Title: Is Kamala Harris’ Press Strategy Depriving Voters — Or Just Journalists? Plus, Understanding Election Polls.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Reporters understandably and incorrectly believe that the most important thing a candidate can do is answer their questions.

Brooke Gladstone: The political press are complaining about a lack of access to Kamala Harris. But, of course. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. On this week's show, with the election weeks away, we explain why pollsters failed in 2016 and 2020 and how to read the polls in 2024.

Courtney Kennedy: If the race is within about five percentage points, the takeaway should be that that poll is telling you it's more or less tie.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, at the presidential debate, Harris came after Trump's tariff plan, calling it a sales tax on the American people. Economists agree.

Gordon Hanson: Tariffs led for a one-to-one increase in prices as those goods were entering the United States. That meant that a 25% tariff would mean that prices were 25% higher.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Oh, Kamala. Kamala. Since ascending the blood-stained rungs of the Democratic ticket, the political media and the undecided voters, they quote, have exclaimed, "We hardly know ye." True. She's given precious few interviews, which has reignited a debate over whether this politician, like many politicians past, is depriving voters of essential insights into who she is.

Commentator 1: She should be talking to local press at every stop. She shouldn't be doing an interview and have it be like a Bigfoot site. It gives bigger scrutiny to it.

Commentator 2: The media and the public have legitimate questions, and she should face them. This is a political necessity.

Brooke Gladstone: Or whether she's merely depriving the political press of the oxygen it craves.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Reporters understandably and incorrectly believe that the most important thing a candidate can do is answer their questions.

Michael Steele: What has struck me is the highbrow nature of the press coming at Kamala Harris, in my view, whining, that she doesn't talk to us. Right now, is there a real need for her to sort of, you know, get the imprimatur of the press on her campaign?

JD Vance: This is a person who is asking you, the American people, for a promotion to president of the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: JD Vance.

JD Vance: But she refuses to sit down for an interview, even with the extremely friendly media. Now, is that a person that we should reward with a promotion?

Audience: No.

JD Vance: No.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Donald Trump will do interviews with anybody.

Brooke Gladstone: Of course, it's much easier for someone who can blather or bleat without reference to the question or even, you know, the questioner, someone who sees the encounter as just another opportunity to offload the chaos roiling within.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Anyone who tells you that Donald Trump answered reporters' questions is lying to you.

Brooke Gladstone: MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Anyone who then tells you that Kamala Harris has to answer questions from reporters because Donald Trump already answered questions from reporters is lying to themselves and to you, and you must not allow them to do it.

Brooke Gladstone: Of course, Tuesday, Kamala Harris, along with Donald Trump, did take questions from ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis on the debate stage. But it wasn't, could never be nearly enough to really know a person who spent relatively little time in the media's hot glare. Still, Charlamagne tha God, speaking here for many undecided voters, says she better get moving.

Charlamagne tha God: I mean, it's the bottom of the 9th inning. I feel like she should be any and everywhere having these conversations.

Brooke Gladstone: But with so little time and so much at stake, can you really blame her? Because the questions the media scrum aims at Democrats are so often framed around GOP talking points rather than what might affect voters' actual lives.

Dana Bash: I want to ask you about your opponent, Donald Trump. He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity. Any--

Kamala Harris: Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.

Dana Bash: That's it.

Kamala Harris: That's it.

Brooke Gladstone: Harris was lauded last month for her swift dismissal of the question posed by Dana Bash at CNN's much-ballyhooed sit-down. But still, Washington Post columnist Matt Bai says that the press could learn something from her guarded press strategy.

Matt Bai: When we sit around and complain Kamala Harris won't talk to us, she should, but then we have to own our part in that.

Brooke Gladstone: When Harris does grant more access to journalists, as she surely will in the coming days and weeks, what will they do with it?

Matt Bai: Would you want to talk to you? Because I don't think I would.

Brooke Gladstone: Bai says, the questions Harris fielded at the debate and on CNN before that are classic examples of what he calls the institutional interview.

Matt Bai: The interview has no specific topic. There's no burning question anyone is trying to answer. The point of the interview is simply for the news organization to have it and to hope that other news organizations will refer to it and generate a lot of attention and excitement. Institutional interviews are generally conducted by a kind of committee process in which the reporter and the judgment of the reporter is very much reduced. It's not a way to get at a lot of truth.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, you have noted that some candidates, Harris in particular, but lots of candidates, have an aversion to unscripted moments. You said her big surprise in the Dana Bash interview was that she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet. You wrote, "Someone get the defibrillator."

