In our third episode, we talk about redistricting in Alabama and the GOP primary for governor in Georgia before exploring the world of online polling with Civiqs co-founder Drew Linzer. Enjoy!
David Beard :
Hello, I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections, here with my co-host Daily Kos political director, David Nir. If this is your first time, welcome. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the mini elections that take place below presidency from Senate to city council. We've also got two other episodes out now, one with Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas that covers the history of Daily Kos Elections and why we do the work we do and why we're so passionate about it. And then we've also got a 2022 midterm overview with Daily Kos elections editor, Jeff Singer. So, go ahead and check those out. And as a quick ask, please subscribe to The Downballot. Tell your friends who you think might like it and leave us a five star rating and review. But that's enough, let's dive ahead into today's episode. What are we covering on today's show, Nir?
David Nir:
Later on the show, we are going to be talking with Drew Linzer, who is the director and co-founder of Civiqs, one of the leading all online polling firms in the country. And we're going to be discussing both how his company actually polls people on the internet and what he is seeing out there in the United States today. But before we talk with Drew, we are going to be introducing the first of our weekly hits. We are going to be talking about redistricting litigation in Alabama, the Republican primary for governor in Georgia, and then interesting international election that brought some good news for the left.
David Beard :
So, let's go ahead and dive into our inaugural weekly hits. Nir, why don't you kick us off?
David Nir:
So we have to talk about what the Supreme Court just did in Alabama with a lawsuit over the state's congressional map. Here is the backdrop. Alabama has seven congressional districts. Only one of them has a black majority and is capable of electing black voters candidate of choice, which is almost always going to be a black Democrat. This is the case, even though Alabama's black population is about 27% of the state, meaning that just on the pure numbers, it's pretty clear that Alabama could elect two candidates preferred by black voters if only there were two black districts. Obviously though, Republicans in the legislature don't want to draw a second black district, because that would mean electing a second Democrat. They want to keep the state's delegation, six Republicans and one Democrat and pack as many black voters as they can into this one single congressional district. The seventh district.
David Nir:
The problem for Alabama Republicans is that the Voting Rights Act says you can't do that. You can't try to deprive voters who are from racial minorities of their ability to elect candidates of their choice by chopping them up amongst a bunch of different congressional districts. And a federal court agreed with a set of plaintiffs that said that under the VRA, specifically section two of the Voting Rights Act that Alabama had violated that and had to draw a second black district. And the remarkable thing here is this was a panel of three federal court judges. And two of them were appointed to the bench by Donald Trump. The third by the way, was appointed originally by Ronald Reagan. So this was a very conservative panel that agreed entirely with the plaintiffs and said, "Yeah, Alabama needs to have a second black district and the legislature better get on it right away and draw a new map that gives black voters the opportunity to elect their preferred candidate."
David Nir:
Well, guess what? I don't even want to call it conservative majority on the Supreme Court. I want to call it a partisan Republican majority because that's what it is today, stayed that lower court ruling. And the court, the Supreme Court did not issue a written opinion explaining its decision, but the five far right justices on the court or the five most far right justices, I should say, all voted in favor of this stay, which has the effect of saying that Alabama's Republican drawn map with the six white districts and one black district, that's going to be used for 2022, despite the obvious violations of the Voting Rights Act and the obvious efforts to prevent black voters from having their say in the political process. The decision was so extreme that even John Roberts, the chief justice, who has devoted his career dating back to his time as a young attorney to undermining the Voting Rights Act at every turn even he dissented from this stay.
David Nir:
And he said he thought it was inappropriate to the extent that the Republicans in the court even tried to justify it. There was a concurring opinion by Brett Kavanaugh that was only joined by one other justice in which he claimed that the ruling by the lower court had to be blocked from going into effect because the elections are coming up too soon. Well, last I checked, I looked at my calendar, the elections are in November, this is February right now. Alabama's primary is not for several more months. It's a total BS, garbage excuse. And Elena Kagan, one of the liberals on the court called him out for it and said that the opinion below was almost unquestionably decided correctly and that the court was essentially engaged in lawless nonsense in trying to block the ruling from taking effect. And here's the thing, it's not just about this one case in Alabama, many other states in the south that are run by Republicans could draw an additional district if not more than one, where black voters could elect their preferred candidates.
