Your June mailbag questions, answered. "Ask Away" is here!
On the struggling economy, the complexity of polling around abortion, and whether Lewis Hamilton can bounce back this year.
Welcome to Codebook, a newsletter that decodes our world through polling and research.
This edition—"Ask Away!"—is a monthly feature rounding up the best reader questions.
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Hello friends! I'm excited to get into this month's Ask Away because I'll very soon be taking a short step back from Codebook to take on the new job title of "mom". It really is overwhelming and exciting to be gearing up for this big change and I truly feel blessed.
As you can imagine, Wally is very excited about the promotion he is getting as well.
I'll still be writing weekly Data Digests for my premium subscriber folks on a pretty regular cadence (Mondays!), so if you want to keep up with what's going on in the world of polls and such, I'd encourage you to take the leap and become a premium subscriber now!
Now, on to your questions. 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. Send me a Will Buxton Cameo.
On to your questions!
First up, from friend and professor Josh G.:
What economic indicators actually matter to likely voters?
This is a very relevant question these days given that the President's economic job approval is in rough shape. The RealClearPolitics average has it at only 34% approval. Americans are clearly upset. This, despite the fact that the unemployment rate is only 3.6%! Back in 2012 when I was advising a Super PAC involved in that election, we were always focused on the unemployment rate and continuing the refrain that Republicans had run on in 2010, "where are the jobs?" (Here's NPR's write up from back then about John Boehner's use of the tagline.)
Today, there's less worry about jobs, but enormous worry about inflation.
There's no sugar-coating the inflation situation these days. Even if you want to make the case that the President isn't at fault, it's obvious that Americans are really frustrated by the situation and want it fixed. Most economists believe a recession is on the way. We are in a bear market. There's a lot of bad economic news afoot.
I don't think there's a hard and fast rule about which economic indicator matters more. I've heard it said that voters don't turn out to say "thank you" so I'd expect voters would be more focused on what's going wrong, whichever indicator that is.
We also know that partisanship drives views on the economy, where people's perception of what is happening nationally is tied to who is in charge. (This Craig Gilbert write-up of the Marquette Law poll is a good one.)
But it also seems that telling voters to ignore the thing they think is bad and focus on the thing that is good is a very, very bad message.
Next up is a question that came in just a moment too late for me to include in May, so I'm tackling it here in June. From reader Mason M.:
Do pollsters ever try to get to voters' underlying intentions? For example, I hear many Pro-Choice people say Pro-Lifers just want to control women's sexuality. But most Pro-Lifers I talk to don't say that, instead being more moved by the idea that they're protecting babies.
This is related to a question I also got from friend and professor Brian R.:
How do you square the abortion polling being all over the map? Just language/framing?
There are lots of ways to describe the polling around a sensitive and emotional issue like abortion. Complicated? Nuanced? Contradictory? Very few people hold views that are entirely black-or-white.
Pollsters very often do try to get at some of these underlying views. My team asked a lot of different questions about the issue, knowing that if you just ask voters if they are "pro-life" or "pro-choice" that doesn't tell the whole story. Similarly, someone might be opposed to Roe vs. Wade as a legal matter but also be opposed to a full abortion ban, and so on and so forth.
Here's a summary of what we found:
As you can see, some voters are in the "blue" bar for some questions and the "red" bar for others.
When we actually take a look at how many people are entirely in the "blue" on these questions, we find it is about 33 percent of all voters. They break out as follows:
However, seven-in-ten voters hold at least one view that falls into this chart. Only 29 percent of voters are anti-Roe, supportive of a 15-week abortion ban, and consider themselves "pro-life." The biggest group of those who are somewhere in the middle are those who consider themselves "pro-choice", want Roe upheld, but would be open to a 15-week abortion ban. (You might think of this as the Chief Justice Roberts position, per The Hill?)
But! This also still doesn't totally answer Mason's question. This is about the complexity of views on the issue, but isn't necessarily about what motivates people to hold the views that they hold.
And Mason's question hits home with me because I had an exchange about this almost ten years ago on Real Time With Bill Maher. I can't find the clip anywhere on the internet (if any of you do, please drop me a line!), but the segment is seared into my mind. I was on with Gov. Howard Dean and you can tell how long ago it was because I had my long hair back then.
