hello and welcome to cross talk where all things are considered i'm peter lavelle is there such a thing as public opinion anymore after all after 2 election cycles in a row data has been largely imperfect is there is more than just one public and are there good reasons not to trust the polls. to discuss these issues and more i'm joined by my guest and martin in washington he is president of the national conservative organization that was shot the eagles as well as co-author of the conservative case for trunks and new york we have sarah norman she is a democratic strategist digital marketer and data scientist and in pasadena we

cross to greg john who well he is co-host and co-creator of the independent media show congo or across up rules and effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i was appreciated ok let's go to it and and you know when i look at the last 2 election cycles and how the the polling was off i think it's it's more than methodology it's what we think about polls and and it seems also to me that imbedded in that is that there should be a certain kind of voter and i think that the polls that are written looking for a certain kind of voter and when you do that you don't get the results that you want or people simply just won't answer honestly because they don't trust people they don't trust polling and politics. fortunately and so divisive so head well i you know i am a little bit more cynical if you can believe it i actually think my old boss phyllis schlafly for whom i worked like phyllis schlafly who had such a long career. politics she used to describe that one of the key things for her was

running for office she ran twice for congress and lost and i ran for congress and attorney general missouri lost but you learn a lot one of the things i learned that pollsters come in and try to charge you money and give you an answer that you want and i just want to say very clearly i believe the posters especially in 2020 had a had a vested interest in making sure that the election was headed the way they thought because biden raised billions i well maybe billions in the hundreds of millions in august and september to pay the posters right the posters are paid because he buys t.v. ads i mean the system is so corrupt now it's a corporate system it's a racket you know the other famous eric hoffer phrase that every good cause begins as every good cause begins as a movement becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket in iowa alone we spend over $100000000.00 on t.v. ads for the caucuses where $150000.00 people vote in caucus who makes money the consultants pollsters television companies and ad makers and my point here is that

i think the polls are playing a a role in that system and it's a broken system and that's what you're seeing. you know a lot about this i mean how do you look at i mean i think we should be clear here that you know campaigns have internal polls and then there's external polls that people pay for and i'm willing to buy into some to some extent what and had to say their internal polls or something else here but again i'm more interested i'll give an example i think i worked for colgate palmolive in the 1990 s. in poland and i was and i took i was taught how to write a questionnaire how to ask questions for consumers and i'm sure it's just a variation on a theme here because you know you could you know it would be a company would say i want to find out this is this and this and they would write out the questionnaire and i say no because you get looking for the answers that you want but that's not and you. you know i would have to say respectfully i. disagree i mean pollsters have every incentive to get it as right as possible

you know they want to be hired again and as a data scientist myself i can tell you we like getting it right. but since possible i think where the misunderstanding is is no one is saying that polls are perfect there is there's always a margin of error and there's always going to be some human made assumptions going to be pulled which make them imperfect you know for example if someone says i'm definitely going to vote do i count them the same or more as someone that says i'm very likely going to vote that's any human decision then i'm going to make and the poll may be as good as that decision was such as one example but i think what's happening is there's a misunderstanding among the public on how to read the polls what exactly they're saying and you know i do think that we need to be more transparent how polls were

done and what the margin of error is and there's also one thing on a smaller note that i don't think is talked about enough there's some lot of important based on how you ask a question and so i personally like all of that asked this thing question in a few different ways to make sure that they're not biased you know before the election i think it was gallup who came out with a poll where it was like 54 percent of americans said that they were better off than 4 years ago well the same company came out with a poll about a month earlier were only like 14 percent of americans said that the country was heading in the right direction over the last 4 years so they asked the wrong question you know republicans were touting this means that trumps going to win well apparently american you know maybe they don't always vote just for their interests but where where's the country's going to we have to ask the right questions to and i just wish that. there is more understanding about what we're still looking at and