Matt Bai: Yes. Yes. That's the headline. I'm sure Vice President Harris was quite pleased. If that's the biggest thing she said, it does nothing but benefit her campaign. But it's not very surprising. Virtually every president the last couple of decades has reached out to someone across the aisle.

Brooke Gladstone: Bai has interviewed many presidential candidates over the years, including John McCain and John Kerry.

Matt Bai: I only know of one way to get a presidential candidate or a president off script, and it is to listen and respond. If you listen and converse and actually make an effort to understand, most human beings, politicians or otherwise, will meet you halfway and will try to make themselves understood because it's human nature to try to make yourself understood when someone actually cares. If you don't care and you don't listen, you get that scripted response. We can jump up and down about it, but ultimately, we bear some responsibility, and it doesn't do us any good to deny it.

Brooke Gladstone: You suggest that Harris's advisors seemingly let her come to the table with no plan other than to evade the traps.

Matt Bai: I was surprised by that. I think this is a troubling sign for a campaign, to be honest with you. Kamala Harris went into that interview with CNN. I think the same thing is true actually for the debate. She went in with a plan and a strategy to evade damage. But there was clearly no worldview, no agenda, no single thing she wanted the voter to know about her. She has plenty of things she wants you to know about her opponent - there's no shortage there, but I do think there's a problem there. You've seen this before with John Kerry, with Mitt Romney, candidates who think that the best way to get from point A to point B is to simply get there without doing damage, without blowing up.

Brooke Gladstone: Getting your opponent to blow up instead.

Matt Bai: Exactly. Because your opponent is weak enough that if you just stay out of the way, that person will do themselves in and you'll win by default. It almost never works. I'm not going to say it never works because something works all the time in politics, but I think it's dangerous. If I were a Democrat looking at this campaign, it would concern me.

Brooke Gladstone: Attorney and writer David Lurie, who contributes to the newsletter, Public Notice, sees this differently.

David Lurie: As a lawyer, one thing that I always prepare my witnesses to do is this, to answer a question, Brooke. But when the question is a gotcha question and includes a premise that is false or misleading, you don't answer it. You question the question.

Brooke Gladstone: He says Harris is wise to politely shut down questions that may yield lots of clicks but little of value to the voter, like this line of inquiry from Dana Bash.

Dana Bash: When you were in Congress, you supported the Green New Deal, and in 2019, you said, quote, "There is no question. I'm in favor of banning fracking." Fracking, as you know, is a pretty big issue, particularly in your must-win state of Pennsylvania.

Kamala Harris: Sure.

Dana Bash: Do you still want to ban fracking?

Kamala Harris: No. I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking as vice president. I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.

David Lurie: Well, first of all, let's take a look at the situation. She's been vice president and was the tie vote in the Senate as a representative of the Biden administration, favoring the granting of hydrocarbon licenses, including for fracking. She would be flipping if she came out against fracking, since all of the actions she's taken for nearly four years have been in favor of hydrocarbon mining and oil development, etcetera. The premise of the question is uninformed, and the purpose of the question is the gotcha. Now, if the question was, can you explain how your views on energy have developed over the years and where you are now, that would be an interesting question.

Brooke Gladstone: When watching the interview, Lurie was reminded of a 2015 conversation between then-candidate Hillary Clinton and NBC's Chuck Todd.

David Lurie: After approximately twelve minutes of interrogating Hillary Clinton in a myopic way about her IT practices, Todd turned to what he considered to be the substantive part of the interview, in which he played a reel titled "Clinton Versus Clinton." The headline, very much like a New York Post headline, 5, 10-second snippets of Clinton taking a position in one year on a particular topic and then explaining her related position on that topic several years later.

Hillary Clinton: I believe that marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.

Brooke Gladstone: She said that plainly. She was wrong on the issue then. Years later.

Hillary Clinton: This morning, love triumphed in the highest court in our land.

Brooke Gladstone: Chuck Todd.

Chuck Todd: How do you respond to some critics who say your positions have changed out of political expediency, that you're sort of whatever the majority is at that time, that's the position you have.

Hillary Clinton: On same-sex marriage, like a lot of people, including our president, I did evolve. I was not raised to even imagine thi, and I'm thrilled now that it is the law of the land. I have a lot of good friends who are now able to be married because of the changes we've made legally and constitutionally.

Brooke Gladstone: Lurie says that when Clinton earnestly took on Todd's accusations of cynical flip-flopping, she actually gave a worthless line of gotcha questioning wings.

