tonight on "kqed newsroom," with the election trump and joe biden make their closing pitches, but with a record number of people voting by mail the winnermay not be known for some time. we take a look back at the l history of tion polling, including president trump's surprising upset in 2016 with the other the new book "lost in the gallop." and people with different political views spark a romantic collection? we hear from a host of a abdati podcast the experiment. we will revel in a time honored tradition. welcome to "kqed newsroom." > and now for "kqed s. newsroom"'s election 2020 coverage.

we're finally here in the last few days before tuesday, november 3, election day. voy rs have submitted earl ballots in record numbers with roughly 80 million votes already cast. in the nearly 4 years since president trump took office, regulationhave been rolled back, immigration has been curtailed, and the american jubecial system has come significantly more conservative. this week, amy coney barrett was sworn in as the new a supreme urjustice and a monday night ceremony on the whithouse lawn. but according to polls him her confirmation has not yet proven to be a game changer for mocratic rival joe biden is leading in several critical states and has raised more money. joining me now by skype from san francisco, our turn on politics and government senior politics and government kqed correspondent marisa lagos, thank you for joining us. scott, we just recorded our the nation, the california has silver avoided a spik we expected the pandemic was going to increase early ngmail- vobut the numbers are far above what was expected. who

benefits from this electoral t surge? conventional wisdom, priya, whenever there's a larger than expected turnout, democrats tend to benefimore the republicans because republicans historically are very reliable voters, were as you have a lot of occasial voters among democratsti, first- voters, younger voters, more low income voters. those are all folks who sometimes vote and sometimes they don't onr various re so you would guess th in a lot of places, this figure turnout is going to help joe biden and any other democrats on the ticket, but i think we all have to be careful in making too ny assumptions about things. we do have to wait for the ballots to be counted. we expect a pulot of icans to show up on election day to ly vote in person, pabecause of what president trump has been saying, that voting by mail is not safe, it is riiced, it isn't of course, but it's had an impact on

republicans. >> do you expect election day to turn into electionek, or longer, marisa? >> i mean, it's going to depend where you are, and in cafornia, that's been th case for a decade. it's very unusual and he really settled on election night. i would expect th, , you kn presidential race wise, it's going to depend on what we're seeing as those early returns fi arlly counted and some of the states we'll be watching like florida do allow processing a ballot before :00 p.m. on election day, but the big question here in california is going to be some of those tighter measures, ballot measure races, where polling shows they are really neck and neck and we're not going to be a le to make call until we have all the votes counted. >> scott, berkeley and i just put out a recent poll of californians. 87% of respondents said they am worry that manyicans we'll

not respect the outcome of this year presidential election , and a similar number, nearly 9 out of people think violence is likely to occur if there are disputes about who won the election. yikes! would you expect the sort of civil action to center in washingt, d.c., or would it be more widespread? >> it is hard to say. i think these are very genuine and letimate concerns. you know, we have heard a lot of comments from the president calling into question whether or not he would actually accept the results of the election if he loses. i think, you know, there was an analysis done by an inrnational organizaon that look for trouble spots around the world, and the states they focused in on were places like oreger where s a big militia movement, pennsylvania, north carolina, a little bit in california as well, but i don't think d it wocessarily be focused on d.c., and i think i we'll look more at some of the state center especially ey turn out on election to really close , then of course to see ys. the president es and if he declares victory before all the votes are counted, i think you're going to see

t potentially both sides on the streets, and you know, it's also concerning. we've seen a big uptick in the number of guns thpurchased. country is extremely polarized because a lot of anxiety, so i think is good reason er be cod, anxious. let's just hope all of it, none of it plays out. >> of course, there is concenn whether prestrump would vacate the white house. marisa, let's turn to kamala harris, our senator here in califoia. joe biden had big fundraising day when he announced she would be his running mate. what has been r net impact on the presidential ticket. >> $26 million in the first 24 the biden campaign also took in more than twice what it had in august after her announcement. after coming t twice and august what i had in july of that announcement. we see her rority sisters from alpha kappa alpha which hearted at howard university 22,000 individual donations alone, so i think this has excited the days that biden was really hoping for women in