i do think the media needs to cover that that's the whole point of asking the right questions because the polls were really i mean we we don't you know went into 2020 thinking well that only 2016 was it was not a good year for pollsters that 20 to 20 was an awful year was not i mean they're asking the wrong questions which i truly believe because i think they're ideologically driven but but also. its point that there is an incentive here you know to tell people what they want to be there in the paymaster here. well you know i really don't think that a lot of these polls posters out there really are posters anymore they seem to be like like propagandists of sorts and i don't think they're there to judge public opinion i think is there more to sway public opinion and when you have a society that's so free it's going to require a lot more propaganda to get people in line and you know the really thing about these polls is that a lot of people i know never get called for these polls why because i think

a lot of these pollsters have what's called a selection bias so they choose the people that's going to give them the answers they want to put out the data they want for the client that they work for i mean they've got to get paid to as well so it really did say the truth nowadays i don't think these pollsters are really even trying the judge public opinion is more is lester trying to sway public opinion ok i want to go back to say here because we're stepping on our toes. you know i i i disagree i think there's a couple small examples that i can think of 'd that maybe calls you sway public opinion but not in the way that i think was insinuated there you know one example that if. i went to trump in 2016 sorry but no one really thought he had a real shot in the polls started i did however oh well got. to uncover oh maybe he does and maybe a voter group well for we don't want to vote for it because in a crowd. aries because it be racing the boat and he's not going away and then the

whole started to say hey 16 percent of people say for him and then 20 and so on and so maybe that does influence a vote in some way but i disagree with you know the large scale of polls admittedly are not perfect they often can't catch public opinion fast enough you know one example of this in the final days before the election in florida you know like a week before we thought that florida was don't quote me on this but about 10 points ahead for team blue and then the last couple of days we saw that start to shrink not down to where it was but it hurt and i thought the fact that in the last couple days you're the same couple points that probably means that it actually dropped a lot more because polls are back and so as long as we're being communicated about

that i trust polls and i don't think that they have the power to have a large impact on public policy i think he has a public opinion has an impact on polls it makes it a lot of strange things happen during the election not just the polls here and i mean that you know it's interesting i think the center brings up a really great point particularly during the primary season in 2016 and i'm very curious when the pollsters what they deem to be republican because right now they were in the they were there were a lot of people that were like strumpet maybe not just didn't have much an affiliation with the party i mean so you know look he won't group of people here and they were very much surprised because i mean the 2016 simon. is just a whirlwind i mean nobody copped out because i think they were looking at the wrong people and they were asking the wrong questions go ahead well i'm i think you're right although the primary process is as you. point out is it is particularly

chaotic by design i mean again i was sitting on the r. and c. the republican national committee and i looked at the process they were getting ready to go roll through and again iowa has a disproportionate effect you know the boston media market because a new hampshire disproportion effect basically you're you're paying to get a name i.d. what trump did that was different was he had name i.d. and he came in but i look i just want to i really am sorry i can't resist hammering home in 2016 i was doing t.v. on the day before the election i said i'm from missouri the poll says trump's going to win by 4 he won by 19 and i said that i said he's going to win by a lot more so whatever we're missing and but let me be clear i don't want to debate trump and his presidency i do want to say this president trumps candidacy and presidency has exposed in my opinion corrupt institutions now i mean small c. corrupt meaning institution that's not working right like it's supposed to and one is pollsters the pollsters are either lying and to your point the posters always get a little closer and the old days they got a little closer as election day came because they want to get hired again but

across america they were wrong in every place except trump versus biden perhaps and also like kelly versus mick sally and the reason why is because the system is corrupt now they're paid and by the way i meant internal polls when i was a candidate they would tell me a poll that explained they would ask the questions and in such a way to tell me oh yeah you're getting close now if we just buy one more t.v. ad you'll get there the system is broken and sarah you have to believe that when someone does a poll that says biden's winning binds when bynes winning and it's amplified by television happily and by big tech happily that persuades people either it does or it doesn't one last thing the nielsen ratings were are the example of this they go 21200000 whatever number of households and tell us what america watches and americans bought that until now when they say we're not buying that anymore so the system has been shown to be small c. corrupt and my fear is when government. quip or