David Lurie: All she did was legitimize that topic, right?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes.

David Lurie: Legitimize the criminal investigation, which was the farce. Legitimize all the attacks on her about everything to do with emails, including all the emails that Russia stole from the DNC.

Brooke Gladstone: Are you then suggesting that if she'd responded without legitimizing them, that this issue would have gone away? Because having lived through it, I have my doubts.

David Lurie: I think that the answer is one of degree. She played by the rules. She said, I recognize that these questions are legitimate. They were not. I recognize that these questions are significant. They were not. The premise, which Chuck Todd stated, that she was a liar and even a criminal was outrageous.

Now let's turn to Kamala Harris. Obviously, she wasn't being accused outrageously of being a criminal and a liar because of her use of an email server, but the premise of the questions about reversals was that she's craven, free of principles. What she said is, I have principles. You can see them in my actions. You will see them in my actions as president, and you will see them in the policies that I am advancing. That's what she said during the interview, and that's what she said repeatedly during the debate.

David Muir: Your opponent on the stage here tonight often asks his supporters, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?

Kamala Harris: I was--

Perry Bacon Jr.: That's a good question to ask Joe Biden.

Brooke Gladstone: Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. agrees that journalists lucky enough to get access should think more carefully about how they use it.

Perry Bacon Jr.: It's not a particularly good question to ask Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, who are not in charge of the current economy. Particularly since we're looking to the future, it's very easy to sort of gotcha-is that question because in a nation of 330 million people, many people are worse off than they were four years ago almost no matter what at any time. What you'd rather ask the question is something like, President Biden passed four major economic policy bills. Do you think those were effective, and would you carry on legislation like that or not? I assume Trump would say not and Harris would say-- I actually would have been curious how Harris answered a question like that.

Brooke Gladstone: Did the political media also ask precisely the wrong question after the debate, meaning who won?

Perry Bacon Jr.: I don't know if that's the best thing. If you're an undecided voter in Wisconsin, is the goal of the debate for you to learn that Harris did better than Trump, or did you want to know that Harris said she would sign a bill to make abortion legal across the country and Trump would not commit to that?

Brooke Gladstone: We don't see that kind of takeaway, at least in the headlines, in high-profile political media, but that's not the only media that's out there.

Perry Bacon Jr.: Kamala Harris could do an interview with any journalists. I think that these organizations include a lot of people, and the political media would include Fareed Zakaria, Christiane Amanpour, Jamelle Bouie. It would include Bolts, which is a magazine that covers state and local politics. Essence magazine covers politics. Capital B covers Black issues.

If you talk to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution or an Atlanta TV station, they might ask more questions about Atlanta. If you talk to Christiane Amanpour, she might ask more questions about foreign policy. If you talk to Capital B, they might ask more questions about the state of Black people in America. I think there are plenty of people who write about government and politics and elections who are not fixated on what the poll says and who's ahead. At some point, the politicians might want to consider talking to those people.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote, every year, politicians need journalists a bit less and that Harris could do an interview with herself being questioned by Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, and it would get millions of views online.

Perry Bacon Jr.: That's where we are now. Kamala Harris has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the last two months while doing two to three interviews. That shows that you don't necessarily need the media to get your message out, which, to me, creates an interesting dynamic, because if the media is no longer just a place where people have to get their news, something I'm excited about is the idea that the media can play more of a critical democratic role. We explain the candidates' positions more, ask them the real questions. That's a place where the media can play a bigger role, and it's the only role left at this point.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, Bacon is clear that regular access to candidates is better for our democracy, but he doesn't deny the risk it poses to the campaigners.

Perry Bacon Jr.: They might result in a gaffe. They might result in some kind of statement she makes accidentally. If you're trying to maximize electoral votes, that may not be the best way to go. I acknowledge that, but I think that's the tension that's worth debating here. One view of it is to save democracy, Kamala Harris should win, and everything she does to enhance her chances of winning is best for democracy. Another view held by me is that more access to journalism, more access to information, more candidate engagements with journalists is a good thing for democracy that I want to see in the election, even if it might not help Harris.

Brooke Gladstone: Are voters really missing out on vital information about Harris right now? I mean, her staggeringly abbreviated campaign has her formulating and releasing more detailed policy papers as we speak. Newspapers are making them available on their websites. Interested voters can find this stuff, and there's always a debate about how interested voters actually are in policy. It depends on the voter, just like the reporter. What do you think?