color in particular. we saw after the debate for example, a huge fundraising haul for democrats because the i think this worked, you know, and i've talked to folks close to her. i think democrs still have some problems with men of color, latinos and black men in particular. they're going to have work to th do with election even after they win, but i think kamala harris has served to shore up some of the basin the fundraising numbers biden was hoping she woultt >> swhat we'll it mean for california if kamala harris becomes the new vice president. >> would beextraordinary not just for california but the whole country. certainly would nancy pelosi as speaker and kamala virris as president, we would have a pipeline to the white house and to washington, but i think in general, really for the country and perhaps for the world, seeing someo like kamala harris, a woman of color, of mixed race dissent, esbecoming vice ent, she is a very different kind of person than we have seen atin job ever before. i was thinking about this earlier today, and she's more

of like a justintrudeau, someone who's younger, more youthful, more hip, little bit less formal, and that glass ceiling has never been broken, but it would mean a t for california, and of course for the country if she were to become vice president. it would be extra ordinary. >> marisa, let's turn to the region. you been talking to de californians helpincrats work to flip arizona blue. what are you hearing from them? >> a lot of excitement first of. i've talked to a number of people who've either done phone or text banking from california even some folks o've gone out there and been in full ppe to do doorknocking. i think they see this state as a real potential. mark kelly is up. that's the democrat runninma againsha mcsally in the senate race there. we see biden really making somet inroads, and going to come

down to i think a tight race there, but i think californians really felt that year, demoat least, that they di not want to be on the sidelines like they felt they might've bitn in 2016 g for results, and i think they say that you know, in recent weeks, conversations have sifted from we'll you vote for biden and reharrison making balance are in. i think a lot of people these days are fatigued and tired of the cas,s and teand are saying at this point i voted, leave me ofalone, which course is a win for these volunteers. >> scott, let's move to the supreme court. it's already weighed in on one aspect of the election because h they sided with trump administration and wisconsin case preventing ballotfrom being counteafter th election day, even if they were postmarks from before the election they. have also taken some other actions. what are you watching? >> i think so far, supreme court has mostly deferred to the states. had they t overturned or confirmed what the state courts have tried to do, i think one of the most concerning aspect ru of all these ngs happened in wisconsin, where they decided , the court decided to uphold

wisconsin's rule that ballots that come in ecafter the on would not be counted, even if they are postmarked by election d brett kavanaugh in his separate decision in that case suofested along the lines what president trump has been saying, which is that ballotsa come in after election day could, the word used, flip the results, which is exactly what president trump has been saying to undermine the integrity and confidence in the voting, so that really t the antennas up of a lot of t civil rights and votilk rights democrats. there was another case in vermont where he alluded to vermont, where he incorrectly wrote what was happening in vermont, and the state asked him to change his wedecision. he back and amended a, so i think everyone is on hyper alert, and i think the bi question what happens after

the election? do some of these cases come back to court with amy coney barrett, who so far has no weighed in on any of these cases? >> we've been talking a lot the democrats are fighting to win the senate because they need to win the extra seats if biden/harris tas the white house or four if trump/pence ticket. >> mitch mcconnell, the senate majority leader, republican we've heard him rn . republicans this could go democrats' way. don't want to say anything as for sure until those are th counted, but e are nine republican seats either leaned democratic or are considered tossup's under the political reportethich is a well- úgroup. npartisan analysis only one democrat. and arizona, we have you know, colorado where it looks good for democrats, and a number of other states. even places like georgia that a couple of years we would not have been talking about. i think it's looking good for dems, but obviously, we won't

