What You Need to Know About the Election
With the 2024 presidential election hitting the home stretch, we asked Robin Jacobson, professor of politics and government, about trends in polling, the challenges of battling disinformation, and just how polarized we really are.
Professor Robin Jacobson moderates a discussion on campus with members of the Washington State Supreme Court in 2023.
In an age when fewer people are willing to answer their phone—and many don’t even own a home phone—pollsters have to adapt. Jacobson says they’re trying methods such as online opt-in polls (in which participants actively choose to respond as opposed to being contacted by pollsters) and probability-based online panels (in which willing respondents are polled repeatedly over time). Another tool? Analyzing social media posts in an attempt to detect trends. In some ways, Jacobson says, “campaigns now have a broader set of methods for trying to get a read on what’s happening on the ground.”
The sense of a widening gap between red and blue America is real, Jacobson says, but polarization “is a really complicated concept.” There’s “elite polarization”—essentially, stark differences in policy between the two parties—and then there’s “affective polarization”: how people on opposing sides of the political spectrum feel about each other. The latter is clearly a concern, but, says Jacobson, “It’s important to note that polarization is happening on the extremes—those who are are very engaged politically do on the whole dislike each other more. But most people are not that engaged, and don’t feel that level of animus. That said, the media creates a misperception of high levels of polarization, and that misperception does increase distrust of others.”
Recent elections have tended to be more about mobilizing your base than persuading undecided voters to your way of thinking. “If you think the election will be determined by who comes out to the polls,” Jacobson says, “you’re going to play into that negative partisanship.” What seems to be the best way to get your people to turn out is—unfortunately—to hammer away at how terrible your opponent is.
COVID-19 has driven a shift in how campaigns raise money and get out the vote. “Door-to-door mobilization historically had been really effective, and now we’re trying to see if COVID broke that,” according to Jacobson.
Disinformation, Jacobson points out, is nothing new. “We’ve long had real audio clips or pictures taken out of context, or used disingenuously, so we don’t really need AI to make people appear to say things they didn’t.” But she acknowledges that technological changes have “turbocharged” the threat. At the same time, even as AI might be part of the problem, she sees it as a potential silver lining: “When an AI-generated fake of President Biden’s voice was sent out in robocalls during the primaries, it was very quickly uncovered.” As the growth of efforts to expand media literacy and punish misuse of AI in elections shows, “There’s a lot of attention on it.”
