Marquette poll director breaks down the Wisconsin governor’s race

Welcome back, everybody. It's consistently ranked among the best and most reliable polls in the entire country. The Marquette Law School poll has been taking the pulse of Wisconsin voters and beyond for the last 14 years now. And in that time, it's had to adapt to the changing habits of Americans. How do you reach people who screen your calls and don't trust you with their opinions? It is a challenging landscape, and nobody knows that better than Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll. Charles, good morning to you. Good morning. Good to be here. Thank you. Happy election day. Happy election day. Okay. So first question for you is one I'm sure you get asked often. Some people believe that polling is broken after the results of several presidential elections were inconsistent with surveys leading up to them. Are they right? Charles, is this a broken system here? Well, there were big errors in 2016, no question about that, including here in Wisconsin, including my own poll. We've been more accurate in the 2020 and 2024 presidential races, though still somewhat underestimating President Trump's votes in all three of those elections. On the other hand, the two midterm elections, 2018 and 2022, we've been quite accurate. In fact, all polling in 2022, a little bit underestimated Democratic support rather than underestimating Republican support. So it's a mixed picture, but it's been more complicated in the presidential than it has been in the midterm elections. OK, speaking of that, obviously here in Wisconsin, the big issue or the big race at the top of the ticket. Ticket, excuse me, is the race for governor here. Wanted to talk to you about how challenging it must have been to conduct polls on this race in particular, not just in the primary, but then, of course, now leading up to November. How do you all as a poll navigate that when you have candidates who are dropping out, getting back in? It's got to be chaos. Well, the primary race was chaotic, and all you could do was adapt on the fly. I think this fall has gone pretty much according to the plan that we expected to have, and we haven't had to do special polls at the last minute. The big thing that we've shifted over the last few years is, away from calling people exclusively on the telephone, we now contact them by email and by text. And if after a couple of follow-ups we haven't heard from them, then we still phone them. So we do about 5% to 10% of the calls on the phone now, but the rest are done online. Interesting. So, of course, you have adapted to how people are kind of different now in terms of caller ID and then screening calls and not answering phones in general. I wanted to ask you, you know, I know we were talking about Challenges getting responses from certain voters here. I know you're saying that you see that kind of across all voters, but it seems as though in the last several races that you all have had to predict here that it seems like Republicans are underrepresented when it comes to, or I should say underestimated, when it comes to how they're polled. Do you think that there might be some kind of, I don't know, political affiliation when it comes to responding? There are two parts to that. One is about President Trump. He has done an exceptionally good job of mobilizing a set of maybe 4% to 6% of the electorate who generally don't vote, but when he's on the ticket, they do vote. That is one of the major reasons why the presidential polls have understated Republican votes. But then in the midterms, those same folks tend not to vote at all. And therefore— Their absence from the poll doesn't affect the accuracy of it because they're not showing up to vote on Election Day. I think that's the biggest issue that we've had. We've done changes in our methodology to try to reach more and more of those hard-to-get Republican voters. So we now sample in parts of the state that we know from past results have been especially good for President Trump. And try really hard to get the right number of people out of those areas and, of course, in Democratic areas as well. But it's a more concerted effort to reach those hard to reach, especially Trump voters. It's interesting, okay, how you kind of change where you sort of target your surveys. That's good to know. I wanted to ask you as well about, you know, when you guys get ranked in terms of polls across the country, there's hundreds of polls that you guys are ranked against all over America. I can imagine, though, that here in Wisconsin, your job is especially challenging because our races are all so close. Walk our viewers through that. How do you navigate that? Yeah, you know, in one sense, if we just predicted every race was a tie, we'd probably be fairly accurate because of how close our races are. It doesn't really change the way we go about the poll, but it does give you a little bit of qualms on election night about which way it could go, a little tip this way or a little tip that way. This year, we've consistently seen Crowley a little bit ahead. Anywhere from a tie at one point to a seven-point Crowley lead in our last poll. But it's a three-point lead with registered voters. So that spread right now from three to seven points shows that turnout can matter quite a lot. And, of course, we could be wrong. And I think the number one message I want to get to voters is... Don't let the poll tell you what to do or how to vote. I'm trying to inform people about what voters are thinking about the issues of the campaign and how they view the candidates, not to tell people how to vote. And so, you know, the election is in the voters' hands today, and it's entirely up to the voters to determine our next governor, not the polling. All right. That is a great point to end on. Charles Franklin, thank you so much. Thank you.