As the 2026 midterm elections approach, new research raises an urgent question: are Americans operating within fundamentally different information realities? In this episode, Professor Matthew Baum examines what voters know about election rules, where they get their information, and how partisan divides shape perceptions of the voting process.
With the 2026 midterms approaching, a troubling question surfaces: are we living in two completely different realities?
Professor Matthew Baum of Harvard Kennedy School joins Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to examine new research from the Shorenstein Center in collaboration with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation on Americans’ knowledge of voting regulations in the 2026 Voting Information Trends report.
The findings reveal significant gaps in understanding when asked about their state’s voting regulations:
With the midterms approaching, this episode offers timely insight into how voters get information—and how different information environments may influence what they believe about the voting process.
Voiceover:
You're listening to Terms of Engagement, a weekly show from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, featuring Ash Center Director, Archon Fung and Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy, Stephen Richer. Now let's get to the show.
Archon Fung (00:33):
Hey everyone. Welcome to Terms of Engagement. My name's Archon Fung and I'm the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Stephen Richer (00:43):
And I'm Stephen Richer. I'm the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I am now a lecturer and a fellow at the Ash Center.
Archon Fung (00:50):
We're recording this show live and hopefully we're looking a little bit better or at least a little bit clearer because we've upped our camera quality due to some more professional production advice. So any feedback you have on the form of that will be very welcome. If you'd like to join the conversation, please just type in the comment section in YouTube or wherever you're watching if you're joining us live. And then otherwise, if you're watching us recorded, send feedback to info@ash.harvard.edu.
Stephen Richer (01:25):
Yeah. The next version of enhancements will actually superimpose Ryan Gosling's face over mine, and then it'll be really hopefully visually enhanced.
Archon Fung (01:35):
More appealing.
Stephen Richer (01:36):
But as always, Archon and I are speaking on behalf of ourselves, not on behalf of the Ash Center or any Harvard University or Harvard Kennedy School affiliate. And today we are talking about what voters are listening to, whom they're listening to, what types of information they are getting. And a little bit of context here is that after the 2020 election, we found out as a profession, election administrators, I was a former election administrator, that oh my gosh, a lot of people are now interested in how elections work and a lot of people don't have great information on how elections work. And some people don't even have great information on how to do the part that they're supposed to do, the voting part.
(02:22):
And you'll have to forgive elections officials because we were playing a bit of catch up here, in that prior to 2020, very few people actually cared about how the behind the scenes process happened. And because most people only participate with the process every so often, it just wasn't a great environment for distributing information. Since then, election officials have really been trying hard to distribute information to voters in a myriad of ways such that they can, yes, better understand how the tabulation process works, et cetera, but also so that voters have everything that they need in anticipation of the election.
(03:02):
Today we're going to ask, are voters even listening to election officials? And if they're not listening to election officials, where are they getting information from? And are we living in completely siloed Americas where one group of Americans are getting information from this source and another group of Americans are getting election information from this source and never the tween shall meet?
(03:28):
So to discuss that with us, we have an in-house expert here at the Harvard Kennedy School and Archon's going to introduce him.
Archon Fung (03:36):
I will, but I wanted to ask you, Stephen, just a question about the excitement or enhanced interest in elections. Some people say our public institution should be really boring. The problem is when banking gets too fancy and high-tech and everybody's talking about banking after the financial crisis. I know judges who say, "Well, the law should be boring. It's a problem that so many people are following podcasts about the Supreme Court." It should just be turn down the volume. Do you think most election officials would prefer a pre-2020 reality in which nobody really pays attention to how they cast your ballots and then you read about it the next day in the paper?
Stephen Richer (04:17):
Absolutely. I think the overwhelming would prefer that. I myself probably would have preferred that, although admittedly, some of it was fun-
Archon Fung (04:24):
Sure.
Stephen Richer (04:24):
... having people interested-
Archon Fung (04:25):
It's exciting.
Stephen Richer (04:25):
... in the office. But that's not the reality we're living in.
Archon Fung (04:29):
Yeah, it's not.
Stephen Richer (04:29):
And I would say to members of the judiciary, and you and I have had this conversation before, yes, they would prefer that people just have confidence in the legal process, but that they not have to be out there in the public talking about what it is the federal or state courts do because they don't see that as part of their role. And what I would say to them is, people are filling that space and they're just filling that space without you. And so I think that's another area of government that might have to start communicating and maybe they'll look at election officials and what we've done and what's worked well and what hasn't worked well, unless Matt comes in and tells us that actually nobody's listening to you anyways and you haven't had much success since the 2020 election, but we'll get to that.
