College Reaction pollsters on the youth vote and coronavirus sentiment
“If we had something like mail-in voting, that lets college students bust both stereotypes — that of the flaky voter and that of the reckless one.” — Cyrus Beschloss
“Going after the issues that are really impacting them, making sure that campaigns are addressing them in a way that college students see as real change … that would be an effective strategy to try to get young people more engaged.” — Matin Mirramezani
The following is a transcript of the interview conducted by GovSight Vice President Miguel Pineda and Editor in Chief Gillian Brassil with the founders of College Reaction — Cyrus Beschloss and Matin Mirramezani — on polling, garnering the youth vote and Gen Z concerns amid the coronavirus pandemic. The interview has been edited lightly for clarity.
Gillian Brassil: Thank you both for being with us today. First, I’d like to kick it off with when did you see the need for College Reaction? And how do you guys get started?
Cyrus Beschloss: So I will dive into that if you don’t mind, Matin.
College Reaction got started a couple years ago. Initially, we figured that there are tons of issues that obviously matter in terms of what’s being discussed in the critical discourse. We don’t often get young people’s perspective on those critical issues; in terms of where we tend to hear from young people, it’s oftentimes really tightly tethered to what’s going on on campuses. So campus issues, whether that’s free speech, whether that’s Greek life, all really, really important issues. But we thought that there needs to be a source that injects the youth opinion, students’ opinion, into the mainstream discourse. That’s what we set out to do. And we try to do with the polling that we do.
GB: What type of questions do you tend to ask in these polls? What areas do you cover? And how do you make sure that you reach out to a representative body?
Matin Mirramezani: We ask all types of questions, obviously a lot of it has to do with politics, especially now in the election cycle. But we also cover areas that are of interest to nonprofits or of interest to for-profit companies. Recently we’ve been doing a lot of polling on the coronavirus, which is of interest to a wide range of people.
And the way that we kind of try to make sure that our results are really accurate is … I kind of like to break it down in two ways. First of all, we have a panel that we leverage for our polling. And we are very intentional about how we recruit and how we maintain that panel to make sure that it’s representative of the college student body. I call that a kind of like a pre-poll adjustment that we do. After we do each poll, we stratify the results to make sure that we weigh for any underrepresentation. That helps us make sure that we’re really doing the best to accurately represent the voices of college students around the country.
Miguel Pineda: A lot of people may not be familiar with how polling works. A lot of times people look to polling for everything — from elections to specific policy issues. But how do you guys write survey questions and disseminate them and get a sample that’s representative of all college students to respond to?
CB: So in terms of the way that we set up to actually write the questions, it’s obviously a fine line between speaking to students in the language that there used to be spoken to — that’s one thing — and then obviously there are serious conventions in terms of ways questions are asked. That’s something that obviously we’ve had to study a lot when we were getting started with polling. We’ve gotten better at [that] and can always improve.
One of the best strategies, I think, whenever you’re creating a polling question is just to consult the greats. Right? Look at Pew, look at Gallup, look at any of the people that are doing high capacity, quality survey work and look at how they’ve asked that question. And from there, you can always bounce off; you can always add intricacies. But basically I like to say, you know, draw from the wisdom of pollsters past.
GB: And from pollsters past, who do you guys look to as an inspiration for College Reaction and why do you look to them?
CB: It’s more just sort of looking at the polling that organizations produce. I wouldn’t say that we necessarily have a couple of polling rockstars that I look to specifically. Maybe I should. But in terms of some of the gold standards in the field, I think that they’re ones that you know. Pew, Quinnipiac: those are firms that have had actual reputations — and for very good reasons. Their process is super different from ours. I mean, they are doing landline polling, random digit dialing, that has produced amazing results and really good insight for tens and tens of years. We have to think about ways that we can get to young people these days, that’s going to get to as many people as possible and do so in a representative way. So again, it’s really just about learning from what’s been done in the past and then adjusting that based on the habits and the preferences today. That’s a long way of saying I should have a couple more rock stars.
MM: First of all, what we do is this kind of added technology that we are really leveraging — new methods of reaching out to students. Obviously it would be very useful. And it’s inefficient to reach out to this kind of small segment of the population. Another part of our model is that we really know college students, we really know what’s the best way to reach out to them, we really know what’s the best way to keep them engaged. [We are] making sure that in our process their voices are heard. Because I think a lot of general polling that is done in the general public is obviously much harder to tailor to a specific segment [of the population]. But I think since we’re really specialized in this segment of the population, we’re really working to understand them — understand how they have engaged with questions. I think that’s a big part of what we’re trying to achieve with College Reaction.