a shins use those tools to roll the american people in a direction they think is better for us that's what's disturbing and go back i'd like to be fair time their own project jump in well i just wanted to say that if you just think about what the pollsters are really trying to do where the propaganda says i like to call them they're trying to get to that low hanging fruit we know there's people on the left you know vote for biden it was people on the right that's going to vote for donald trump but it's those persuadable in the middle and how do you get them you say well public opinion is this and that right always for medicare for all and what not and you get them to believe that this is the way you should vote or this is the way you should act or these are the policies you should follow so i think they did it too a tedious time too as well and you also got to remember who's paying these people it's the establishment you know so this was a big tool a mechanism they used to kind of shame people into thinking a way that says hey if you don't think in the way that public opinion thinks the way society thinks there's something wrong with you you should go vote for team blue ok i'm going to go to a break right now but great you bring up such

a fascinating point is exactly where i want to go is boater shaming and i think that that's making the last 2 election cycles here ok i'm going to jump in here we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on polling in america say part. of the way of life for a range is leading a traditionally nomadic lifestyle tundra is similar to a parallel reality. drive for the women who carry the weight of this whole blood on their shoulders. and the. rules to let. she. is quick to say it's not however in the vast expanse

of russia there. were a housewife could secure regular employment status it's in the final soon as today . she's.

well i'm at a process where all things are considered i'm peter lavelle remind you we're talking about public opinion. here let's go back to sarah we just talked about at the very end of. the 1st half of the program before we went to the break about voter shaming i mean. because i mean if a pollster comes up to you you know you would then apply yourself as a republican you know and most people and correct me if i'm wrong but most pollsters are quite liberal ok it's like it's the exception that are conservatives here i don't know why it should be liberal conservative because you just funded by and what people want to know but and that's beside the point i suppose you're just you know being identified and if you find yourself as a republican there is an awareness now as a very acute awareness is that there's

a lot of people out there that don't like you because of your politics here and that's something that's relatively new in politics for me ok i mean i was brought up in a and or a republican home i was by little i was in university now i'm a conservative in my own right here but you know you get cast aspersions on people because of their political affiliation now that is the case and i think that people are wary of pollsters when they when they were approached. you know there's no evidence that conservatives are lying to pollsters when they do answer poster questions what about the shi'ites from voter i mean we've heard yet so dull trump attack the media and our institutions and because the media is the one reporting on these calls naturally people that support trump may have less trust in the polls and pollsters themselves and we do see some evidence of that and if we knew how

many conservatives were less likely to answer polls we would wait for it but unfortunately to find out that number we'd have to take a poll. probably air travel and. we don't know how much of that is actually happening but we do have evidence that it is happening and trust attack on the media as an institution is having an impact on people's trust ulster one thing that i do want to go back to where we agreed earlier is i do think that there's a financial incentive for pollsters but where i disagree if i think being offensive is to get it right mind you there's competition there is there is about 50 companies could be the i will call this year and if they don't get it right it's a really long it's a bad long term business plan because they're not going to get hired again and another thing that i would say is i disagree with the idea that holsters you know want to say i buy it in so that people feel obligated to vote for buy it and i mean you know i'm personally a democrat and i'd be

a scientist i want polls to be as spot on as possible but if we were going to say that i'm going to be a bad actor and try to try to sway public opinion in anything i would want to show that biden would have less of a chance because i want his base to feel like they have to show up you know in 2016 a lot of people didn't show for hillary to think she had it in the bag and i don't need to and so i just disagree that pulses are incentivized that way they really do want to get it right. ok well and i mean robbie. rehired for the iowa caucus of course of course you know how that money got rehired everybody. who lost a job i mean look it's are you job ok but it mean one of the things i think it's really quite fascinating and it's kind of a reflection of what's going on in the country not just before the election but certainly since here you do have to. say that there is more than one public there are public because you have such