David Nir:
What the Supreme Court is saying is not only are we not going to say it's a requirement for Alabama in 2022, we are very probably going to rule against VRA section two in some way that renders it inert in the future. Meaning that further claims under this very important plank of the Voting Rights Act will not be available to plaintiffs anywhere in order to get redress. This is the ultimate Republican dream, it is very, very dismaying. And until we get a new court or frankly, an expanded court, it's something that we are simply going to have to live with.
David Beard :
Just a great rundown. I almost have nothing to add. I have one thing to add, is that the facts on the ground that change because a lot of people on the other side of the point, if this was good enough for Alabama in 1992 and 2002 and 2012, et cetera, is that the percentage of African Americans in Alabama has grown as a portion of the state over the past 30 years. And so that's why two districts are now needed when originally in the early nineties, only one district was drawn.
David Beard :
So this is not a case of... Republicans often like to accuse Democrats of inventing claims. And this is not a case where the claim has come out of nothing, it's come out of on the ground changes to the state of Alabama that are inconvenient for Republicans and so they don't want to acknowledge it or draw that second district that they should draw. It's very unfortunate because the state of the Supreme Court is what it is, but there's a lot of great folks fighting for this in the south and all across the country. But we have to live with how it is for this year, anyway.
David Nir:
I would add to your point Beard, that even if Alabama were to draw a second black opportunity district, that the makeup of the state's congressional districts would still overwhelmingly favor white people, because you would still have five of seven districts with white majorities, meaning that they would elect Republicans because voting is very racially polarized in the south and especially Alabama. Five of seven seats, that's about 71% of the districts, but white people in Alabama are only 63% of the population. So even the remedy being asked for would still over represent white voters. Now, there is one little here, which is that there's an additional set of claims that plaintiffs brought that were not adjudicated.
David Nir:
And the court has now asked for... The lower court has now asked for briefing on those claims. Now, I think that there's a good chance the court will again find the favor of plaintiffs, but unfortunately I think there's an even better chance that the Supreme Court would do the same thing. So, this is no way around it a dismaying turn of events. But why don't we change gears and talk about something that at least could give us a little bit of shot of right here.
David Beard :
Yes. I love to follow along with disastrous Republican primaries, and we don't know how disastrous this one's going to get yet, but I have a good feeling about it. So in the Georgia governor's race, Brian Kemp who narrowly and controversially defeated Stacy Abrams in 2018, is running for reelection. And he is not the only Republican as David Perdue who lost to Jon Osoff in the Georgia runoff last year has decided to also run. And he's doing this in large part because Donald Trump doesn't like that Brian Kemp decided to acknowledge the results of the 2020 election that Joe Biden won Georgia. So, because Donald Trump is so angry about the reality of the situation, he's decided to push Perdue into this race, convince Perdue to run, to give him his backing, to record ads on behalf of Perdue. So it's become this big incumbent GOP governor that has a lot of support in the state against this Trumpist former Senator who is really... Entire argument is that, "Donald Trump likes me better." It's his argument for victory.
David Beard :
But for a while, there's been a third sort of notable Republican in the primary. And one of the reasons that's important is that Georgia requires runoffs as we saw. So had this primary gone with three notable figures, there's a good chance that there would've been a runoff, which would've been weeks of extra primary campaign. And so Vernon Jones who was first elected as a Democrat from Georgia in the state house and has recently turned into a Republican and has become extremely Trumpy and is notably also African American. So has sort of a different appeal than either Perdue or Kemp. He's been running for the governor's race as well. And he hasn't been polling terribly well, but enough that there was a good chance that he could push it to a runoff. And obviously Donald Trump doesn't want that because Donald Trump wants to stomp all over Brian Kemp.