know until all the votes are counted, and as scotat happened, does not have to happen on election night. >> the state of state office released its final freeti el update on voter registration, and it says there's a record number of californians built 22 million who've registered vote. that's 2 million more th 2016. let's turn to a statewide ballot measure, prop 21. this would give cities re power enact rent control, protections. w that doing among likely california voters? >> not very well, and a similar measure prop 10 was on the ballot a couple years ago, and was overwhelmingly tejected by . i think this time around, some voters remember that earlier ballot measure and are wondering why is is back on e ballot cuba we have not changed our minds. governor newsom signed legislation expanding some protections for renters, peso aps the voters want to wait and see how those steps address the prlem, but it is not doing well. itder 40%, and that's not a good sign this close to the election, so it has a real steep

climb to make. af >> scott and marisa lagos leading our excellent politics team, thank you so much, and good luck over the next few days and weeks. >> thank you so much. visit kqed.org/voterguide . at this time in 2016, just days before the presidential election, hillary clinn seems like she had the win on lock. poll after poll predicted or easy victory, but that was not to be. so how could the pollsters be so wrong, and since they were wrong in 2016, could they wrg again in predicting joe biden's victory this year? tonight, we delve into the history limitations of polling a in amekilljoy necas from skype from kensington, maryland, joseph campbell, the author of "lost in gathe op." thanks for joing us this evening, joe. >> it's a real pleasure to be on your show.

>> you journals before you became an academic. talk us through how you saw polling before u started on your research for and how those views have changed. >> i thought polling was pretty reliabin. i gave pothe benefit of the doubt that these numbers, the numbers were going to be accurate, and i did not give it a second thought, but as i got into the research for lost in the gallop, it became clear that polling is an imperfect instrument, susceptible to failure and susceptible to errors of different kinds. >> you were spurred to write this book because of th2016 election. we cannot help but look back at that and recalled how very wrong it went. is here co the pollin general have joe biden ahead of donald trump. should we believe them? >> we should keep in mind that polling does have a checkered past, and it's important to recognize that polls can go

wrong, and when they go wrong, they can go wrong in surprising ways, and unpredicted ways, ways that have not happened before, so not all polling failures are quite alike. just like no two ecpresidential ons are the same either. we've seen the 2016 model policing the 1948 model when polled across the board tewere comp and uniformly wrong about dewey defeats truman election, when harry truman won a surprise and dramatic upset election. so we see all these diffvaent eties of polling failure, and i think we're going to come if the next time the polls fail, they may fail in a surprising way, away we did not expect and a way that does not mirror any previous polling failure. >> let's talk about why some of this is. a wh the challenges pollsters face when they are trying to get answers and put their finger on the pulse anof amer >> one of the biggest challenges in getting a decent response rate, and it used to be the gold standard of polling used to be that they would use telephone, landline telephones, random digit dialing sothey could reach listed as well as

unlisted phone numbers, and because most people in the country, and i'm thinking the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, te haphones, that was a prty reliable method of getting a representative cross- section of the country. with the demise or the decline of land lines, we're seeing fewer and fewer people with land lines and fewer and fewer people answering thphone because they don't want to be harassed by telemarketers or other scammers or whatever, so the sponse rates in polling by phone, the former gold standard, have dropped f dramatically into the single digits 5, 6, 7%, so to get a de nt sample that way is very difficult, very time-consuming, and obviously very expensive, so that is a major principal thchallenge pollster they are facing these days. >> we do have the internet out. has not gotten any better? >> the internet is a tempting option for pollsters, t they still have not figured out the way to get a real good representative sample using internet-bed methodologies. and pollsters have been trying

since the late 1990s, since thes early of the popular internet to really tap that platform and figure out a way on to get a rely reliable sample, and so far it has not really happened. some polling organizations have recruited via the internet panels of respondents, people who did go back time and me again for responses, and that's a very promisitg methodology, bu is somewhat expensive . so the poindustry is dopted it one that is in a state of flux right now, priya, and there's a inlot of experimentation on with a lot of different methodologies. there is no single gold standard anymore. >> you know, a lot of r work as journalists is based on what we see as in e polls, where we see who is up and who is down, and viewers and voters, information. are you telling us that really, we should not? >> we should not s le out po is automatically in error and

