away!"—is a monthly feature rounding up the best reader questions.
Hello friends! It's great to be back. I was trying to explain what it feels like to return from maternity leave to my team at our Monday staff meeting, and the best comparison I could come up with was that it's like studying abroad or doing an internship in a far away city in college. You leave for a few months and everything kind of continues without you. Meanwhile, you're off having a life-changing experience from which you return as a slightly different person with a new perspective.
When you come back, it is a little jarring to see what has kept going in your absence, and it also throws into sharp relief just how much you've changed during your time away. And now, like someone who studies abroad in Spain and comes home obsessed with FC Barcelona and paella, I would very much like to talk to anyone who will listen about baby sleep schedules and Bluey.
As always, thank you to everyone who submitted a question this month, and if you want to get a question in for a future Ask Away, there are a few ways to do it.
1. Comment on Bulletin under any post. I see all the comments!
2. Comment on a post on my Kristen Soltis Anderson writer Facebook page or send a message to that profile. I read your notes!
3. Reply to me on other social media platforms (Instagram and Twitter: @ksoltisanderson).
4. As noted above - send me a Will Buxton Cameo. Or a Chris Medland Cameo! I'm very responsive to this particular medium.
On to your questions!
From Brian R. via email:
Basically, there is a LOT of polling out there about national races, even state-wide races. For obvious reasons there isn't as much local polling. But I'm curious... how would you think about down-ballot races and whether what we are learning at the national level will tell us anything about local races, such as school board? Similarly, ballot roll-off is a problem and I'm curious if/how you would anticipate turnout this year (especially among young voters) looking down-ballot... do you think there will be significant drop-off from those who voter for a Member of Congress or high-profile statewide race, and local races?
Hi Brian, and great question! There's so much focus on national stuff these days because so much political news is covered by national outlets, while local outlets face shrinking budgets and a more challenging environment. But local government is where lots of stuff happens that has a huge impact on people's daily lives! A have a few partially-formed views on all of this.
We live in such polarized times that unless a race for a local office has broken through in some way, I can imagine people being more apt to just vote for their party all the way down.
I do expect a drop-off in turnout relative to a presidential year BUT I expect turnout to be high relative to other midterms of the last decade or two, because...
Younger Americans are much less apathetic than they were two decades ago, so I would expect young voter turnout to be reasonably high. Not as high as for seniors, but pretty high for young voters.
Republicans have been much smarter about understanding the power of these local races and you see it pop up in GOP victories in school board elections all over this year. For a long time, those elections were more easily dominated by candidates with ties to education interests (easier to get elected when the teacher union is behind you, for instance!) but now new voices are in the game so to speak. This has also meant the "right" has been able to win even in "blue" territory when the race is around clear, stark issues (a la the San Francisco school board drama).
Next, from Anne W. on Twitter:
Saw this poll Q on the spread of favourable - unfavourable opinions toward socialism & capitalism & wondered, do some points on a scale tend to get selected more or less regardless of subject? Like do people usually pick highly unfavourable over somewhat?
I love this question! There are a few types of response styles that can be problematic for survey researchers. The first is acquiescence bias, which means people like picking the positive answer over the negative answer in general. If I do a survey where I say "Do you agree or disagree with the statement: Red is the best color" and then later in the survey I ask "Do you agree or disagree with the statement: Blue is the best color" there will be some people who say they agree with both. You cannot agree with both, in reality, but people like to check "yes" or "agree." This is why many pollsters (myself included) object to these sorts of questions unless they are necessary, and prefer to use other scales.
The other types of response style you can find that are problematic are either neutral response style or extreme response style. What you talk about in your question is extreme response style, wherein some people pick a more extreme answer than is probably really the case. In the moment, they develop a stronger opinion about something than they truly have, and so they pick STRONGLY when in reality their view might just be somewhat. Neutral response style is the opposite, meaning if people are offered a neutral midpoint, sometimes they'll just pick that rather than do the work to express a real opinion.
For other types of questions, you can run into something called "heaping" where people sort of round their responses to some common points. For instance, on a type of question called a "feelings thermometer", people are asked to choose how they feel about something on a scale of 0 (very cold) to 100 (very hot). People tend to pick numbers like 0, 50, and 100 a lot on those sorts of questions. (If you really want to go down a fun rabbit hole, there was a massive scandal in the political science world a few years back about a paper that was fraudulent and was debunked because the data had some weird stuff going on with heaping.)
And now, one from reader Risten Kanderson, who is definitely not me, why would you even ask that:
What is the best episode of Bluey?
Look, I get it. Bluey is a children's cartoon. Each episode is only 7 minutes long. I do now have a child, yes, but she is only three months old and is therefore not an adequate excuse for me watching this show.
But I heard The Ringer's Andy Greenwald sing the praises of this show as one of the best original scripted TV programs of our current age, and then my college friend Ashley told me it was life changing, and so I took the plunge. Most Bluey episodes revolve around the kids - Bluey and her little sister Bingo - playing make-believe as the parents gamely join in.
There are a few things that are important to note. First, Bluey is almost definitely written for the parents, not the kids. It is 100% kid-friendly content, but much like the very best firing-on-all-cylinders Pixar content, it is written with the grown-ups in mind.
Second, Bluey puts in the work. I was watching one highly-touted episode called "Sleepytime" which Greenwald described on his podcast as:
"an absolutely trippy exploration of one child's dream logic inside their head as they try to go to sleep. It is big brained and beautiful and inspiring."
And yes, it is all of those things, but I definitely took a pause while watching it and was like...wait...is that...The Planets I am hearing? In this children's cartoon? And yes, dear reader, it was "Jupiter" from Holst's The Planets playing over little Bingo Heeler's trippy toddler dreamscape. And then two days after I watched it The New York Freaking Times did a whole article about the music from Bluey and yes, it is all intentional.
So which is the best episode, then? Well, there are over a hundred of them, and I have still probably only watched a small fraction, a fraction driven by a mix of randomness and friend recommendations.
I thought about saying the answer to "which is the best episode" is Pass the Parcel, an episode about the kids playing birthday party games designed for every kid to win and one of the parents' hilarious quest to teach the kids why losing is important. ("It isn't the 80s, Pat" absolutely slayed me.)
Then I thought about saying "Flat Pack" because it is a loving ode to building IKEA furniture packed into a loving message about enjoying time with family.
I thought about picking "Daddy Dropoff" or "Road Trip" or "Hammerbarn" or "The Weekend" and in the end it came down to two. One because I think everyone will like it - that's "Fancy Restaurant" - and the other because it hit me hard - and that's "Baby Race".
In Fancy Restaurant, the girls want to give their parents a nice dinner date. Seeing as they are little kids trying to set up a "fancy restaurant" inside their house, everything of course goes wrong in delightful ways. It is a wonderful story about true love.
And then, Baby Race, which was a real emotional gut-punch. It involves the mom, Chilli, telling little Bluey and Bingo the story about being a new mom and being proud of Bluey for reaching her first big milestone, rolling over, before becoming anxious as other kids beat Bluey to milestones like sitting up and crawling.
(There's a scene where Chilli is sitting on a couch full of books about baby development (ahem) while her husband Bandit wearily bounces the baby to sleep in the background that, uh, hit home.)
Chilli is worried about whether she's a good mum, and let me just tell you, the episode packs more heart into seven minutes than you can possibly believe. The episode is available on YouTube, so do yourself a favor, especially if you are a mom, and give it watch.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post indicated that the Bluey episode "Baby Race" is about Bingo's infancy. It is not. It is about Bluey's. I regret the error.
That's all for this month! Don't forget - send in your questions for Ask Away, October Edition!
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