David Beard :
So he's met with Vernon Jones. Vernon Jones sings Donald Trump’s praises. And then all of a sudden Jones drops out of this governor's race and parachutes into one of the congressional races that's open, Georgia's 10th district, which is open because the current incumbent is running for secretary of state. And so he's jumped into this open race, he soon after of course got Trump's endorsement, which certainly is convenient for him. Suffice to say, still there's a lot of candidates in that race, so I don't know whether or not Jones will actually come out of it, but obviously having Trump's endorsement in a Republican primary is a good benefit leaving Perdue and Kemp to duke it out mano a mano.
David Nir:
The fun thing here is that Perdue for all of Trump's extremely loud mouth support and incredible abuse that he's heaped on Brian Kemp, has been a pitiful fundraiser so far. He raised just one million dollars in his first fundraising report. Brian Kemp reported raising seven million dollars and had something like 12 million to the bank. Stacy Abrams beat them all. She raised more than nine million dollars, but an amazing thing happened this week, which is that the Republican Governor's Association, which helps Republicans win races for governor all across the nation, announced it was going to start spending on ads on behalf of Kemp in the primary. And what's so remarkable about this, is that the RGA has never had to spend to save an incumbent's ass in a primary. And what it does is it sets up an official and very deep pocketed arm of the GOP in direct conflict with Donald Trump. I think it won't be if he hasn't already, before Trump starts crapping on the RGA. So, this is going to be super fun to see how all of this plays out.
David Beard :
And the safe assumption going back since Trump first became the nominee back in 2016, is that if you got Trump support, you are really, really in a favored position in a Republican primary. And so I think folks have assumed, oh, Perdue, former statewide official, very prominent had Trump's endorsement, he would just walk all over Kemp. And we've seen both with the money distinction with the way that Kemp has sort of fought back aggressively against this. That he's not going quietly into the night. He is going to give it everything is got, and he's not afraid to scour the field if that's what it takes. And that is one of the necessary conditions that Stacy Abrams needs to win this election in November is a very messy Republican primary. And that's exactly what we've got turning out to be.
David Nir:
And the beautiful thing is that it really does seem to toss up the polling out there. What we've seen so far shows that either man could win the race. So, may the worst man win. We'll hit one last topic in this week's weekly hits, and we're going to a favorite arena of Beard's, which is international elections. What have you got for us?
David Beard :
Yes. So, from time to time, I'll pull out an interesting international election here in the weekly hits and talk about it. I've written a lot about various international elections for Daily Kos. So it's a favorite topic of mine. So, I want to take us to Portugal where they held a general election on January 30th. So just a little while ago, and that took place, it was a snap election. So it wasn't the regularly scheduled election because the two left-wing parties rejected the budget of the minority government, which was the Socialist party, who's the main center-left party in Portugal. They are the government, they proposed the budget, but it relied on the two left-wing parties. Voting for it in recent years and they rejected it at the end of last year. And that led to new elections.
David Beard :
What was expected to be a very narrow race, where polling sort of yo-yoed a bit between a very close race between the center-left Socialists and the center-right Social Democratic Party, turned into a unexpectedly large victory for the Socialists prime minister Antonio Conte, who's been in office since 2015, won his largest victory. They actually won a majority, which is tough to do. Portugal isn't entirely proportional, but there is a large proportional aspect to it. So he won... The socialist won 42%, which was 13% more than the second place, Social Democratic Party, who just won only 29%. And that margin allowed them to gain a majority of just their party, which means they won't have to rely on any left-wing parties to pass the budgets going forward. And so it should create a very stable period of governance in Portugal. One concerning thing from the election is that Chega, a far right party in Portugal, saw a significant rise. In 2019, when the last election was held they got just 1%.
