Friday Maibag!

Open it up.

Happy Friday!

We made it!

I am getting ready to teach my FOURTH class of the semester(!) at Georgetown later today.

This week’s topic: Is horse race journalism really so terrible? Thoughts welcome!

Before we get into your questions from the week that was, let me remind you that the Friday mailbag is a post for paid subscribers. If you are a free subscriber, you’ll be able to read some of it. But why not enjoy the whole thing! Become a paid subscriber today!

Below I answered a whole bunch of questions. But, if I didn’t get to yours, never fear! Tune into my weekly Friday livestream over at my YouTube channel. It’s at 1 pm eastern — and I will spend an hour (or so) answering questions there too!

Here. We. Go.

Q: What is your all-time favorite Trump quote? This one may be my favorite: "So we have that so-called area, they consider it like a sacred area. And I will say this, I don't think I am a believer, but I have interviewed pilots that look, I like Tom Cruise, but better than Tom Cruise".

A: Oh man. That’s like asking me to pick my favorite child 😂😂😂

The one I think about the most is when Trump, while he was president, did an interview where a journalist asked him what grade he would give himself for the job he had done. “I would give myself an A+,” he said. The arrogance! The hubris! The self regard!

This is a fun game though. What’s YOUR favorite Trump quote?

Q: I start my day with your Morning video -- thanks for all you do. My question has to do with the reliability of polls. Do they still rely primarily on the telephone for gathering information? If so, how can this produce reliable data since many people do not accept phone calls from unknown phone numbers?

A: That’s so nice. Thank you!

As for polling, it sort of depends on the pollster! Most — although far from all — still rely on phone calls although those calls are now made much more to cellphones than landlines. (I have a landline in my house. It rings once every two weeks or so.) Some pollsters mix in Internet questionnaires as well.

The big issue for pollsters is that telephone response rates continue to go down. This, from the New York Times’ Nate Cohn in 2022, is stunning:

In the poll we have in the field right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview. If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.

Two hours!

I mean, that’s obviously a problem. And it’s not going to get much better in the near term as I don’t see people all of a sudden rushing to answer their phones when they don’t recognize the number.

Q: Can you help me get my mind right for election night? We know it will be a very close election coming down to a small number of votes in a few states. In 2020 there was a lot of mail in voting, and it took longer for us to get results and enough data to project Biden the winner. Do you think this will be like 2020 when it took days for us to get an official winner? Or might it be something more like 2004 (can’t believe that was 20 years ago now) when John Kerry was conceding the next day? I know Trump won’t ever concede but how soon might there be an officially projected winner this year?