Archon Fung (05:15):
We're about to find out and we're about to find out from Matthew Baum, who is the Marvin Cal professor of global communications and my colleague, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School. He now teaches in my area, which is the democratic institutions and politics area, and he is the exalted chair of our teaching area. He studies how information through the news media, entertainment, and now social media, shapes what we all believe and what leaders can get away with. His first book, which is 'Soft News Goes to War', showed that Americans who don't follow politics closely pick up a surprising amount of information incidentally from talk shows and entertainment media. It may be that that insight has a new relevance now in the age of TikTok and Instagram.
(06:07):
He has written many other books and also the co-lead author of a 2018 science article, 'The Science of Fake News'. In 2020, he co-founded the COVID States Project, which is a 50-state survey that became the Civic Health and Institutions Project or CHIP 50, which we'll talk about today. That project won an American Association of Public Opinion Research Award in 2025. And he also co-founded the Harvard Kennedy School's Misinformation Review. So Matt is a great, great person to talk to about how Americans are getting election information and especially about a couple of the tools that he and his team at the Schorenstein Center, in collaboration with the Ash Center, have recently fielded. And we'll be introducing some of those tools to you and you can benefit from them yourself. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matthew Baum (07:06):
Great to be doing this with you.
Stephen Richer (07:07):
Thanks, Matt. So I'm going to jump the gun here because I'm excited about this, but first we've already got a lot of live viewers, and so if you have questions, please put them in the chat. Archon and I will be monitoring those and hopefully we'll integrate some into the conversation. But this is not at all what we said was going to be the order of operations. But Matt, I just want to know, has it all been in vain, everything that election administrators are posting to their government websites? They're getting social media channels now. They're trying to put out cute little videos about how elections work. Are people listening?
Matthew Baum (07:40):
Well, I mean, I think it's really important to think of this dynamically. Most people in the summer and early fall are not listening, but we're now getting to the point where people are going to start to tune in. And remember, this is a midterm election and people like you and I who are really interested in these things get very hot and bothered and excited, but a lot of Americans aren't that engaged with midterm elections despite all of the attention that this one is getting. So I think the short answer to your question is up until now, a lot of people haven't been listening so much. Some more people will start listening, but some other people are just not going to listen.
Archon Fung (08:23):
Yeah. So Matt, maybe I'll post the dashboard. We can talk about your tools, but following up on Stephen's question, a huge issue that we're trying to figure out, that you're trying to figure out is who are they listening to? And so some of the research, if I can get the dashboard up, which I probably can't do, but maybe somebody can post it, shows that many people who are getting... No, not that one, not that one. Not that one either. Sorry. Many people who are getting information about how to vote, most of them are getting it from social media websites and some of them are getting it from news websites, and a smaller percentage from government websites, which include but aren't only, election official websites. A lot of people are getting voting information from the DMV and other places like that. Poor Stephen and his colleagues out there are pulling out-
Stephen Richer (09:29):
They're trying really hard.
Archon Fung (09:30):
... all of these PSAs, updating their websites, creating better bots to do automated election information, but people are just mostly getting it from other places. It's like your soft news book, right?
Matthew Baum (09:44):
Yeah, for sure.
Archon Fung (09:45):
So what do we do about that, if anything?
Matthew Baum (09:49):
Well, I mean, if you're familiar with the allegory of the drunkard search, I think the key insight here is find out where people are and put it there, rather than just putting it out and hoping that they'll find you. And I think you need to consider the denominator here and caveat this. The top line in that dashboard, which unfortunately you weren't able to actually get on the screen, is in the neighborhood of 40% of people who are getting election information, period, full stop. So as I said, a lot of people still haven't tuned in. A bit of a plurality around one in five people say they're getting this from social media. There's no reason that that information might not be what election officials are trying to communicate necessarily. The social media doesn't tell you what that information is. It just tells you the platform that it's coming on.
(10:45):
So it's a little bit more complicated to figure out how efficacious is the effort that election officials are making or how effective will it be over the next five, six weeks. Excuse me.
Archon Fung (11:02):
Yeah.
Stephen Richer (11:03):
So the small snippet would be you don't have to do away with your website, but the reality is that the drunkards, which I guess in this case are the American public, are not stumbling upon the government website. They're spending time on news media websites and they're spending time on social media. So figuring out how to integrate into those places where they're already existing, right? And there we go, and there's the website.
Matthew Baum (11:29):
There it is.
Archon Fung (11:29):
Yeah.
Matthew Baum (11:31):
Yeah, I mean, firstly, economists like to call it the streetlight effect because you don't have to accuse people of being drunkards. So if you prefer that, you can do that. But yes, I think that's about right, is that from this dashboard, you can see what platforms people are going to, but you aren't getting eyes onto exactly what they're exposing themselves to when they go to that platform. And it's really early days. So we need to see how this sort of builds out over the next three, four weeks.