David Beard :
And this year in this election, they got 7% and they're going to have a number of new members of parliament in Portugal. So, that's something to keep an eye on. Obviously the far right has risen in many countries across Europe. And so it's really been a lot lower to happen in Portugal than it has in other countries, but it's arrived there as well. So, that's something we're going to keep an eye on. And the good thing is that this result is part of sort of a broader revitalization of center-left parties across Europe in the past few years. There was a real period a few years ago where it seemed like both more radical left-wing parties or more aggressive left-wing parties and sort of centricity liberal parties were sort of combined to eat away at the sort of traditional center-left parties, which are normally the socialists in Europe.
David Beard :
And what we've seen is that they've rebounded really well both here in Portugal, but also in Spain, in Germany, where they recently took power last fall. And in a lot of the Nordic countries where the center-left is either in power or in power in coalition. So that's something that's a real positive to see after they were as a stretch of really unfortunate election results in Europe where the right really seem decedent.
David Nir:
You mentioned that this was a snap election. I am sure that in the United States, there are many times when presidents or congressional leaders wish they could call an early election when they're riding high in the polls. But I think we've seen a fair number of times on the international scene that these kind of calculations can go badly awry, or at least not work out as hoped. We saw that happen in Canada just last year. And I think we also saw something like that in the UK, not all that long ago. So perhaps sticking with fixed elections, maybe you should just be careful what you wish for and having regularly timed elections is maybe the better approach.
David Beard :
Yeah. I think the key and maybe the distinction here in Portugal is that the election was really necessary because the budget failed to pass. And we've also seen that in Israel where often the budget failing is what leads to an election. And I think that gives a better understanding of the electorate of why are we voting? The instances that you mentioned are really good examples of both in 2021 in Canada and in 2017 in the UK, when Theresa May called the snap election after she became prime minister, they were both elections that didn't seem necessary and there was a lot of questions both by opponents and by the electorate of why are we having this election? We just voted a couple years ago. Things are going okay why are you making us go through this?
David Beard :
Because it turns out regular people don't really like elections. I don't understand it, but it seems to be the case. What you need to do... Advice for me to all the international parties out there, if you're going to call a snap election, you better have a really good reason to do so.
David Nir:
Well, I could say the same thing about the US. Why are we voting again this November? I'm pretty happy with the 2020 results, can't we just stick with those for a couple more years? But that's not in the cards.
David Beard :
With us today is Drew Linzer, the director and co-founder of Civiqs, one of the leading online polling and analytics companies in the country. Thanks for joining us today, Drew.
Drew Linzer:
Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me.
David Beard :
So, it's still pretty common that when people think about polling, they think about, Gallup, the 20th century of calling a bunch of landlines until they've got a complete, so they have enough people to get a good response rate. And that's pretty different from how Civiqs operates. So, why don't you tell us a little bit about how Civiqs does things in the current modern online era?
Drew Linzer:
Sure. So, Civiqs is an entirely online polling firm, which means that we conduct interviews with people all across the United States on a regular basis on the internet. Folks sign up to participate in polls, which is a great way to have their voices heard, people really enjoy taking the surveys that we send them. And we have some scientific sampling methods that we use to select from among all the people who have signed up to take surveys with us. Who's going to get a survey that day. So we call this big group of people a panel. And if you're in the panel, you get emails from us every once in a while. And you click a link in the email and take the survey. It's very convenient for folks. It means that we get response rates that are much higher than traditional telephone surveys. And the methodologies are very comparable to what would be used in a traditional telephone survey.
Drew Linzer:
So scientific sampling to get representative groups of Americans, and then all of the sort of traditional weighting and modeling techniques that go into analyzing the survey results to get the final answers that we publish and release out publicly. So, it's got a lot of benefits over traditional survey methodology which struggles with low response rates and other issues having to do with telephone interviewing these days, while maintaining very high standards of quality and accuracy. So, it's a technology that we're very excited about and it lets us do very large quantities of polling on lots of questions all the time, everywhere in a way that is accurate and sustainable.