Anyhow, Gov. Dean was making the point that anyone who is pro-life must hate women and want to take their rights away. I am not exaggerating! I'm pretty sure that's nearly a direct quote. I thought it was important to push back - hate is pretty strong word! - and explain to Gov. Dean (who surely knows this) and to any viewers (who might not) why someone might be pro-life. I said that many people who are pro-life are pro-life because they view that a pregnant woman of course has rights but so too does an unborn baby, and so the question for those pro-lifers is not "how do I punish women" but rather how do you strike the right balance when there are two sets of rights in tension. For many pro-lifers, it isn't just a matter of a woman's body, because in their view there is another body involved that also has rights that deserve consideration.
You can see this in polls that ask about when people think that life begins. (In 2008, Barack Obama got some blowback for saying that the answer to this question was "above [his] pay grade.")While this isn't directly asking about someone's motivation for being pro-life or pro-choice, it gets at that underlying set of values that animate the surface level policy positions.
Here, YouGov finds 54% of Americans believe that life begins at some point in the first trimester. Unsurprisingly, there's a big difference between those who believe abortion should be legal versus illegal.
My point on Real Time wasn't to try to persuade anyone to change their mind on the issue of abortion, but to try to rebut what I thought was a mischaracterization of the reasoning of the other side. For the same reason, I don't think it would be fair for someone to go on air and say "Well, people who are pro-choice want to hurt babies." There's no evidence that is what pro-choice people want! In fact, 58% of those who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases think life doesn't begin until the third trimester.
But Mason, I think your question is a good one, and pollsters like me should do more to ask questions about the why behind people's views on all sorts of topics. This issue in particular is a very charged one, and one where the rhetoric so often assumes the worst of intentions on the other side, but where the data doesn't bear those characterizations out.
I also would encourage people to check out YouGov's dive into the one in four Americans who say they have changed their mind on abortion (in either direction) and the reasons why they did.
Finally, from James M.:
Will LH44 win a race this year?
For readers who are uninitiated: "LH44" is Lewis Hamilton, arguably the G.O.A.T. of Formula 1 drivers. Even if you don't follow racing at all, it's possible you've heard of Lewis Hamilton because he's a massive global celebrity, shows up at things like the Met Gala, etc.
Very, very long story very short: he was on track to win an historic 8th World Drivers' Championship last year and wound up in a very close battle with rival driver Max Verstappen. At the very end of the very last race of the year in Abu Dhabi, a race Hamilton had led somewhat comfortably for most laps, another driver crashed causing a yellow flag. The handling of that yellow flag was very controversial and there's no way for me to make that story short except to say the race resumed and Hamilton was passed by Verstappen, handing Verstappen the title. (I was at this race in Abu Dhabi! It was bananas!)
Hamilton's team, Mercedes, and its incredibly iconic team principal Toto Wolff, were mad.
This season was going to be Hamilton's chance to bounce back and snag that eighth title. But here's the deal. This year's Formula 1 season brought about a new set of regulations and a newly-designed car. The new rules are aimed at making all the Formula 1 teams, with their widely varying yet generally kajillion dollar budgets, more evenly matched. The new car design is also supposed to let cars drive more closely together and pass more easily by changing the aerodynamics and the amount of "dirty air" the cars give off.
(OK, I said long story short and I'm still just making it long.)
The problem is that the new car design Mercedes rolled out for this season isn't as great. Many teams are finding that the new design makes their car bounce like crazy, a phenomenon that has come to be known as "porpoising". Mercedes is among the worst when it comes to this problem, and Lewis Hamilton in particular is really feeling the pain as a result.
In a previous year, Lewis Hamilton would regularly be showing up on race podiums and fighting for the championship. This year, his results have not been nearly as strong or consistent and he is generally not competing for pole position.
Maybe even more troubling if you're a Lewis Hamilton fan is the fact that you can't just say it is all about the car. His teammate George Russell - a new, young, up-and-coming driver who just joined the Mercedes team this year - is still able to make it onto the podium at races here and there. Russell has 99 points in the driver's championship standings, while Hamilton currently is at 62. (Leader Max Verstappen is at 150.)
Mercedes has begun more vocally complaining about the new regulations and some other drivers have been saying the same, saying there's no way that Formula 1 drivers can drive cars that bounce like this for the next few years. But some of the other teams have said, well, not every car is bouncing as badly as Mercedes is, so....they should just build a better car.
Bottom line: Lewis Hamilton is a generational talent. This might not be his year, but I do hope he stays in the sport, gets a better car, and fights for that eighth title soon.
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