Archon Fung (12:02):
Yeah. Do you expect these patterns to change over the next three or four weeks or you just don't have a prior on that?
Matthew Baum (12:10):
I don't have a strong prior, although I would've though the social media numbers would actually be relatively higher honestly.
Archon Fung (12:15):
Oh, interesting. Interesting.
Matthew Baum (12:17):
I think that just seems like a logical place given media consumption habits these days. I also thought AI might make it out of the residual, but I guess not.
Archon Fung (12:29):
Yeah, we'll see. But maybe this is an underscan of social media and AI, right?
Matthew Baum (12:36):
Yeah, that's right. It could be. We don't know exactly what people are thinking of either.
Archon Fung (12:40):
Yeah. Right. So I think most of our audience is sophisticated enough to be careful consumers of graphs like this, but every graph like this doesn't affect ground truth necessarily. There's a lot of instrumentation going on here. You want to talk just for about a minute on what the instrumentation is? Where are we getting these results about where people are getting election information?
Matthew Baum (13:06):
Right. So this is from a project called the National Internet Observatory that is primarily run out of Northeastern University. And what they're doing is building panels of volunteers who allow researchers to monitor their internet behavior. So this is a panel of, I think, 3,000 people at this point. And so they have little add-ons on their web browser and on their phones, and that allows the researchers to see everywhere they go and the type of information that they expose themselves to. So what this is saying is if the query is where are you seeing voting related information, this is showing the behavior of those 3,000 or so panelists in terms of when they were looking for voting information, where did they go?
Archon Fung (14:02):
Yeah.
Stephen Richer (14:04):
It's amazing to me that people willingly put something on their phone and their computer that will allow researchers to track their web behavior. But setting that aside, one of the first things that jumps out at me is that the Republicans are lower on all of these categories than are Independents and Democrats. And so are Republicans simply not consuming as much information about where to vote, how to vote, how the voting process works, or is it something that's not captured here?
Matthew Baum (14:36):
So my intuition is that this is reflective of the enthusiasm gap, that Democrats and Independents are just more motivated earlier because they're more excited about this election. And this is not a midterm election that thus far at least has particularly fired up Republicans.
Archon Fung (14:56):
Right.
Matthew Baum (14:57):
So if you're a little bit less excited about it, you're going to be a little bit less inclined to be taking the time to go out and find this kind of information.
Archon Fung (15:07):
Yeah. One thing probably heartening to Stephen with a past hat as an election official, is that so many people are getting some kind of information about how or where to vote. So the result so far is 40% of the whole pool got some how to vote information. I was thinking before we fielded this, it would be maybe 5%. 40% of the whole panel? That seems really high to me. It's interesting.
Matthew Baum (15:36):
Yeah. It's hard to know whether this is a glass 44% full or 56% empty. I'm not quite sure how you should think about that. Certainly there has been a lot of information in the news. I mean, a lot of stories in the news-
Archon Fung (15:51):
That's true.
Matthew Baum (15:52):
... about issues around voting much more than we've seen in prior midterm elections. So that could have something to do with it.
Archon Fung (16:00):
Yeah, that's good. That's good.
Stephen Richer (16:02):
Another question we wanted to pose to you, and I know that you can break this out by age, by educational level, by income, and I think those largely conform to what I would have believed, is just that if you have higher income and you have higher education, you do consume more information, period. But one of the challenges that we believe we're being presented with in today's Brave New World is that people are siloed in their informational systems and they do not cross. Does that conform with what you found?
Matthew Baum (16:39):
Well, it's partially true. There is some siloing, but in other survey work that we've done on the CHIP 50 Project, we have found that the average American indicates that they got news about politics and public affairs from at least three sources in the past 24 hours. And this specific survey was in the run-up to the 2024 election.
(17:06):
So they're not necessarily getting all their information from one source. And it's also true that most people are not strong partisans with a strong sort of intrinsic motivation to silo themselves. That said, there are two factors working in the other direction. One is that algorithms will tend to silo you to some extent, even based on weekly express preferences, because it's always sort of looking at the margin for what you're going to pay more attention to. And if I pay a little more attention to this side than that side, I'm going to get more of this side and that's going to be somewhat self-fulfilling.
(17:44):
The other dimension concerns who people listen to and trust, and so therefore who they find persuasive. And that I think is potentially an even larger factor at play here. You don't really see that in this dashboard, but I don't know if we're going to talk about, for instance, the vote by mail survey that we ran recently [inaudible 00:18:07].
Archon Fung (18:08):
Yeah, let's talk about that.