MP: So can you guys describe your specific model that you use as College Reaction and how it differs from other major pollsters?
CB: So I’m not sure that our model necessarily differs from what a lot of folks in the field are doing. Whether that’s U.W. whether it’s Ipsos whether it’s S.S.R.S. So effectively, what we’re doing is we’re taking the same sort of polling that you take, whether it was done online or whether it’s done on the phone, we’re taking the questions [to students]. That’s the big difference, the big place that we break from some of the places that I mentioned. Whether that’s with Quinnipiac or whether that’s Pew: We’re just delivering that digitally to the college students.
So a big part of what we emphasize for us is basically: meet college students where they are. Go to them with the surveys, which is a big part of random digit dialing. That’s a big reason why people actually do phone surveys, because they want to reach you. They don’t want you coming out and reaching out to the pollsters, right? You’re not going to necessarily just spend your Saturday looking for people who are asking questions to answer — or maybe you are and in which case, I applaud you and I would love to talk.
But again, it’s about extracting all the interest that can be involved in a polling interaction while still making sure that there’s high participation. That you have a good response rate. So I think the short answer is basically that we deliver polling to college students and make it as easy as possible. As opposed to, let’s say, forcing them to come to a landing page and fill out a huge amount of demographic information. We basically just think about every question. How would a college student want to answer this question? And then from there, keep everything as methodologically sound and as faithful to the way the past pollsters have done things.
GB: You’ve mentioned a few of the problems with polling, some of the flaws, difficulties. Are you skeptical at all about the strength of polling? Especially right now? What are some of these weaknesses and flaws that you see? Should we be heavily relying on polling because of this?
CB: The short answer is no. I am super trustworthy of — and this is conditional for sure — but of good polling.
I think that it’s on everybody to separate the wheat from the chaff and to understand what good polling looks like. And to recognize [good polling] in the same way that we know what a trustworthy new source is, to know what a trustworthy polling source is. So that whole narrative that 2016 got the election wrong. We’re talking about razor thin margins of error there. And obviously it tilted in a different way. But most models were not as far off as people remember them to be in the first place. But there’s definitely, definitely a change that needs to be made internally to survey people who were traditionally under surveyed in 2016 — and obviously, you know, young people are definitely one of those populations.
MM: My answer is obviously no. I don’t think the polling numbers have ever lied, the margins are very small — and if we kind of look back to where the elections have landed and where the polling has been, there’s kind of a good alignment. The current narrative and the skepticism toward polling is mainly because we have to really read the fine line in what this poll is actually telling us and what we’re trying to interpret from it.
So when we look at a nationally representative general voters poll, we can interpret that as, what is the outcome of the Electoral College going to be? I think there’s like a lot of nuances, from getting a top line number and then translating that into “what does this actually mean?” And I think what a lot of places like us are trying to do is read through the numbers and get really granular on what the data is actually telling us. In context of a presidential election, what are the implications for the Electoral College and swing states and all of that, instead of just reporting the top number for how the general population feels about the general election.
GB: I’m looking at one of your recent polls about how jobs for recent, upcoming graduates are being affected by the coronavirus pandemic. So I would love if you guys could expand on that and talk about how you guys queried that and what the data shows.
CB: There’s obviously a lot to sift through. Starting with the jobs. Yeah, I mean, these are grave numbers. So 38% of students who had jobs going into the summer, 38% of those folks said that their jobs were canceled. Another 37% said that their jobs were moved, remote, or delayed. So it concerns me there obviously. It’s just that we have a whole wave of young people at this point who are graduating or going into summer internships — into this trembling job market.
And it seems like those sorts of financial scars stick with people. There’s been research done about the students who graduated into the 1980s recession, their income was — across the board, across industries for the most part — about 2% lower than students who didn’t graduate into a recession. And 2% is what it is, it’s not 50%. But it’s pretty pronounced in 1980. I’m concerned about what that’s going to look like 15, 20 years from now. We have students who had poor luck in terms of when they graduated and past that, nothing was in their control.
GB: Something also that’s pretty big in your polling is about the youth vote. Do you think that this coronavirus pandemic is going to affect that?
CB: What do you think, Matin? It’s tough to tell at this point, right? We don’t even know what the policies are gonna look like.