David Nir:
So, I think there's no question that online polling has grown a great deal in popularity and also in acceptance in recent years. Obviously though, a key difference is the fact that with traditional telephone polling, at least in the lay understanding, calling a bunch of people at random to try to get as random representative of the sample as possible. And with the panel that you just described, folks are obviously opting into that to receive these emails from Civiqs. So, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you ensure that you still get a representative sample, even though people are choosing to participate as opposed to telephone polls, where people are sort of being made to participate.
Drew Linzer:
Yeah. And this is the key distinguishing feature between the traditional telephone poll and the online poll. With the telephone poll, at least in theory, everyone has a telephone and you can randomly call the phone numbers that everyone has and they don't have to sign up in advance or anything like that, you just call them. Whereas online, there is no registry of everyone's email address that you can just send an email to. Even if you worry to get your hands on such a list, laws forbid you from doing that, we actually get permission from everybody to email folks. And on top of that there's no sense that you can randomly generate email addresses to contact. So it calls for a different approach to sampling.
Drew Linzer:
And it starts with getting as many people as we can into the panel from all parts of the country, all demographic characteristics, all political perspectives, so that when it comes time for us to create a sample, which is part random and part based on what we know about the demographic characteristics and political characteristics of the country, there's a very large pool of people who are interested in participating and will be eligible to participate and will participate. And it turns out that it works just as well if not better than traditional telephone sampling, because response rates on telephones are so low, people are moving away from landline telephones to cell phones, mobile phones, which have very different laws governing how they can be contacted, especially among young people it's very hard to get young people to respond to telephone surveys. There are other factors as well. People just don't have the patience that they might have had 20 years ago to answer a 20 or 30 minute survey on the telephone.
Drew Linzer:
But if they get something on an email and they click it on their phone and they're in the line at the grocery store, it's very easy to complete. So, we see real advantages in terms of getting folks to answer surveys. They seem to enjoy. Like I said earlier, they respond at good rates. And one of the biggest advantages of having an online panel in place for sampling at least, is that people volunteer lots of demographic characteristics about themselves as part of helping us understand what Americans think. And we can use that information to sample them accurately and make sure that we're getting a pretty accurate breakdown of people with all different characteristics at the time the sample is generated. And it makes for a much more efficient and clean process. And all the studies that have come out recently comparing the accuracy of online polling with telephone polling, show that they're pretty much on par these days. The technology has really come a long way.
David Nir:
So, speaking of technology coming a long way, one other huge way that Civiqs differs from traditional polling is, with a standard poll, maybe up pollster is going into the field to talk to voters for three, four, five days. But you guys are taking a totally different approach to both how often you contact people and also how you report and gather results for the questions that you have in the field. Can you talk about that?
Drew Linzer:
Yeah. This is something that's maybe the most exciting thing to that we do, at least in my opinion. And if you go to our website, you can see some of the results that we release. And that's C-I-V-I-Q-S, we are an online company, so we have to spell our name wrong. But Civiqs with a Q. Civiqs.com. We release the results of daily tracking polls that we conduct on a huge range of topical questions, political interest. Right now, if you go there, you'll see results from polling we're doing about people's attitudes about the pandemic. People's attitudes towards Black Lives Matter, towards President Biden. On a whole host of issues and politicians. And in many cases, some of these results track Americans opinions daily going back five, six more years. And the way that this is all possible is that our survey methodology enables us to interview folks from the panel every single day.
Drew Linzer:
Not everyone gets interviewed every day obviously, but we are interviewing Americans every single day. And we've been doing this every single day for years and years and years. And we have some pretty advanced statistical techniques that we use to process this data and smooth out the daily ups and downs in the daily samples and produce trendlines on what Americans think about politics. You can break it down by party ID, you can break it down by gender, race, age. You name it. We get some results even at the state level. And it's just a really rich and detailed look at how American public opinion has evolved on a wide range of issues over time. As I said, it's something that we're very proud about, it's a unique thing that we offer and I'd love it if folks listening would go check it out.