a polarized politics that you have really country split down the middle looking at things very very differently and i'm not convinced of the public opinion questioning really works anymore ok because you know there's certain words about how we express about what kind of public policy we want and their and their dog whistles well and in the end in the end no but i'm not casting aspersions on the pollsters is that you know people think very very differently about. why it's getting deeper and deeper go ahead well i mean let me let me talk to the notion i mean you know the a lot of times it's start out to the present trump attack the media institutions i what i want to concede right now is that fox news is in the same place as c.n.n. they're persuading people to think about things in a certain way and they're very good at it and their number one of the things that people that pay them the most are pharmaceutical companies and other companies that that make a lot of money on this and they have an interest in the business model to

a service point earlier about a business model the incentives but what they did for the last what the mainstream media the fact all the fake news did for the last 4 years was called trump a something something like hitler and even joe biden said people like me were he said were nazis now that's different than we've ever seen in america and if you don't think that makes normal people shy i'm a new york times best selling author of a book on trump i'm out there publicly if i go to a cocktail party i don't start with that because i. i know that what the culture has been conditioned to not just think i'm wrong but think i'm a nazi so you can say sarah that people are not shy and not intimidated they certainly are now i would say this peter about the 2 americas there's 2 americas but one america whether it's the left or the democrat party thinks they know a lot about the people and they have a position set of positions there's another america that's leans republican that's conservative it's much more populous now it's much more working class now it's actually much darker than it was meaning color of the skin than it was before it's

actually got look this president who is hitler had prominent gay americans say he stood up for us he was on our side you don't hear that oh my point is only this the movement in america peter that is being missed by posters is people that don't want to say about what they believe because tech and the media are saying your bad if you believe that the fine people hoax is supposed to make me not talk about president trump's record on freeing people who are in prison for too long and being kind to and being aggressive to protect gay rights overseas in other places so it's a it is a we're in a moment where that 2nd piece of america you're describing i think it's a bigger than a majority and i think it's angrier now about how it's being treated than ever and i think it's very dangerous i think that's actually the danger here not because by the way there's never been a riot i was at the trump rally on saturday organized and there's never been a riot of trump people they said the trump of and turning to violence it's what they had teeth of people showed up and there were fights the trump people don't

riot we don't do it we don't go target people and the media tells us we do this is a very very strange that we're not having real honest people like sarah say the media is not being fair again i'm not saying the trump people are perfect or his policies are but there was no muslim ban there was a ban on countries and it was struck down by the courts so we have a system that hemmed in hitler but we don't have people that acknowledge it they just call me and i. see you know i mean i just brought up something i think is really important and i want sarah to comment it out for you is that you know so much of these public opinion polls it's about the cultural wars ok it's for me it's class and i'll tell you everybody just runs to the hills you know including republicans i wish the republicans have an open lane right now i hope they take it ok because the divisions in america are class driven and that's something that is a country leading a leads do not want to address because it if you admit that then you have to enact

policies ok well look at the stimulus that is being discussed in washington here i get 9010 issue people are for it ok but if you listen to the inside the beltway public opinion doesn't matter ok so that's a poll i would really like everybody really talk about because it might have been influence on policy because a lot of polls don't but great answer that that issue there because i think it's you know if polled the posters addressed the class divisions or let me hungry i think all that calling people hitler and all of that would go to the wayside go ahead well we can't have that we got to keep people divided so the elites can run off with money and have all the can. forget about talking about any class issues and i agree with you 100 percent over here they purposely don't talk about it so they can divide us up on the other things when race religion ideology and that's what i think a lot of these pollsters go after when you think about you know the left this out in the street the progressives that i started out there with that are still out