Matthew Baum (18:09):
But the upshot there is that... Well, before I talk about the survey itself, Republicans and Democrats, we know from years of research, people tend to look to trusted elites as a signal for what they should think about issues like politics, that they're not necessarily carefully attuned to and paying a lot of attention to all the time. So when Republicans are telling their partisans one thing and Democrats are telling their partisans something completely different, like whether voting by mail is safe and effective or is corrupt and compromised, that's going to lead people to very polarized and very different conclusions, which is sort of what we saw in the results from that survey, which is why I wanted to mention it.
Stephen Richer (19:01):
What's the causal factor here? Yes, what's flashed on the screen right now isn't terribly surprising to me or probably to many of our listeners who are in the democracy in the election space. I want to know if you're able to find out, one; these people already had these beliefs and therefore they identify as Republican or as Democrat. Two; if because they're Republican or Democrat, they're simply on channels where that type of information is fed to them. Or three; because they're a Republican or because they're a Democrat, they seek out politicians who align with them and those politicians are saying those things. Does that make sense as three different possible avenues how that results?
Matthew Baum (19:49):
It does. And unfortunately, I'm going to give you the political science-y answer, which is it's all of the above. That's just the truth. We know that it is actually more common for people to pick a party and then adopt policies consistent with that party, as opposed to figure out where they stand in policies and then find a party that matches where they stand in policies. The other pathway certainly happens, which is why I say it's all of the above, but the prevalent pattern is for whatever reason, other than policy preferences, we identify with one side and then we seek out what it means and think about it as an identity in a way. What does it mean for me to be a Democrat? Oh, I guess this means I have this attitude about healthcare and I have this attitude about immigration because this is what it means to be a Democrat.
(20:43):
I mean, again, it doesn't explain everybody, but to some extent. And in terms of the information channels that you would expose yourself to, again, I don't think it's fair to say that average Americans go out of their way to segregate themselves significantly. There is some of that, but in terms of what people are going to find persuasive, you're more likely to take signals from your own team than from the other team and internalize them. In the case of voter fraud, I think this is very much a top-down phenomena. If you are a Republican, you have been told now for a decade that voting is not secure, that it's right with fraud, especially vote by mail. And that is coming from your team's elites. So that makes it credible. If you're a Democrat, you've been told the exact opposite for an extensive period of time. So for you, that's not the issue.
(21:44):
The issue is, as we saw in this polling, voter access and the concern over suppression. So again, it's really all of the above.
Stephen Richer (21:56):
I guess it's increasingly challenging to break that loop, but there are a lot of people who are interested in talking to voters, obviously. There's the election officials who want to convince voters that the tabulation is safe, secure, lawful, accurate. There are voting rights groups who want to make sure that voters know how to vote and that they do in fact go vote. And then of course there are politicians who want to make sure that their people vote and they want to persuade other people who might be persuadable. To what extent is dollars spent on those endeavors a decreasing return in the new media landscape?
Matthew Baum (22:38):
Well, I mean, I think it's a question of if the new media landscape allows you to target niches of audiences more directly. So there are folks out there who may be important in certain electoral contexts is the word I was trying to say, that can be most effectively reached through those channels that you just described. There are other niches of the audience for whom that's not as effective. Is these sorts of signals as effective as they were 25 years ago to as many people? Probably not, but that doesn't make them unimportant, especially in an environment where, as in a midterm election, where it's relatively more motivated people who turn out and vote. The marginal voters are less likely to show up in midterm elections, and marginal voters are less likely to be going to government websites or listening to what election officials have to say.
Archon Fung (23:38):
Right. Matt, I wanted to get back to that slide with, you don't have to show it, but the two reality slide, that there's Republicans living in a reality where the greatest concern about the November elections is voter fraud. Democrats' greatest fear, according to the CHIP 50 survey that you have fielded, is false claims of election fraud, is the top concern. And so these are two different realities. I myself, I'll put my cards on the table. I regard the truth as the Democratic, or not the Republican position. I don't really know how much Democrats should be worried about false claims of election fraud, but I do think that the belief that a huge danger to the integrity of the election is large numbers of ineligible voters fraudulently voting is just not a problem. And to me, it's akin to, I was watching some comedy horror lately, it's akin to belief in witches in Salem. It's just not true, but a huge amount of our society believes that it is true.
(24:49):
Do we know anything about whether that belief is movable and how to move it?
Matthew Baum (24:56):
Well, we know that people are very resistant to having their deeply held opinions changed, but because it's sort of unpleasant to discover that you're wrong. So we all have these defense mechanisms that we sort of run away from information that challenges our beliefs. And I guess since you're taking sort of the Republican position, if my Republicanness is important to my identity and my president and congressional leadership and state legislative leadership and governor are all telling me this thing is true, then that's going to weigh pretty heavily on me and it's not going to be easy to dissuade me of that unless similarly credible messengers tell me that no, that's not true.
