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NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll Results: The Transition, Trump, & COVID-19

Providers or Posters: Who’s Responsible for the Disinfo Mess on Social Media?

Rarely a day goes by without someone calling out prominent people posting disinformation — misleading statements, half-truths, outright lies — on social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. And it matters because Americans use social media a lot.

Over 8 in 10 (83%) Americans over the age of 12 have at least one social media account and adults are currently spending about 123 minutes per day in them (according to data from Backlinko). So, with all the disinformation filling social media, one question pollsters have been asking is: Who is responsible for policing social media sites? The platforms or those who post?

In a 2016 McClatchy-Marist Poll, 53% of Americans believed that Facebook and Twitter are “free marketplaces” and users are responsible for determining the truth in what they read. 41% thought the platforms had a responsibility to stop the sharing of information that is identified as false.

This is a topic that, at that time, both Democrats and Republicans agreed on…to an extent. 52% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats thought users were responsible — a narrow 3-point difference.

Fast forward to 2020, and opinions have dramatically changed — and become more politically polarized.

In an August 2020 Pew Research survey, three in four Americans (75%) said technology companies had a responsibility to prevent misuse of their platforms to influence the 2020 presidential election.

While not the same question as the one we asked in 2016, it hints at a significant shift in public opinion with regard to how much social media platforms should be responsible for the content they host.

What’s really striking, though, is the partisan divide in the Pew study. While 85% of Democrats said the tech companies should do something about the misuse of their platforms to influence an election, 64% of Republicans felt the same. A 21-point gap — much larger than in the 2016 poll — albeit on a different question.

Still, no matter who Americans believe should deal with social media misuse, a large majority agree it exists.

In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll conducted earlier in 2020, 82% of Americans thought it likely that they would encounter misleading information on social media sites.

So, with a majority of Americans expecting misleading information and a majority thinking social media companies themselves should take at least some responsibility for the problem, it may be one of the few bipartisan issues the new Congress will deal with in 2021.

This post was written by Marist Poll “College 2 Career” intern Thomas Muratore.

masks and gourds

Marist Poll Results & Analysis

 

 

 

 

 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly six in ten Americans (58%) report they plan on celebrating Thanksgiving this year with fewer people. More than one in three (36%) plan to spend the holiday with the same number of people as last year. Only 4% say they will include more people in their gatherings. 

 Democrats (74%) and independents (58%) are more likely than Republicans (39%) to report they will participate in a smaller gathering. Regionally, 65% of residents in the Midwest, 63% of those in the Northeast, 57% of Americans living in the West, and 51% of those in the South agree. 

 Regardless of demography, the proportion of those who report they will have a larger get-together is in single digits. 

 The pandemic is personal for more than seven in ten Americans. 71% of adults nationally report they personally know someone who has had coronavirus. This includes 81% of midwesterners73% of southerners, 67% of those in the Northeast, and 63% of those in the West.  

Swing State Voters Rule: Why Every Vote Doesn’t Count the Same

Think about Election Day! Voters of all different ages, ethnicities, religions, and incomes come together to voice their opinions. So, regardless of differences people might have, everyone has equal say, right? Actually, no.

Not every vote is created equally, and the greatest factor on how much your vote truly matters is simply where you live.

In reality, swing states have a lot more say in who becomes America’s next president than states that reliably vote blue or red, year in and year out.

Hamline University Professor of Political Science Dalton Shaultz says, “There are only about 10 swing states – states that could flip between a Republican or Democratic presidential candidate – that really determine the outcome of the election in terms of getting a candidate to 270 electoral votes.”

What about the rest of us? Shaultz says, “In 40 states, Democrats or Republicans can get enough votes that there is no realistic chance the opposing party can win that state’s electoral votes.”

That means that in those consistently red or blue states, voters literally have less influence than voters in swing states. Adam McCann of WalletHub, a personal finance company, shows this by factoring in win probabilities from fivethirtyeight.com and electors per adult population for each state. His work demonstrates the sometimes vast difference in impact between voters in swing states in presidential elections and those in ‘spectator states.’