there working to feed people and help people what not they're so driven on their emotions so if you can find a way to get them on their emotions you know i'm saying then you can get them to come over and vote for you as if the republican side of the conservative side tends to be a little bit more pessimistic about the polls and look at them and say what are they trying to say how they tried to control us what are they trying to do but i mean that's the whole game of what the pollsters are doing right now they're not out there to give you real you know real public opinion. they're out there to sway public opinion and that's why they stay away from the class issue because they want to keep us divided and they talk about the things that really just matter the feelings of the progressives and that's how they get them and pull them in there. you know and i plainly disagree i think that pollsters desperately want to understand everyone else specially that those that they naturally don't identify as much with and they want to wait it correctly and get it as spot on as they can but i think you bring up

a really interesting point here which is that oftentimes public opinion does not have as big of its way on public policy as we may like or think you know and i think there's a few reasons why this it line is that those with the extremes you tend to be extreme without them and they lobby loud and with their wallets which of course influences politician you know one example of it is abortion rights most americans support the fastest abortion but anti choice that ticket have been successful in many cases because they are spending their time and money lobbying this issue another common issue that stop public opinion from swaying public policy as much as we would think or like is a mission is are often wrapped up in bigger initiatives so you brought up health care you know one example of that is birth control most americans support birth control being covered by health insurance now before obamacare i was paying $600.00

a year for birth control and mind you there's plenty of legitimate health reasons to take birth control well if obamacare were to be struck down i would lose that precut bridge and i would go back to paying $600.00 a year for birth control which is almost as much as trump paid in taxes and it's something that most americans want women to have adam on. another if i could. baker point and phil go ahead. and other major reason that public opinion sometimes i don't translate the public policy is an issue of gerrymander and this is when people who officials who are in charge drive the district line do so in a way that if bandages their party so it's it's drawing a map so that you choose your voters rather than your voters choosing you pennsylvania which is the state that you know has had a huge impact on several of national elections including this this last one is

a great example of that in 2012 pennsylvania is but voters gave republican 49 percent of the congressional seat but republicans ended up with 72 percent of their of their congressional seat so that that's an example gerrymandering getting republicans a huge advantage and personally there is one thing that i could change about american politics that would call for the end of gerrymandering and then i think the public are running out of time here but you know. i think the policy makers listen to these good public opinion polls like in these foreign wars things like that that need to be translated into policy all right i want to thank my guests in want to do new york and considine and what i think our viewers for watching us here at r.t. seem excited remember across cycles. over . the next 30 across the delusional.

but you have lost again vision of the world this or that you have to consider for a bird or a beast in the times or something the newest genius comes you don't talk with that it will do it for us the best of the scientific studies that are devoted to put it to good use it's kitchen on the side of the yards to needs assistance but seems to me. you need to go to church for this new look at a lot of these i will go to a pretty chilled to the if there will be a choice to be on your boat it will show you such today with a message from the postal order of the out of this thread to free sure the coke with full attention you. want a few that beautiful and hear them. rush or you never. would be mean. to put so that the new. black. radish did their share for.

gas then jenny. gould. b.s.t. when you're in the water with your the locust last with less heat in your address stuck underneath it you just want to also let the speech into your pride you will know when you are going in the usual with these. the war in syria has lasted longer than world war 2. who has been suffering the most in this almost and back in long conflict regular syrian people. need is more than when you wife of 20 years you want to. i could see everything with my own eyes and hear the stories of its residents one group in particular russian wives of syrian man of the apostles and. they were pleased to look up to sing as national just like it's.

the headlines this hour hearing is on the way in a british court and whether to grant biota doing a song jaw for a u.s. extradition request was denied health grounds but also this counting is underway in the u.s. state of georgia for the 2 remaining american senate seats there's room to play full with control of the chamber still in reach of either party i guess discuss the possible outcomes. we're going to have a divided government and a very government should a stool and went to sleep it's going to be show boring in this country. and germany extends its lockdown until the end of the month with tough demick rooms than before . the french quarter allows the police to record a greater minds.