MM: It definitely is. The general sense that I’m getting is that it will be hard for all segments of the population. It’s especially going to be affecting college students because sometimes it’s harder to get them out and mobilize them. It will be a challenge especially for the campaigns to try to mobilize the youth and get out the vote. But it’s also kind of like echoing what Cyrus said. It’s still hard to tell exactly how it will effect and how that effect materializes without knowing specific policies and how those specific policies will be carried out by different states.
CB: And one more thing to tack on to that, Gillian. Think about a case. Let’s say that I went to Michigan State and I’m coming in from out of state. Let’s say I’m from Massachusetts, of all awesome states. And let’s say that was registered to vote in Michigan, an important state. I want to make sure that I’m registered where I go to college versus where I’m from. If I’m at home and I’m staying back in Massachusetts for the general election or for the primary, then I basically have to rely on the fact that Michigan is going to have a generous absent voting policy that’s gonna allow me to send in a mail-in ballot. Past that, we have thousands of college students who have obviously been sent home from campus, thousands of whom obviously were registered where they go to school versus where they’re from. So that’s also going to be a big obstacle in terms of getting young people out to vote come November.
MP: That actually kind of leads into my next question for you guys. Youth voting — and this has been well documented — has been an issue before the coronavirus, before 2020. Why do you guys think that is and how do we fix a problem like that? How do we get younger voters — you know, college aged — how do we get them engaged and more active in terms of voting?
MM: I think one aspect of trying to engage the youth vote is kind of trying to address the issues that are most salient to them. We’ve done a lot of polling on issues. The number one by far issue that’s affecting college students and that they’re prioritizing is climate change. So I think going after the issues that are really impacting them, making sure that campaigns are addressing them in a way that college students see as real change: That’s kind of what drives them out. That would be an effective strategy to try to get young people more engaged.
CB: One more thing that I’d add is just it’s a matter of collecting. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle, the way that I look at it, right? So why do politicians not necessarily go and spend a ton of time rallying at college campuses? Campaign managers are probably going to tell them college students don’t turn out to vote. Why would we? Why would we spend important time at a college campus? Now, I think that college campuses and colleges, frankly, are one of the most mobilizable segments in American life. Where else do you just have collections of people who organize themselves by interests, by affiliation, by their level of engagement in politics? You have young Democrats, you have young Republicans, you have the debate club. Whatever that is, I just see those as tons of different segments that campaigns and politicians can tap into. I think that where you’re gonna see a campaign benefit from the youth vote the most is where you see a campaign really leveraged the infrastructures that exist on college campuses today.
MM: And I think it will be really interesting to kind of see how the campaigning is going to be very different in this election cycle. And I think it’s going to be very interesting to kind of see how college students really engage and mobilize in this age when the kind of methods of reaching out to the voters are really familiar to them. They tend to be more tech savvy. It would be really interesting to see how their engagement changes in this cycle versus the general public who kind of might be more used to traditional ways of outreach in the previous cycles.
GB: Everything has been upended by the pandemic and we’ve already seen that affecting our elections and how they’re run. And, not to put you on the spot Cyrus, but obviously I read your Op-Ed from a while ago about how do we spur the youth vote right now. So I’m wondering if you guys could explain a little bit more about mail-in voting and what that could mean moving forward and if that’s something that we should consider doing beyond this election.
CB: Yeah. First of all, thank you. Thank you for reading and sorry to your eyes, to put you through that retrospectively.
In terms of mail-in voting, I just, I have trouble in terms of what we expect of everybody. But in terms of how we look at young people, obviously there was a lot of ire directed at young people when you saw that footage of kids on beaches in Florida. Obviously, it’s not representative, but there is sort of this notion swelling, right, that young people are out and about not taking this seriously.
But there’s also this whole notion that young people don’t turn out to the polls. And so when you have both of those things edging up against each other, I think it puts everybody that’s trying to vote, that’s trying to be part of this democracy, in a tough place. But especially these people who are basically getting buried in both quarters. “Hey I bet you won’t turn out to vote” or, “hey, I bet you won’t stay in and not leave your house.” And I think that puts young people in a really precarious position. If we had something like mail-in voting, that lets college students bust both stereotypes — that of the flaky voter and that of the reckless one, who again is just busting out of their parents house to the nearest bar or beach. So I think mail-in votes are going to be essential across the board, especially if we see any sort of second wave like we’re hearing Dr. Fauci talk about that might come about somewhere around November. I just don’t see a scenario where we don’t have at least that option across the board. Especially for young people.