Perry Bacon Jr.: If you compare this to 2019 where there was a primary, candidates ran in the primary, not only did journalists ask the candidates a lot of questions, but so did like regular voters. I don't want the candidate to be elected president while not taking questions from anyone. I think that journalists have a useful function, and often do, are specialists in certain subjects, but I would prefer the choice, whether we be voters or journalists, that we allow voters to ask questions first. I know I'm inventing a world that doesn't exist, but in reality--

Brooke Gladstone: I like this world. I want to live in it.

Perry Bacon Jr.: Why don't we think about the world we're trying to create as opposed to pretending you can only do interviews with three outlets? I don't think is that the media is stupid. Don't ask them questions. The media is a lot of different things. Why don't we enhance that and work with what's good about it?

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Journalism is a business, and America's political press has always been problematic. It accused Thomas Jefferson of robbing widows, which was reprehensible and false, and fathering children with enslaved women, which was reprehensible and true. It accused John Adams of having hermaphroditic tendencies, which I don't know. But did you know that Adams had no faith in democracy at all? He said democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. That there was never democracy yet that did not commit suicide. That it's vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy.

Much the same could be said for America's free press, and it seems that both are long overdue for renovation. Maybe this election will be a test case. We can make them better. We have to.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, polling gets a facelift after the failures in 2016 and 2020.

Courtney Kennedy: A good rule of thumb is to take the reported margin of error and double it.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. This year, as in every election year, news consumers are wary of trusting the polls. Who can blame them after what happened eight years ago?

Commentator 3: 2016, if we remember, every poll in America said that Hillary Clinton was going to be president, and every single poll was wrong.

Micah Loewinger: And four years ago.

Commentator 4: The polling was wrong. It was wrong again, even worse than it was in 2016.

Micah Loewinger: In the year leading up to the 2016 election, we released two breaking news consumers guides on election polling to help listeners navigate the onslaught. Now, we're revisiting those guides because it turns out that the polling business has fundamentally changed since we first wrote them. The Pew Research Center's Courtney Kennedy says there are two main reasons why.

Courtney Kennedy: Two things happened. Donald Trump has proven to be a political candidate who has this great skill for turning out voters who historically didn't always vote, and some of those same people are less likely to participate in polls than the average American. It's sort of that combination of those two factors. Is fundamentally what has burned the polling industry these past two presidential cycles.

Micah Loewinger: You've said that the shy Trump effect has largely been debunked by researchers. This is the idea that Trump supporters are likely to lie in surveys due to the shame or the social stigma they might perceive about saying they support Trump, right?

Courtney Kennedy: Yes, that's right. If you ask me, "Hey, Courtney, has anyone ever lied to a pollster?" Like, sure. Yes, there are. Sometimes people will misrepresent their views to a pollster, but those errors are not large enough to explain what's gone wrong with polling in 2016 and 2020. The issue is the survey doesn't have enough Trump voters to begin with. It's about who is in these polls, who is not in these polls, and it's really not about people misrepresenting their views once they're already in the process.

Micah Loewinger: Let's dig into the changes that have taken place in the polling industry because, according to a recent Pew report that you co-authored, it seems like there's been quite an overhaul. One major change, you said, is that more polls are now conducted online and less by phone.

Courtney Kennedy: Yes. That trend actually even precedes 2016. The other major trend that we see, you see pollsters giving people choices about how to participate, recognizing that if you only let people respond online, you're going to lose a lot of older, more conservative folks, or if you only let people respond by paper, you're going to miss a lot of young folks who live much of their lives online.

Micah Loewinger: In your report, you also mentioned that pollsters are now adjusting their results for more variables. For instance, a respondent's education, their race, maybe even their political views. This is what pollsters mean when they talk about weighting. Can you tell me more about that practice and how it's changed since 2016 and 2020?

Courtney Kennedy: That's right. The group of people who responded to the interview, they're not going to be perfectly nationally representative. That's just not real life. The gender might be off a little bit or the race profile might not be perfect. With weighting, we do a statistical adjustment to take the survey and make it as nationally representative as possible. The reason we have to do that, frankly, is because every year that goes by, response rates to surveys tick lower and lower. The even bigger issue is that the people who participate in polls these days, they tend to be a little bit different from those that don't, and so weighting is really our mechanism to try to correct all of those things.

To your point, this challenge has gotten worse. When I came into the field 20 years ago, a typical good poll might have weighted on maybe four different variables. Today, it's more like 12 variables because this issue of nonresponse has just grown over time.