disregard them completely, but i think we should keep in mind that pollingdoes have a checkered past. and to realize these are imperfect instruments. they are useful tools, but they are not the only tool, but you are quite right. journalists in particular rely heavily on polls to set e conventional or dominant narrative of election campaigns, and polls are the centerpiece of that narrative creation, you will, and when polls go wrong, inevitably journalism stumbles a bit too. there is this relationship, polling failure equates to journalistic failure, and we w that in 02 when polls were right, donald trump had no chance of winning the election, and we recall the shock the day after the election, when trump won a >> hood yothink isgoing to win the election looking at the

polls? >> are you going to do that? i wrote a book out polling failures, so i think i know best not to make any predictions, but let me tell iy you this, the likelihood that the polls are way off,, universally off, and joe biden is going to lose the popular vote in 2020? that is very unlikely. that is very unlikely. now how the electoral college is going to break that oueven we are a few days of election, that is still up in the air. >> w. joseph campbell, thank you so much for joining us on the show tonight, the author of "lost in the gallop." yo >> priya, thank very much, a pleasure. a new national poll by the associated press shows 85% of registered voters describe americans as being greatl divided in their values.'s political partisanship has grown, studies also show the number of intermarriages between people in differt political parties is shrinking significantly. our next guests renin experiment on their dating podcast to get an insidelook at phenomenon. joining me now by skype from san francisco are the cohosts

of thedatable podcast. ladies, thank you for joining us. tell us about this mini dating experiment, why you decided run it? >> priya, gets pretty j because we talk about dealbreaker so much on our this year said a dealbreaker for me is dating someone of opposing political beliefs, so we thought that's a very strong statement. let's put that to the test, let's set up a blind dating experiment with two people who have opposingpolitical beliefs , to see if romance can develop from that. so we reached out to facebook groups, our own community, ou own network, as well as we went out there on social media to sebewho would brave enough to partake. >> and you did eventually find two daters, kiki d tom. julie, tell us who they are, something about their backgrounds, and why you selected them. >> first and foremost, they were both single. they are in their 30s in new york city, and kiki is more liberal, voting for biden,

where tom is a registered publican and either ting for trump or jo jorgensen,d the reason why we picked that was they were first of all well versed in politics, so vethey could a very educated, open conversation. they also found this experiment to be intriguing, so they really came in with a very open mind they also had a lot in common outside of politics, like they both were into arts, they both have similar values of what partner, and similar in lifestyles. >> in yue, did you find that you were sifting through the different applicatio people who came in, that there were any differences between republicans and democrats in theiinterest in dating across the aisle? triggered. crats were very we got more messages from democrats who said i would never partake in this. this is very metriggering for i don't think i could go with this experiment, but the republican applicants were a lot more open, and they said i

haveveeen wanting to an open communication and conversation with someone from the democratic party, so they re uch more open to it. >> julie, was that surprising to the two of you? >> it was, and i think at i learned too as people make rash generalizations about the party, where in today's world, itbeay not even democrat versus republican. it is what ever values that they have. >> yue, how did brinling a cs change the dynamic of the date for kiki and tom? >> the first half of the day we told him politics. they can talk about anything but. but the second half of the day, a student of onpolitics were the table , we felt the tension, and that was a word that both of them used in their post-interview. they felt that uncomfortable when it got real, when it got personal. but what was beautiful about d, they were able to find the some sort of common ground and to openlhear each otheout, so it was not a conflict or it