Archon Fung (25:54):
Credible to me, right? Yeah.
Matthew Baum (25:54):
It's credible to me.
Archon Fung (25:54):
Yes.
Matthew Baum (25:55):
In other words, if I'm the Democratic leader, I say, "Hey, Republicans, this is nonsense," that's not going to move the needle much. And the opposite is true, of course, for Democrats. Republicans do not have a monopoly on aversion to being told that they're wrong. So it's a real hard nut to crack. But I want to say that if you put that slide back on or if you just remember those percentages, these together, `cup half full or half heavy situation, because if you believe that, 64% of Republicans did not say that this was a concern.
Archon Fung (26:33):
Yeah. Right, right, right.
Matthew Baum (26:34):
And 74% of Democrats did not say that claims of election fraud were their top concern, and flipped around, we would say those are pretty high percentages. So in the environment in which we are operating, honestly, my surprise was that those numbers were as low as they were.
Archon Fung (26:51):
Oh, so you see this as a relatively positive result given your baseline [inaudible 00:26:58].
Matthew Baum (26:57):
Relative being the operative word. I wouldn't go so far as to say I see it as a positive result, but I would've thought it would've been considerably higher on both sides given the messaging that we're seeing.
Archon Fung (27:08):
Yeah.
Stephen Richer (27:09):
Yeah. I mean, open up social media-
Archon Fung (27:09):
Stephen, is this a hopeful result for you along Matt's lines, is that the people naming these top concerns are a minority of both halves or both thirds, however you want to think about it?
Matthew Baum (27:23):
Was that to me? I thought that was-
Archon Fung (27:26):
Oh no, no, to Stephen.
Matthew Baum (27:28):
Yeah, what's I thought.
Stephen Richer (27:29):
Oh, is it? Sorry. Is this a new watch?
Archon Fung (27:30):
Is it comforting percentages are not-
Stephen Richer (27:32):
It's hard to know if it's a-
Archon Fung (27:34):
... above 50?
Stephen Richer (27:34):
... secondary concern, but I think polling has pretty consistently shown that at least 50% of Republicans, registered Republicans, identifying Republicans, have grave doubts about the 2020 election. I've always been of the mentality that we should just talk about elections moving forward and ask people what we can do to build confidence in those. But no, if you told me that only 36% of Republicans had significant doubts in the election process, I would absolutely take that. I take that in a heartbeat given where we've been. We took that. Remember, we were all happy in the aftermath of the 2024 election when Republican confidence went up to low 80s. And still that presumes that 20% approximately of Republicans didn't have great confidence in the election even after what was a very successful election for Republicans, an election that wasn't plagued with too many technical errors that could have contributed to a diminishment of confidence.
(28:31):
So yeah, I'll take that. Absolutely.
Archon Fung (28:34):
Yeah. Trust.
Stephen Richer (28:36):
And I guess I'm a little bit surprised because on the Democrat side, if you open up the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, any single day, you can probably find an article that is about what is the Trump administration going to do this election cycle, what is being alleged about our elections that is pre-textual for some sort of federal government involvement, and to say it's only at 26%. Now again, maybe that's indicative of the fact that people aren't consuming this as much as we are at this point in the game. I don't know, but I'll take it. Yeah, for sure. Matt, did anything surprise you about the results that you've produced so far?
Matthew Baum (29:14):
Yeah, a couple of things, but I wanted to make one quick comment if I may, before I switch to surprises. And that is there's one other dimension, and I don't really know what the numbers look like on this, but typically when politics are turning away from a party, there is a small sort of realignment with fewer people identifying with the party that's on the outs and more people identifying with the party that is surging, or at least moving from the party that seems to be sinking toward independent status. And I would guess that there's some of that going on in this environment as well. Although, like I said, I can't quantify it. I didn't look at those numbers. I think we could probably extract that from our survey, but I haven't looked at that.
(30:00):
Now, to your question, I thought it was interesting that many more people are confident about their vote through mail will be counted, than are confident in the ability of the post office to actually deliver and accurately count all the votes. So there's a bit of a disconnect there, which is a little... It's not completely surprising because we see this in sort of economic perceptions as well and have for years, but it is an interesting disconnect that I think was highlighted in the report.
Archon Fung (30:39):
Yeah. What do you think about that disconnect? Like you say, that the same pattern shows, right? Is 82% of people or 80 some and change percent of people are confident that their mail ballot will be properly counted, but only 62%... Oh, sorry, that's not the right slide. Sorry, that's a different slide.
Matthew Baum (30:58):
Getting used to the slides.