Micah Loewinger: Some recent polls that you've called high quality include Gallup, which used 8 variables; the New York Times's Siena poll, which uses 12. Your organization, Pew, also uses 12 variables. When readers look at polls in the next couple months, is it fair to say they can look at the number of variables for a sense of the weighting that's being used?

Courtney Kennedy: I think it is an indicator. Two questions I really ask of any poll that I'm looking at is, did they address this phenomenon of education, of people who have college graduate level education or higher would be more likely to take surveys? You've got to fix that because that tends to be correlated with support for Democrats. And did the poll do anything to make sure they had the right balance of Republicans versus Democrats? Frankly, if the pollster just is completely hands-off, that doesn't turn out very well, especially with online polls. They will tend to skew more Democratic unless the pollster really has good controls in place to make sure that that balance represents the nation.

Micah Loewinger: Here's a point that you made in your recent article that caught my eye. The real margin of error, you write, is often about double the one reported.

Courtney Kennedy: People assume that those numbers are the total margin of error for the poll, but that's actually not the case. The margin of error only covers one of four different error types that we have in surveys. It's just reflecting the error that's associated with sampling. We don't interview the whole country, but it leaves out some really important errors, like nonresponse, noncoverage, like people that couldn't have been surveyed to begin with, and even measurement, which gets to the shy Trump idea. There's these three other, quite frankly, important error sources that are not reflected. A good rule of thumb is to take the reported margin of error and double it.

Micah Loewinger: The number of active polling organizations has grown quite a bit. From what I understand, the barrier to entry just isn't that high and a lot of new companies are getting into the game. If listeners encounter an unfamiliar poll, one that's maybe not associated with a major news organization, are there signs that they can look for that might indicate that this poll is low quality or it's being conducted by partisan actors?

Courtney Kennedy: Well, I think you named a biggie, which is, first of all, look for the track record. Who's doing the poll? Do they have a track record of doing high-quality polling? The other thing you can look for is, do they provide details about how the poll was done? One thing you can see, a sort of tip-off of a poll that's probably not very trustworthy, is if you look to see, where do they describe how they did their methods? And it just says something like, oh, the poll was done online. Full stop.

That's a huge red flag because the pollsters who are really doing work carefully and putting in a lot of resources, they will go into great depth about where the people came from, how the sampling was done, how the weighting was done. There will be paragraphs of detail. On average, the pollsters that are willing to provide more fulsome details about their methodology, they tend to be more accurate.

Micah Loewinger: I want to talk about some of the recent narratives around polling that have kind of sprung up in this election cycle. There's been discourse around this idea that Harris's honeymoon period is waning, or even over.

Reporter 1: Brand new New York Times Siena Poll suggests that Harris's honeymoon is over.

Reporter 2: The honeymoon, I think, is over for Kamala Harris

Reporter 3: The Harris honeymoon is officially over, and Trump continues to surge in the polls.

Micah Loewinger: A recent New York Times and Siena College poll shows Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris by a razor-thin margin of 48% to 47% among likely voters. That's within the margin of error as reported and also within a much larger margin of error, as we've just discussed, this would mean the first lead for Trump in a major nonpartisan national poll in about a month. Do you think there's merit to this idea of the honeymoon or the honeymoon lull?

Courtney Kennedy: : My read of the data is that things have stabilized, that the public needed several weeks to really wrap their heads around what had happened. What does it mean that Biden's no longer the Democratic nominee? What we're seeing now in polling is that processing period, the honeymoon, if you want, it has kind of ended and that public opinion about this race has stabilized into a fundamentally tied race.

Micah Loewinger: I want to address a narrative that you take issue with around the 2022 midterms. I remember the coverage. There was quite a lot of prediction of a red wave.

Reporter 3: The polls show Democrats sinking and Republicans rising.

Reporter 4: The reports I'm seeing show a big red wave coming.

Commentator 5: We are officially on a red tsunami watch.

Commentator 6: I think the red wave that's coming is going to be like the elevator doors opening up in the shining.

Micah Loewinger: The red wave never came, despite some polls that said it would. In your report, you wrote that most polls had reported with general accuracy during those 2022 midterms, much more so than usual. What happened there? Why this misconception?

Courtney Kennedy: There was a late wave of polls that were very favorable to Republican candidates from a handful of partisan, GOP-affiliated polling organizations. They're the ones that led this huge media narrative that there's going to be a red wave. If you set those partisan polls aside and you look at more mainstream polling, they had the 2022 midterm quite accurate. They were very good. It is confusing because both things were true.