MP: Do either of you see a future where something like online voting may take place? You know, if I had to speculate, even something like from your phone?
CB: Oh, I have a tough time with that. I’d be concerned about that. I think I said in the article that we need something like the “Netflix of voting” in terms of melding college preferences. I’m really concerned about the security of something like that. In terms of the technology that exists today, you look at what happened in Iowa, obviously that’s not super encouraging. I’m definitely open to the possibility way down the road. I think for now, mail-in voting seems like the most plausible alternative, but what do you think, Matin?
MM: From what I understand, there’s a big consensus among security experts that probably the safest bet is paper ballots. Today, it’s really hard for me to imagine in the short term to have some infrastructure like that. But I do think, just because we can’t have full online voting, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to leverage these technologies to make voting as easy as possible for not just college students, but all segments of the population. So I think there’s a lot of things that we can work out and I think we should really leverage those technologies we have and the talent and the infrastructure that already exists to make voting as accessible as possible for the general population, but especially for more marginalized communities.
CB: Maybe it’s not the current day Netflix of online voting, but maybe it’s like the Netflix of 20 years ago when we had to mail in the DVDs.
MM: Exactly.
GB: Speaking of security, election interference has been coming up in the new cycle again as we’re approaching 2020. Obviously, more news has come out about that from 2016. What do you guys think the youth sentiment and thoughts and discussion around election interference is, and is it something that young people are concerned about right now?
CB: So far, we have not done polling on that. I have to give you that disclaimer before I give my measly individual opinion. I think that it’s definitely something just from conversations anecdotally that people are super concerned about, especially where you have young people. Big, big, big arena for talking about politics is online. It’s not necessarily in the Washington Post comments page. It’s on Instagram, it’s on Facebook, it’s on social media. And I think, given that that’s been a pretty prime target for foreign interference, that’s something that if young people aren’t necessarily concerned about right now, I think we ought to be. And I think that’s definitely something that we’ll be getting numbers on in the coming months ahead of November.
GB: Going back to something that you guys mentioned earlier about representing marginalized groups: How as a country can we do a better job in doing that in our elections, in surveys and polling all around?
CB: I would just say, a really good poll, a really excellent poll, like what’s been done frankly in the past is one that captures all communities. It shouldn’t necessarily matter what the demographic is; they’re giving you an accurate snapshot of who it is they’re trying to poll. In theory, in the past and in present, if you can take a really clear picture, then you’re capturing everybody across the board. But what else do you think, Matin?
MM: I kind of look at it as two different issues. I think both are really important. I think we definitely need very accurate results and really accurate numbers when we do polling on the general population. We want there to be like an accurate weighing of different communities. But I think when it comes to really formulating those policies, when it comes to really understanding how those policies are affecting [people] and how [they] are intertwined with the history of race and ethnicity in the United States, I think it’s very important to really go a step beyond the polling and really try to understand — you try to emphasize the voices that are within more marginalized communities. That can still be achieved with polling in a sense. What we try to do is really try to factor in the demographics of our audience — and it’s a powerful thing. It allows us to really emphasize, really voice how certain issues are affecting different demographics. But I think there’s a lot of mediums that we need to utilize in order to really highlight the voices of different communities.
CB: And just to strain that metaphor a little bit more in terms of taking a snapshot, our job is to take the snapshot. Our job is to take the cleanest picture possible — and then obviously make it available for journalists, for anybody in the mainstream discourse to then look at that picture. [Then they can] make sense of all the different phases in the portrait, to cap off a pretty subpar metaphor there.
MP: What do you guys think the current administration could be doing to support younger populations better?
CB: I think Matin hit it right on its head. I mean, just the polling that we’ve done so far, we look at the issues that matter most to young people. So number one is climate change, and I think close behind it are health care and the economy. I think it’s just getting at those sorts of issues.
We’ve done polling [for] about a year now in terms of the 2020 general election. And what’s been fascinating in terms of all the different trends among Democratic candidates, a lot of [them] have fallen. You know, Elizabeth Warren’s led at one point, Joe Biden has led, Bernie Sanders has led. President Trump’s support has stuck at about 20% for the last year — I mean, within the margin of error, just a flat line. So I’m not sure that he’s necessarily got a whole lot of college students’ vote to dig into just based on how flat he’s been so far in terms of support. But again, I mean, just looking at our polling, I think that he’d speak to those sorts of issues that mattered for people and frankly, a lot of other people like climate change and health care, especially amid coronavirus.