Archon Fung (31:01):
Are confident that mail ballots will be counted in general, just like, "I like my congressman, but I hate Congress. I like my public school, but public schools generally are a mess." Is room for, or create some basis for optimism, or?
Matthew Baum (31:19):
I mean, I think it does because I think what you have is anxiety about the sound and fury going on in Washington about what the Trump administration and the US Postal Service in particular are going to do. So there is an anxiety out there, but it hasn't penetrated to the point where people are afraid that their election is going to be compromised, their personal election experience. And I actually think that that's something to be very cautiously optimistic about.
Stephen Richer (31:53):
Yeah, because I regularly get questions from Democrats in particular who ask, "Are all these concerns enough to depress turnout?" And then on the Republican side, a phenomenon that I frequently encountered was some of the most ardent believers that the 2020 election had been stolen and that future elections could very well be corrupted. Those were the people who were absolutely going to vote come hell or high water. And yet if you believe that the system is fraudulent, it seems like you would be less interested in participating. And so there's sort of a revealed preference here that I don't know if it's just it's dichotomous views and they hold them both in their head, or if it's again, the distinction from I have confidence in my vote, but I don't have confidence in the aggregate, or less confidence in the aggregate.
Matthew Baum (32:53):
I mean, I think it's a mixed bag, right? I mean, my recollection of the special election in Georgia, the Jon Ossoff one, was that part of the reason he won was that the messaging that the election was fraudulent depressed Republican turnout in that special election, or the runoff rather election. So I think it seems like that can cut both ways. When people get angry, anger motivates people, but when people become more insecure about the election, that could move in the other direction.
(33:31):
So part of this depends on the strongest partisans. You were talking about the diehards who are going to be there no matter what. Probably those are the people that respond to this kind of stimulus with anger as opposed to withdrawal and insecurity about it.
Stephen Richer (33:47):
Okay. Archon, what about you? Did anything surprise you in going through this?
Archon Fung (33:52):
I was surprised a little bit. I thought it was interesting at the pattern that Matt pointed out. One thing that I hadn't thought to ask, but you guys did put it in the survey that was pretty interesting. Can we show that second graphic now, which is... Sorry about the graphics confusion. So this is people's knowledge about how to vote by mail. And so according, Matt, to the CHIPS 50 that you guys fielded, 30% of respondents kind of got it correct about how to vote by mail in their state. 30% were incorrect, but quite confident in their incorrect views, and 36% were not sure. So roughly two thirds of people don't get right what the vote by mail procedures are. And I thought, well, that means that people are really worried about this thing that they just don't know anything about by and large, or only a third of the people know what the rules are.
(34:57):
So I was trying to make sense of that. But then I thought maybe this isn't surprising at all because the vote by mail stuff has been so up in the air public policy-wise with the President's efforts-
Stephen Richer (35:11):
[inaudible 00:35:12].
Archon Fung (35:12):
... to create a bigger role for the postal service and then the Supreme Court being maybe okay with that and then definitely not being okay with that. It's like maybe people are right to be a little bit confused about how to vote by mail.
Matthew Baum (35:28):
I mean, I think there is certainly some of that, but in all honesty, I vote by mail. I don't really pay that much attention to what the procedures are. I just know that I get a postcard that tells me by when I have to submit it, and that's pretty much it. And then for the next 20 months, I forget all about it. So this actually, for better or worse, didn't surprise me so much.
Archon Fung (35:53):
So maybe you don't have to know to vote by mail.
Matthew Baum (35:56):
You really don't have to know very much because in most places at least it's sort of handed to you. It comes to you and all you have to do is sign and respond and then you get your ballot.
Stephen Richer (36:05):
So I don't think that this is an impediment to actually voting for the very reason that Matt just said.
Archon Fung (36:10):
Yeah. I see.
Stephen Richer (36:10):
Is that it's largely served up on a silver platter for most people, but it is an impediment to explaining the process and getting people to have confidence in the process. I think that this distinguishes the United States from other countries, where maybe the rules haven't been as malleable, they haven't changed as much, and maybe there aren't as many avenues to participate. But American elections, our election system and how people vote has changed materially over the last 20 years. It's changed materially even since COVID, and there's a whole bunch of ways in which people can participate. And of course, every state does it a little bit differently. And so it creates this situation where maybe it would be unreasonable for us to expect any more than one third of voters to know exactly how that process works.
(36:59):
But then again, if you're saying as an election official, "Well, we've explained how the process works. Why don't you know how the process works?"
Archon Fung (37:06):
Yeah, we've explained many times.
Matthew Baum (37:08):
Yeah.