David Beard:
Great. And that gives me the segue to dive into the current political situation a little bit. Joe Biden's polling is not good right now. I think we all know that even no matter what poll you look at, be it the Civiqs polling or other polls. There's no poll where you can point to and be like, "Oh, actually, Joe Biden's doing great." And Civiqs has actually had it a bit lower than the average. That's been very consistent sort of since the beginning of his presidency. So, I think that's less interesting than looking at sort of the demographics of that drop. So, what have you seen over the past year that sort of caused this drop in any sort of particular demographics that stick out at you that's been a particular problem?
Drew Linzer:
We were one of the first firms doing a lot of tracking who sounded the alarm about Biden's declining approval rating. When he took office, we had him in positive territory, plus five approval versus disapproval. And the honeymoon period lasted a little while. His approval rating fell to about even by March of 2021 and held there for some time and then really started falling again around May of last year. And it's been a rough ride. He hit a low around October of last year. There was a lot of talk last year after the withdrawal from Afghanistan about how that was a defining moment, but really opinion had been turning against president Biden before that, and only continued the downward trend after that. He saw a slight uptick in his approval following the signing of the infrastructure bill, but pretty much immediately after that, the Omicron variant of COVID was classified and started spreading. And his approval rating took another downturn.
Drew Linzer:
He hit a low in our polling in the mid thirties, and it's been staying pretty steady there. The number one group where he's losing support is young people. And in particular, Americans age 18 to 34 who were crucial to his election victory, who had a plus 13 approval rating for Biden when he took office, he's underwater 30 points. And it's just been a steady decline. He's also lost a lot of around among Independents. Independents were pretty much even on him when he took office. And now he's underwater by around 40 points. That's the story, it's been pretty consistent.
Drew Linzer:
What we can do is measure what Americans are thinking, what they're feeling. We can break it out demographically and see which groups are changing. For the more in depth question of why we do do supplementary polling on a whole range of topics, including in partnership with Daily Kos. And we put out a monthly poll trying to understand in greater detail explanation and nuance behind all sorts of things, but including President Biden's falling approval rating. In fact, last year we did a couple of really interesting surveys with Daily Kos. One was asking Americans their level of satisfaction with a whole battery of elements of life in America today, and seeing what exactly they were so dissatisfied about. So, the results of that we have up on our site. One interesting comparison though, you were asking if this is typical, is simply between our tracking of Biden's approval rating and former President Trump's job approval rating.
Drew Linzer:
And even though the approval rating for former President Trump was never very high, it was always steady. And we tracked... This is one of the things we find when we track issues every single day. Sometimes the numbers just don't change. So support and opposition for former President Trump was just... I mean, for four years it was just flat. And in contrast, approval for President Biden has fallen. So, I wouldn't necessarily say this is just the way things go. I think that people are genuinely increasingly disapproving of the job that they feel President Biden is doing. We can see it among independents and among young people particularly. As to why, it's probably lots of reasons. That's a big question for folks to figure out.
David Beard :
And another important factor in all this is going to be turnout, which is not something that is-
Drew Linzer:
I would say.
David Beard :
... easy to pull particularly so early. Obviously once you get closer, you start to see likely voter models that can give you sort of a better sense of this. But we don't know right now, will these young people who are largely unhappy with Joe Biden, still largely voting Democratic on the generic ballot. Are we going to see turnout suffer in those groups in November if they continue to be unhappy with the president. And so instead of going and voting for Democrats like they did in 2020, they just stay home, which is something that has often plagued Democrats in midterms where democratic presidents have been in office. This sort of like, "Oh, well, we've got the presidency, I'm not really happy with what we've accomplished. So I'm just going to sit this one out."