was not a debate. it was more about where can we find common ground. >> i want to listen to a clip from the zoom date you set up for them, and this is one in which they estalk about ent trump, and kiki begins at, so let's listen in. >> i think about, you know, his rhetoric being so aggressive. to me, and like his -- i don't ink he's been running things very well in the pandemic all of these things, to me, have felt like almost personal, you know what i mean? how do abyou feel t that úwho feels what he's doing is very personal and hurtful? do you aligwith that, sympathy for the, compassion for that? and how does that inform how you decide to move forward? >>i think i could start with denouncing racism. he certainly could have, and i would argue should have made a stronger statement than he did, like that momentin the debate,

but he speaks off-the-cuff, andu his off-the- remarks don't always come over very well. the otter i guess coto that is i think his bark is worse than his bike. >> so julie, how did this conversation continue to play out? did it foster understanding, or d it create re division between the two? >> i think both of daters walked away saying it was a there was not a huge debate. there was that tension as yue mentioned. what we learned, though, is that everything else needs to be 100% because this is still a big hurdle to overcome , and i think where kiki was coming from is that she felt like a lot of this was personal, and tom could not fully understand. >> yue, for you, at were some takeaways from this experiment? >> one big take away is what if we approached politics like

dating? these two people me on this date. you don't go on a date helping the other person fails. you hope they are good match, so they came on the day trying to find common ground and try to understand each other. sometimes approachpolitics like a debate. we want the other party to fail, and we want to hear why wrthey are so g and why we're so right, but in this experiment, you could see that they came in with sucha positive, open mind, that they were able to more productive conversations. >> julie, do you feel the pandemic hashifted how people talk about politics? it seems they are bringing up earlier. >> absolutely. i think people are looking to r get deeper, quiccause we're not dating multiple people at once, and we are potentially entering these more turbo relationships that ve faster, so you want to know someone that aligns with you from a values perspective. i think though initably, this election is just so huge, that it cannotcome up on a date

right now. >> if you were to run this experiment again, is there something you would do differently ndnext time aryue? >> we did have time on our side. if we had more time, i would lovetoo spaces out three, four separate dates. after each day, they have some time to digest what was said, ba then com nice and fresh. i think another thing is, you know, what we really learned from this exriment is that just have to go out and vote. i wish there was more conversation that we would've brought in or prompted about voting. it just shows you politi is a personal. kiki felt like i'm voting with my heart, i'm voting with my, you know, with what i've en exped, and tom is very much about policy, so he's voting with what would benefit me from a political poli >> julie, ifyou were to pull back a little bit and look at the scene broadly, how would you say that the hyper partisanship of our electorate is being reflected in the dating pool, water the issues there? think people are making blanket generalizations, and potentially ruling out half the dating pool. i thhak what i learned from this is that it is not so

black and white. it's not that all republicans are exit all democrats ary, and i think people should look more at the individual. of course if their values do not align with you, that's one thing, but i'm going it less about you are republican, you are democrat, and more about what you stand for individually. >> julie krafchick and yue xu, thank you so much, ladies. >> thank you, priya. >> thank you. xu and julie stating abt yue experiment@datablepodcast.com. and now, for a look at something beautiful. this week we step into kia pupatch or two to enjoy the rich colors and traditions of the ason. >> place your pukins down.

>> like a captain! don't forget to turn your clocks back october 31, as we and my daylight saving teen. you can find more of our coverage at kqed.org/kqednewsroom. you can reach me on twitter, facebook, and instagram at priyadclemens. from all of us here at qed newsroomanks for joining us. good night. ♪ ♪

captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for sunday, november 1: the final push in the presidentialon campaign is election day approaches; global covid cases continue tolimb forcing new restrictionand lockdowns; and jeff greenfield with an election preview. next on "pbs newshour wkend." >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: sue and edgar wachenheim iii. the anderson family fund. bernard and denise schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. barbara hope zuckerberg. the jpb foundation. baara hope zuckerberg. the leonard and norma klorfine foundatn. charles rosenblum.