GB: Both of you guys are obviously young. I know Cyrus, you’re graduating right now. Matin I’m sure you have something going on this summer. Cyrus, what are you concerned about going into media right now? And Matin what are you worried about with economics and studying that in the current crisis that we’re in?
CB: I mean, we’re gonna be working on College Reaction a whole lot in the next few months. So all the challenges that we’ve been talking about in terms of polling or a lot of the challenges that we have in our dashboard. But in terms of media, I mean, that’s a whole different conversation, right? I mean, especially amid coronavirus.
Right now, I’m so concerned about local journalism. Obviously, that was a huge issue leading up to [this moment], but with ad revenue just falling through the floor at this point, there are going to have to be really long-shot strategies to save local journalism. But then I think just find new models across the board, whether it’s something like the Texas Tribune, that’s gone the non-profit model. I don’t know. But I’m definitely concerned. And I definitely salute everybody that’s going out in the field. They just announced the Report for America cohort for this year. And that is super awesome. I would love to see initiatives like that in media. And like anybody else that has questions about how to do media right — I can embarrass you, Gillian — they should give Gillian Brassil a call and they can figure out how to do it the right way.
MM: Obviously, there’s a lot to be looking out to and be confused about right now with the coronavirus and how the perspective on the deficit and the outlook of the economy is going to be moving forward. And I’ll leave that to more knowledgeable experts to weigh on. But I think something that I really think about when it comes to policy specifically is really understanding that a lot of things that we know, it’s really hard to materialize them. We know certain policies are really effective. We know certain policies are just really bad. Nevertheless, the political feasibility is always an issue. That kind of ties into the work that we do with College Reaction. [It’s] kind of looking through how people perceive politics and policy and how they engage with it and how they tried to get their voice out there and what they’re even thinking.
Something that I think a lot about is, how do we get these ambitious policies that really need to be out there and really address things that are very salient to our generation — to many communities around the world? And how do we just go from this vision of the policy to making them a political reality?
CB: I’d like to revise my answer to: What Matin said.
MP: So guys we like to end every interview we do by just getting a little bit of perspective from your own lives. How did each of you first get interested in politics and government?
CB: I’m from Washington, D.C., it’s hard to avoid it.
I didn’t necessarily start focusing on political news and political trends for a long time. Did not drink the Kool-Aid for years and years and years. I’d say frankly, it’s from studying history. I studied history in undergrad and I’d say that I became a historical junkie way before I started focusing on politics. Looking at the stories [from the] past make you way more curious about what’s going on today. My dad literally just yesterday, or today actually, I should say, pulled out his newspapers that he’s collected since the 60s — to date him — from when JFK was assassinated. From when LBJ assumed the presidency. It’s just cool stuff and made it a lot more, to me at least, it just made me a lot more curious about what’s going on in the world and sort of what the next story is.
MM: I grew up in Iran. I’ve lived in Alabama for several years and go to school in California. It’s kind of confusing. So I think my engagement with politics has a lot to do with the way I grew up.
I think Iran has been in a very unique political standing in the past couple of decades, especially with a nuclear program. So I think I really grew up just watching the news and really following politics, because how much of our lives were really impacted by those political trends and those negotiations or what the president of the U.S.A. or what this other high ranking officials [said or did]. So I grew up really following politics because it just was really impacting our lives.
When I came to the U.S., it still was really salient to me and I still followed politics really closely. The one thing that also really factored in was seeing the profound effect that policies have on individual families. How one policy that granted millions of people in the U.S. access to health care, and really seeing how an individual family is really affected by that, and understanding the profound effect of that on scale, and really understanding how these policies that have been constructed and are being discussed, are really having such a fundamental impact in people’s lives. Ever since coming to that realization — and I’m developing that understanding more and more and really learning every day — I think that’s been a big driver for me in engaging with politics and in, you know, really trying to get into the grains of policy.
Questions? Ask us at contact@govsight.co.
Like what you read but prefer to learn with your ears? Listen to The Insight Podcast by GovSight on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podbean every Monday.
Follow GovSight on Twitter @GovSight1, Instagram @govsight and Facebook @GovSight. Go to govsight.com to see how GovSight is making “Citizenship. Simplified.”