Drew Linzer:
That's a huge question. It's something that we are very interested in, both as folks who do political polling, but also from a methodological standpoint, because one of the things that we as pollsters are responsible for as we get into the summer, is coming up with polling that is not only of registered voters, but of likely voters. And so we do a lot of research throughout the early part of election years, and this continues into the summer as well, but trying to gauge who is interested in voting, who is excited about voting and who intends to vote, so that we can try to come up with a projection of what the voting population in November is going to be. And so we've started studying this already asking folks how excited they are and if they intend to vote so that we can build up a model of whether or not we think that the electorate this year is going to be say, older than who is registered, more Democratic, more Republican, you name it.
Drew Linzer:
But this is something that we're going to be following very closely because young people who are traditionally in a very important part of Democratic coalition, if they decide not to vote in the 2022 election, then this could turn a situation that is not looking great for the Democrats right now into a situation that is much worse for the Democrats. And as much as I appreciate you all having me on the show, I'm afraid that I don't have a ton of good news to share. I'm telling you what we're seeing out there. And some of these results are not very promising for Democrats.
David Nir:
Now, will you run polls at any point, testing Raphael Warnock against his likely opponents. In his case, it's almost certainly going to be former NFL star Herschel Walker and Mark Kelly against his opponents in Arizona. The situation is much less clear as to whom he might face. So, is there any data on that front we might expect to see from Civiqs?
Drew Linzer:
Both very tight. One of the things that we're able to do is track favorable ratings for every state level politician in the United States. And so we have been tracking a Mark Kelly's favorable rating and Raphael Warnock's next favorable rating going back to April of 2020. Let's start with Mark Kelly. Mark Kelly in 2020 was viewed pretty favorably on balance by folks in Arizona. He had higher than normal number of people saying that they weren't quite sure about him yet, but that's what you would expect for someone at that stage in his campaign. What we've seen over time is that on balance he enjoyed a positive net favorable rating up until around May this year. And ever since then, it's been very close. On balance right now his unfavorable rating is slightly higher than his favorable rating, and it's been pretty steady.
Drew Linzer:
So that's within our margin of error, but it's really tight. And if we look at Raphael Warnock, it's a similar pattern. When he started up back in April of 2020, people had not really heard of him more than half of the voters in Georgia who we were polling back then said they were unsure about him. They hadn't formed an opinion yet. And then as the campaign went on, as you'd expect, people formed an opinion of him. He started off with a net favorable rating. And by the time he won his election in January, the runoff election attitudes towards him had basically evened out so that he had a slight favorable rating advantage. And it has just held steady the entire time he's been in office. Right now we're pegging him slightly underwater, but just slightly. And so there's a reason that these two races are viewed as close, because opinions about both of these senators in their home states are very evenly divided.
David Nir:
Well, we will definitely have you back once primary season gets underway. Usually it's our rule at Daily Kos Elections. We won't talk about an election that's more than two years away. And the reasons for that are many, but there are just so many races to worry about going on right now that how can we possibly talk about 2024, when we haven't even done 2022 yet. But we're going to make an exception. Very recently Civiqs made quite a splash with some polling also in Arizona, except the about Arizona's other Senator. And that would be Kyrsten Sinema, who of course has become just about progressive enemy number one within the Democratic party. Can you tell us a little bit about that polling and kind of maybe talk a little bit about the buzz that it got?
Drew Linzer:
Yes. So, Civiqs has been tracking attitudes towards Senator Sinema going back to January of 2020. And when we started tracking her, the polling on her was fairly similar to what you would expect for any democratic Senator. On balance, Democrats said they had a favorable opinion of her and Republicans said they did not. And that all changed in 2021. She made the news for initially coming out with stances against the filibuster. She made some statements about the minimum wage. This is going back to February of 2021. In May there was some controversy around her not attending a January 6th commission vote and some other ways that she was behaving in public and decision she was making. And then last September, she was against reconciliation. She was meeting with Biden, she was being really, I don't know how else to describe it. She was standing in the way of President Biden's agenda. And each step of the way her faith rating among Arizona Democrats fell. It's below 10% in our point right now.