Micah Loewinger: Are you seeing any narratives in this election that frustrate you that might be misrepresenting the race that you see in the data or in what conclusions can be drawn from the polling thus far?

Courtney Kennedy: There's something that happens pretty much every election, which is there might even be a poll out today where it's like, well, Trump has a one point, and then people use the word lead. It's like, well, yes, okay, he might be up one percentage point based on this one survey, but if the race is within about five percentage points, the takeaway should be that that poll is telling you it's more or less tied. The more people use the language of leads with these very small changes, I think it does everybody a disservice.

Micah Loewinger: But, Courtney, I want to know who's going to win.

Courtney Kennedy: I know.

Micah Loewinger: But still, obviously, polling from battleground states can still be newsworthy and might be more salient than national polls in telling us--

Courtney Kennedy: No, that's true. You're right. That's another thing that trips people up every time, is that while a lot of the national polls get attention, we don't elect presidents through the national popular vote. Just ask Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. That's not how it's done. It is the Electoral College. It is a series of state-level contests. You're absolutely right. If your goal is let's just game out the best that we possibly can who's going to win, you should be looking at state polls and doing the electoral college count.

Micah Loewinger: Many news consumers don't want to do the nitty-gritty of studying trends in state polls or national polls or what have you. They want to look at models. They want to look at somebody who's weighting the reliable polls and less so the more partisan ones.

Courtney Kennedy: I don't love the way that modeling plays out in the public dialogue these days. One thing people forget is that the errors that polls have, they don't magically go away when someone tries to model the race. I think in general, too much confidence in attention is placed in the models. I mean, I'm not naive. I know they're not going to go away altogether, but I still think even today, they're treated with a little bit too much reverence and afforded more precision than they probably actually have.

In 2016, a lot of us look back and really wonder, did those models, did all those headlines of Hillary Clinton being 99% likely to win, did that cause some people to stay home? There's a little bit of evidence that that might have taken place. I don't love some of the discussion around modeling.

Micah Loewinger: I guess I'm confused by this conversation then because I'm hearing you say, approach close polls with skepticism. Approach the models with skepticism. Approach language about small increases and decreases in headlines with skepticism. How can eager news consumers, how can they best follow this race when, as you're suggesting, there's just so much uncertainty?

Courtney Kennedy: I'm not saying that polls don't have any value. I've devoted my whole career to polling. The value of polls is more in sort of telling us, how is the public evaluating the candidates right now? What issues does the public care about? They can tell us, how does the public react into things like Supreme Court decisions? It does give us a lot of useful information but with the caveat, it's not going to be precise within one or two points. There is that margin of error. It is a nuanced message, but that's just the reality that we live in.

Micah Loewinger: Courtney, thank you very much.

Courtney Kennedy: My pleasure.

Micah Loewinger: Courtney Kennedy is vice president of Methods and Innovation at Pew Research Center. Follow On the Media on Threads, TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky, X, and Mastodon to find a handy graphic of our latest breaking news consumers handbook, Poll Edition.

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Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, a crusty economic artifact gets new life.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. During Tuesday night's debate, Harris went after one of Trump Trump's plans to help lower costs for Americans, higher tariffs on imported goods, mostly from China.

Brooke Gladstone: My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump's sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result for middle class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas.

Micah Loewinger: Fact-checkers said that number is high. It's probably closer to like 1,700. Here's how Trump responded.

Donald Trump: We're doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to, finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we've done for the world, and the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off because there was so much money. They can't.

Micah Loewinger: Trump is referring to the fact that the Biden administration in May decided to not only keep most of his administration's tariffs in place, but expand on them, something Harris hasn't indicated she would change or undo. Economists do widely agree with Harris that tariffs are a sales tax that the American public is forced to pay. So far, the Trump tariffs have amounted to a tax increase of nearly $80 billion, and the Biden administration's additions added another 3.6. That the two parties have found common ground on raising tariffs is especially odd because it's a total reversal of a decades-long consensus in Washington that lowering tariffs was the best thing for the economy.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Gordon Hanson, an economist and a co-director of the Reimagining the Economy project at Harvard University's Kennedy School, about this change in tariff policy. In 2013, he and a team of economists started publishing research on the roots of this shift, starting with what they called the China shock.