For example, McCann calculated a vote in Ohio (a swing state) has 107 times the weight of a vote in California (a Democratic spectator state). And, a voter in Florida (a swing state) has 40 times more juice than one in Oklahoma (a Republican spectator state).

So, it’s no wonder both Trump and Biden spent so much of their campaign budgets and time in the battleground swing states; voters in these states are more consequential than voters in others.

Saul Anuzis, President of the 60 Plus Association, a conservative advocacy group for seniors, says, “We don’t so much elect the President of the United States as we do the president of the battleground states.”

What really highlights this reality of differing voter influences is that, since 1992, Republicans have won the White House three times — and twice did so while losing the popular vote. George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 both won the Presidency in the Electoral College in part by capturing key swing states by very narrow margins.

This may help explain the finding from our NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll from December 2019: 73% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said it was a “good idea” to get rid of the Electoral College. Conversely 78% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that was a “bad idea”.

But, getting rid of the Electoral College is no easy task. NPR’s Miles Parks maps out the steps to make this happen: “Fully overhauling the way the president is selected would take a Constitutional amendment, which would require the votes of two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the states”.

And what are the odds of those things happening in this political era?

This post was written by Marist Poll “College 2 Career” intern Thomas Muratore.

NBC News/Marist Poll Results & Analysis of Pennsylvania

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NBC News/Marist Poll Results & Analysis of Arizona

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NBC News/Marist Poll Results & Analysis of North Carolina

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NBC News/Marist Poll Results & Analysis of Florida

 

 

 

 

 

The Climate is Changing But Attitudes About It Aren’t: Polling Climate Change Over the Years

For the first time in presidential debate history, climate change was one of the focus issues last week in Nashville. And you might say, it’s about time. How so?

We’ve been talking about climate change for a long time. And, as it turns out, we’ve been saying a lot of the same things, and agreeing on a lot of the same solutions for a long time as well.

Since 2006, multiple surveys have shown roughly 2 in 3 Americans recognize climate change as a real threat and a relevant issue. But only this year, for the first time in an election year, has it cracked the top 3 issues Americans identify as important.

In a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll, 11% of those surveyed identified climate change as the biggest issue facing the country, placing third after the economy (20%) and coronavirus (13%), but coming in ahead of other hot-button issues such as health care (8%), race relations (8%), and immigration (3%).

And last month in honor of Climate Week, an art project in New York City’s Union Square was reprogrammed as a “Climate Clock” counting down to the point at which some scientists argue climate changes will be irreversible.

So, we wanted to understand how attitudes about climate change have, well, changed over the years.

Let’s start in May 2006, when Al Gore released his Oscar-winning climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. It was among the first widely-seen warnings about what was then more commonly known as global warming. Around that time, the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes polled Americans about whether they favored or opposed legislation limiting US emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Nearly seven in ten respondents (68%) favored such legislation.

A few years later in 2008, the year polar bears were first listed as “threatened” by the U.S. Government in part due to polar ice melt, another survey found similar results. American Solutions for Winning the Future showed 65% of Americans were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about climate change.

In 2012 Hurricane Sandy caused significant damage in seven countries from the Caribbean to Canada. Climate scientists linked the size of the storm (the largest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded) to the changing climate. A poll that year conducted by ORC International reported 66% of Americans viewed climate change as a real threat and that action was needed now or in the future.

Five years later, as the devastating 2017 fire season wreaked havoc in California, we framed a climate change question in economic terms since many politicians had argued addressing it would harm the economy. We asked Americans if they thought “addressing climate change should be given priority even at the risk of slowing economic growth”? A majority (57%) did.

Which brings us to this moment in time when climate change seems to have moved from an issue that a majority of Americans cared about, to one they believe is a top priority. We’ll keep polling to see if it stays that way.

This post was written by Marist Poll “College 2 Career” intern Sarah DeBellis.

US Capitol dome

NBC 4 New York/Marist Poll Results & Analysis