Archon Fung (37:09):
Right, right. Shifting a little bit to a different issue, but certainly related, Stephen, you and I have talked about this, but so at a very general level, confidence in the elections is sometimes partisan, sometimes not. So after 2020, Republican confidence in the election obviously dropped, Biden won, Democratic confidence was high. After '24, we were a little bit surprised in that... Well, what isn't surprising is Republican confidence was high, Trump won, but Democratic confidence in the elections didn't really go down that much, which was a little bit surprising if you think that partisanship is what's doing all of the work.
(37:53):
Now, this is a little bit in the survey, but also visible primarily in other people's surveys. So Pew now has confidence that the votes will be counted accurately as, by my lights, quite low for both Democrats and Republicans. 58% of Democrats have high level confidence that the votes will be counted correctly and 55 of Republicans. So both Republicans and Democrats are lacking confidence in the midterm election. So it's gone down for both now and it's symmetric for different reasons.
Stephen Richer (38:31):
We have to give a shout-out also to our friends at UC San Diego who found similarly that confidence had gone down over the past year and a half in the administration of the upcoming midterm election.
Archon Fung (38:43):
Yeah. Did that give you worry?
Matthew Baum (38:48):
I would say that the key is not partisanship, it's partisan messaging that's the key.
Archon Fung (38:53):
Okay.
Matthew Baum (38:53):
Why is it the Democrats generally believe that the election was legitimate in 2024? It's because all of their leaders were telling them, "Well, Trump really won." They were not getting a message like they were in 2016, for instance, or in 2000 where significant numbers of Democrats thought that the jury was rigged in the election outcome. Not as many as Republicans in 2020, but a significant number.
Stephen Richer (39:25):
Do you catch flack for that within academia? That's kind of a great person theory that there's this leader who can so easily manipulate the masses and history is told through the lens of individuals rather than from the bottom up.
Archon Fung (39:38):
No, the public opinion guys are very much top down for the most part, right?
Matthew Baum (39:43):
This is not a great leader theory. I mean, this is most closely associated with a 35-year-old book by Richard Brody about elite indexing. The notion that partisans look to leaders to serve as their heuristics. I mean, it happens to be true that in this particular era, the Republican Party has one overwhelmingly dominant leader who has been the overwhelmingly dominant signal, but that's much more than we've seen in the past and [inaudible 00:40:22].
Stephen Richer (40:21):
A question from-
Archon Fung (40:23):
And is-
Stephen Richer (40:23):
Okay, go ahead.
Archon Fung (40:25):
Maybe it's good for both partisan sides to be pumping up election fears, but if that's not correctly indexed to some sort of ground truth, it's obviously bad for the collective. So do you see this race to the bottom occurring in election skepticism?
Matthew Baum (40:49):
Well, honestly, it's hard to... I always am resisting laying on my cards on the table because I'm sort of playing the role of [inaudible 00:41:00].
Archon Fung (40:58):
I just did. Yeah.
Matthew Baum (41:01):
But you just did it. I will too. I think on this issue, one side is much farther from ground truth than the other side, and it's hard to treat them as sort of equivalent in that sense. It's hard for me to be intellectually honest and tell you I think this is equivalent right now on this topic and that side.
Archon Fung (41:20):
But it might be the case that worries about ICE at the polls, et cetera, or FBI people seeing-
Matthew Baum (41:25):
Absolutely.
Archon Fung (41:26):
... the ballot boxes might be overblown. Stephen, do you think it's overblown, the kind of D-side worries? How can you answer that question? I mean, who knows.
Stephen Richer (41:35):
I do. Yeah, I do. I do. I do. And I've written about that, and maybe that's just me being a contrarian, but I do believe that. And I do think that part of it is just that's politics at work because it works to their advantage to stoke emotion that motivates people. Maybe you'll donate to something because you fear that. But that being said, when it happens on November 3rd, then we can come back and we rewind this. And so I want to-
Archon Fung (42:00):
But it's terrible for the republic because whoever wins, 40% is not going to buy it.
Stephen Richer (42:05):
Lots of things are like that. Lots of things are like that. It's terrible. Lots of people go around campaigning and being like there's crime everywhere on the street, and then people might not socialize or go outside as much.
Archon Fung (42:15):
Right. I need a brain.
Stephen Richer (42:16):
But we know that that's true and it's not always connected to what the facts on the ground are.
Matthew Baum (42:21):
In fact, it's often inversely proportional to the facts on the ground, historically.
Archon Fung (42:24):
Yeah, right, right. Hey, I want to bring in, William Hauser has a question that the survey addresses, which was a little bit of surprising result to me. So he asked, "Please comment on how our self-generated doubts do the work for foreign adversaries in trying to weaponize elections." So that's his question. One survey result is that so far in the first round of CHIP 50, the foreign adversary concern is pretty low compared to election fraud, weaponizing election fraud claims.