Gordon Hanson: China joined the global economy in fits and starts beginning in the 1980s and in the 1990s. As its economy was moving away from decades of Mao's central planning to something that was more market-oriented, something pretty phenomenal happened. China underwent a period of about 20 years of economic growth, the likes of which we've never seen. We've seen economies grow fast. We've never seen an economy as big as China's grow that fast. The other thing we hadn't seen was a country as big as China be as specialized as it was in a pretty narrow set of manufacturing products. This just upended global markets.

If you were producing stuff that China needed to fund its global factories, so that would be iron ore, that would be copper, that would be all sorts of primary commodities that places like Australia and Canada and Brazil and South Africa and Indonesia were producing, it was boom times. This was just an unbelievable windfall. If you were producing the stuff that China was also producing, textiles and furniture and clothing and simple electronics, it was a nightmare scenario. All of a sudden, the world market was flooded with goods that were the basis for your livelihood.

Micah Loewinger: And then enter Donald Trump in 2017.

Donald Trump: I'll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I'll bring back our jobs and I'll bring back our money.

Micah Loewinger: How did he aim to counteract the China shock?

Gordon Hanson: When Trump was campaigning on a message of America first and countering the era of hyper-globalization, it resonated in parts of the world that felt like they'd been punched in the gut by the global economy. His prescription was, well, China has flooded the market with goods. Let's put taxes on Chinese imports, and that's going to save those regions that had been part of the us manufacturing base.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, he put tariffs on solar panels and washing machines and steel and aluminum, and then a 25% tariff on all kinds of goods from China. How did China respond?

Gordon Hanson: China responded by putting tariffs on the goods that the US exports to China. The complicated thing here is that a lot of what the US exports to China are services and intellectual property and stuff that's very hard to tax at the border. We don't export a lot of physical goods to China outside of agriculture and minerals. What that meant was China was left with a pretty narrow set of options of what to hit with countervailing duties, and that primarily fell on the agricultural goods that are produced in the American heartland.

Micah Loewinger: When you were watching this trade war escalate beginning in 2017, as an economist, what was going through your mind?

Gordon Hanson: As a public citizen, I was concerned that the US was embarking on a set of wrong-handed economic policies. As an economist, I was fascinated because the US had spent the better part of five decades dismantling trade barriers, slowly moving towards an ever more globalized world. From one day to the next, basically, Trump had upended that situation and moved us towards much higher trade barriers, and that meant a reduction in international trade. We were just waiting for the data to come out so that we could begin to track what was the impact of Trump's trade protection.

Micah Loewinger: Did the trade war help American workers?

Gordon Hanson: It did not. We took a very close look at the data. This is work I did with Anna Beck, David Autor, and David Dorn tracking all the goods that the US imports from all countries in the world at a highly disaggregated level. Then we match those goods to where they were produced in the United States to say, well, if the US now has increased tariffs on, say, sweatshirts, are the places that were producing sweatshirts now going to start producing them again.

We tracked this from 2018 when the tariffs really started to bite, through 2019, and all the way out to 2022, which at the time was as far as we could push the data. What we found in terms of impacts on US manufacturing employment was a big nothing. There was really no change in employment in response to those tariffs.

Micah Loewinger: Do we have any good data on how these Trump and now Biden tariffs have impacted the price of goods?

Gordon Hanson: The first evidence we saw of their impacts was really shocking. It showed that tariffs led for a one-to-one increase in prices as those goods were entering the United States. That meant that a 25% tariff would mean that prices were 25% higher. Surprise, surprise. You raise prices on imported goods, you're raising prices for American households.

Micah Loewinger: In the conclusion of your paper, you write that, quote, "The net effect of import tariffs, retaliatory tariffs, and farm subsidies on employment in locations exposed to the trade war was, at best, awash, and it may have been mildly negative, but residents of tariff-protected locations became less likely to identify as Democrats and more likely to vote for Trump." Why do you think that happened?

Gordon Hanson: Well, again, it was effective messaging. The workers in America's heartland, in the midwestern states that had been part of America's manufacturing base going back decades, felt betrayed when, in the 1990s, President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement.

President Clinton: The United States must seek nothing less than a new trading system that benefits all nations through robust commerce, but that protects our middle class and gives other nations a chance to grow on, that lifts workers and the environment up without dragging people down.

Gordon Hanson: This was parts of the United States that had been reliably Democratic, and they saw a Democratic president lowering barriers on cheap imports from the rest of the world that was going to cost them their jobs. Between Clinton signing the North American Free Trade Agreement and Donald Trump coming into power, the China shock happened. First NAFTA was a symbolic betrayal of American workers, and then the China trade shock was an actual economic storm that really upended the regions that had been manufacturing centers for much of the last 60 or 70 years. They were waiting for somebody to come and say, we're on your side, and Trump provided that message.