David Nir:
Wow! Wow!
Drew Linzer:
Her unfavorable rating among Democrats is over 80%. And you just don't see this. It's been mirrored, not great at an extent, but it's been mirrored in an increase in her favorable rating among Republicans. And we actually are showing her with over 50 per percent favorable rating among Republicans and a 20% unfavorable rating. There's still about a third of Republican voters in Arizona who are unsure about her. She has lost essentially all of her support among Arizona Democrats over one year. And it's been something to see.
David Nir:
I have never seen anything like that myself.
David Beard :
So, Senator Sinema, given her terrible, terrible ratings among Democrats, again, this is two years away, but it seems like somebody who would be like extremely vulnerable to a more progressive primary challenger who isn't standing in the way of everything practically that president Biden wants to do and repeatedly making most of the Democratic party very angry. But the other Senator who's been standing in the way a fair amount is Joe Manchin from West Virginia, who is in a very different position in large part due the fact that he represents West Virginia, it's a very different state than Arizona, which is very much a swing state. And so how has his sort of positioning and the way he's gone about the past year affected his favorability ratings?
Drew Linzer:
It's a different overall picture. Similar trends, but it's a different state. So in Arizona, because of the trends we were just talking about, Senator Sinema is underwater 20 points. Joe Manchin on the other hand, right now is in positive favorable territory for the first time ever, that we've been tracking his favorable rating. And that goes back four years. So, for the longest time as we've been tracking Joe Manchin, even though he was generally supported by most Democrats slim margin, he was strongly opposed by Republicans. Well, starting around last spring, April, May, June, July, we started seeing Republicans in West Virginia warming up to Joe Manchin. And in fact, Joe Manchin's favorable rating among West Virginia Republicans is plus 15. It's in clearly positive territory. So he is facing a very different environment in West Virginia than Senator Sinema is in Arizona. And the trends for him on net seem to be working in his favor.
David Nir:
I think this buttress is the argument that we have made all along at Daily Kos on the activism side that for progressives who want actual progress, the goal has to be to make Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema irrelevant by electing more Democrats. And of course protecting the vulnerable Democratic senators we were talking about earlier, such as Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock. And like we said, we're definitely going to check in with you Drew, later this cycle to see how the polling is looking in all of these key Senate rate. But we'd like to ask before we let you go, how can our listeners find out more about Civiqs and how can they participate in Civiqs polling? Everyone always says, "I never get polled. I never get polled." But with Civiqs, you can.
Drew Linzer:
I'm inviting everyone who's listening to visit our website. C-I-V-I-Q-S.com. There is a wealth of information for anyone who's interested in politics and public opinion. Please browse it and click through and see what you can find. If you would like to join the panel, it's completely free. And all we ever do is occasionally send you an email with a link to take a survey. And right at the top of the page, there is a little button that says, take surveys. If you click that button, you can take a short survey. And at the end of it, we simply ask, where do you live? And we use that for sampling. And what is your email address? When you type in your email address, we send you a little email that says welcome to the Civiqs panel, and that's really all it takes. Stay tuned and wait for another email from us every couple of weeks or so. And please take the surveys and it's a really great way to participate if you've ever wondered why no one ever calls you, all these polls you're hearing about, here's something you can do.
David Nir:
We've been talking with Drew Linzer, the director and co-founder of Civiqs, one of the leading online polling and analytics companies in the United States. Drew, thank you so much for coming on to The Downballot.
Drew Linzer:
Thank you.
David Beard :
That's all from us this week. Thanks to Drew Linzer for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere. And if you haven't already, please like and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five star rating and review. Thanks also to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor Tim Einenkel. We'll be back next week with a new episode.