Matthew Baum (43:01):
I'm sure you've been paying attention to election news and information as much as I have. And the foreign interference narrative has really been the 10th or 11th or 12th most prevalent narrative in all of the discussions about the election. It is there, but it's completely overshadowed by other things that we've been talking about. So it's not surprising at all to me that relatively few people have mentioned it. That does not mean we don't have concerns over foreign interventions in the election. I think it's clear that we have adversaries who are interested in influencing our election outcomes. How effective they are at it is much less clear.
Stephen Richer (43:46):
But we're surveying if people are afraid of foreign interference.
Matthew Baum (43:51):
Yes.
Archon Fung (43:51):
Yes.
Stephen Richer (43:51):
We are not surveying how many of those bots on social media that are influencing people's election information are actually Chinese or Russian or-
Archon Fung (44:01):
We don't know.
Stephen Richer (44:01):
... or Iranian bots.
Archon Fung (44:02):
Or somebody might know.
Matthew Baum (44:03):
Exactly. We don't know how much interference may be going on. We have had agencies whose job it was to answer that question. They are much less functional than they were a couple of years ago.
Archon Fung (44:20):
Right, right. And so I think an implication of William Hauser's kind of question is, maybe the whole partisan dynamic that we've been discussing this whole show is, in his words, an own goal. If the ground truth is there's significant foreign influence, we're just not got our eye on that ball at all.
Matthew Baum (44:39):
I mean, I think we don't know if that's the ground truth.
Archon Fung (44:42):
Yeah, we don't. I mean, I don't know.
Matthew Baum (44:45):
We know there is an intent to interfere because our adversaries don't make a secret of that. We just don't know how much they're doing and if they are doing it, how effective it is.
Archon Fung (44:55):
Right.
Stephen Richer (44:56):
Okay. My last question, because I know Matt has to get going here in just a second. My last question is, since I think in 2020 we were a soft target for people not understanding how election system work, and we were a soft target for people saying false things about the elections. Have we gotten better?
Matthew Baum (45:16):
This is a question for me?
Stephen Richer (45:17):
Yeah.
Matthew Baum (45:18):
So I feel like we got a lot better in 2024 and we've sort of lost some ground since then because we've sort of scaled back on our monitoring and intelligence around election interference. So it's more likely that this could go on and not be detected or be detected late or we may fail to recognize what it is or is not accomplishing. The question you asked, how many of these threads are bots?
Stephen Richer (45:52):
But do you think that election administrators have gotten more successful at packaging up and getting information into the hands of Americans about how the process works?
Archon Fung (46:05):
Yeah, quite apart from election interference, just like the true seeking efforts about the election. Are we better?
Matthew Baum (46:13):
Well, I think the answer is yes, but I also think that the headwinds are much more intense than they used to be.
Archon Fung (46:18):
Oh, okay.
Matthew Baum (46:20):
So what's the net effect of that? I don't know if the net effect is that Americans know more, but I think just in order to stay relatively flat, election officials have had to improve their game or up their game quite a bit, and I think they have.
Archon Fung (46:34):
Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Richer (46:37):
Okay. We know, Matt, you have to get going, be at a hard out at 1:00. We really appreciate your time and thank you. And again, we're going to put that link in the chat so that if anyone wants to follow their continued progress and their continued studies of how the electorate is getting information in the anticipation of this midterm election, they can do that. Matt is with the Schorenstein Center, which is actually just down the hall from us here at the Ash Center.
Archon Fung (47:05):
Great. And I just wanted to thank Matt for creating these tools and one of them, the CHIP 50 tool, the whole point is to scan all of the United States for what actual voters are concerned about because we have some ideas, but we don't know, and so we got to keep our eyes out there. And if we know what the actual fears and concerns are, then perhaps journalists, election officials, other people can have that discussion and get to the bottom of those concerns and improve the likelihood of a fair, safe, secure, trusted election in 2026. So thanks for creating those tools, Matt, and thanks for coming on.
Matthew Baum (47:48):
Thank you both so much for having me. It was a lot of fun talking to you and let's hope that things go well.
Archon Fung (47:54):
Yeah, I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to revisit that question.
Matthew Baum (47:57):
For sure.
Stephen Richer (47:59):
Okay. Thanks to the production team. We put them through heck this week and we kept changing slides, but we really appreciate them. And we appreciate you, whether you're watching live or whether you're watching the recorded version, and we will see you next Tuesday afternoon.
Archon Fung (48:15):
Take care, everyone.
Voiceover:
Thank you for listening to Terms of Engagement. Email us your questions, suggestions, or thoughts for future episodes. You can find an email address in the show notes below. See you next time.