Micah Loewinger: This is the part I don't totally understand. Was it that Democrats didn't adequately communicate the downsides of free trade, that it could potentially really hurt American workers, or is it that they earnestly believed that opening up trade with more countries like China and Mexico would deliver prosperity for American workers?

Gordon Hanson: To understand how we got to the point that Democratic presidents were advocating for free trade, important to go back to where the push for globalization came from. Coming out of World War II, the world was a mess, and we created a set of institutions that would help countries trade with each other and help create global prosperity. For decades, the community of trading nations was pretty much high-income countries. It was the US, it was Europe, it was Canada, it was Japan.

When those countries traded with each other, it tended to be like for like, the US sending pickup trucks to the rest of the world and importing small sedans from Japan or luxury sedans from Germany. We had a sense that globalization wasn't going to be that disruptive. In the 1980s and 1990s, as President Clinton was now beginning to sign new free trade agreements, and it wasn't just Democratic presidents. The North American Free Trade Agreement, though it was signed by Clinton, it was first conceived of by President Bush. We were now envisaging expanding trade with low-income countries, countries we hadn't traded with substantially before.

Then China comes onto the scene. We now have not just low-income countries, but really big low-income countries. I think we made the mistake of forecasting forward based on our experience of trade with countries that were kind of like the US in terms of average income levels and saying, well, continued globalization just isn't going to be that disruptive for the American economy. And we were wrong.

Micah Loewinger: Basically, Biden had largely kept Trump's tariffs in place and he's even increased tariffs on Chinese goods. So what happened?

Gordon Hanson: Well, two things happened. One was, I think upon winning a very close election, Joe Biden realized that Donald Trump's tariffs were popular in swing states, and getting rid of those tariffs would have been political suicide. I think the political side of the shop won an argument with the economic side of the shop, which said that it just makes much more sense for us to keep those Trump tariffs in place.

The other thing that happened was they looked around and said, well, what can we do to bring manufacturing jobs back back? What can we do to help restore good jobs to places that had been eviscerated by global competition? Since then, they came up with, first the CHIPS Act, then the Inflation Reduction Act, and this was after Build Back Better and an infrastructure bill that was trying to engineer recovery from COVID. In the absence of ways to help the former manufacturing belt recover, getting rid of Trump tariffs would have seemed just like pouring salt on the wounds of American workers.

Micah Loewinger: Former President Donald Trump is once again campaigning on what he calls an America-first economic policy.

Donald Trump: My agenda will tax China to build up America. In addition, as a matter of both economic and national security, I will implement a bold series of reforms to completely eliminate dependence on China in all critical areas. We will revoke China's most favored nation trade status and adopt a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals.

Micah Loewinger: Gordon, what exactly is he saying here?

Gordon Hanson: He's putting forward a policy agenda that would take the better part of a decade to complete. I think what he's really saying is he wants the United States to decouple from China economically.

Micah Loewinger: Okay. But our economies are pretty interrelated. What would that mean?

Gordon Hanson: They're incredibly intertwined. Unbundling those supply chains would be an incredible amount of work. What is the likely result of Trump trying to get in the way of US-China commerce is products that are more costly for American consumers and intermediate inputs that are more costly for American firms.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, defining the China shock was important scholarship, but today, do you think it's taken up too much in our current conversation?

Gordon Hanson: We're academics. We didn't cause the China shock. We just documented it. In documenting it, we wanted to highlight the fact that we as economists had not been fully honest about what we call the distributional consequences of globalization. That's a fancy term to mean that when we trade more with the rest of the world, when we're more integrated into the global economy, they're going to be winners and losers. We were too sanguine about the consequences of expanded globalization in the 1990s, and we did not take care to prepare for the very real losses that Americans suffered as a consequence of continued increases in global commerce. That's on us.

We feel that the message of our research is we need to be better prepared to help deal with the fact that globalization and other major changes in the economy creates winners as well as losers, and if we're not prepared to help folks who've lost from those big changes adjust to new economic realities, we're going to face an environment of severe political and social disruption, which is what we're living through right now.

Micah Loewinger: Gordon, thank you very much.

Gordon Hanson: My pleasure, Micah. This has been really enjoyable for me.

Micah Loewinger: Gordon Hanson is an economist and the co-director of the Reimagining the Economy project at Harvard University's Kennedy School.

[music]

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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