(Almost) everything you wanted to know about politics (but were afraid to ask)

The NPR Politics Podcast

In this special episode recorded before a virtual audience, NPR political correspondents Tamara Keith, Miles Parks, and Mara Liassion address

Key takeaways

• A Supreme Court ruling has blocked Trump's executive order attempting to change mail-in voting rules for this cycle.
• Recent UC San Diego polling indicates extremely low public confidence (under 5%) in the specific method of mail-in voting.

Main topics

• Election integrity and mail-in voting
• Polling accuracy and methodology

Notable quotes

Polls are not predictions.

Conclusion

The episode highlights a period of intense political volatility where

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Austin Tice is an American journalist who disappeared over a decade ago while reporting in Syria. And for years, we've been searching for him. Speaker 2 (0:09) This looks like a secret passage. I'm just Speaker 6 (0:12) pushing a door so you can get in. Go, go, go. Speaker 1 (0:15) Listen to Where Is Austin Tice from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4 on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (0:28) It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. Speaker 7 (0:32) I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And Speaker 5 (0:34) I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. Speaker 4 (0:38) This is a special episode of the podcast because we're recording it with a virtual audience. Now we're going to answer questions from our virtual audience here. We've also got questions that were sent in ahead of time. And let me just say that out of those pre-submitted questions, the topic that probably came up the most was election integrity, including vote by mail. So let's start there. It is convenient that Miles Parks is a co-host of this podcast and also knows all the things. Dot wrote in asking, will I be able to vote by mail and have it counted? While Kathleen wondered, how worried should we be about mail-in voting? Miles, we got a ruling from the Supreme Court this week that helps answer those questions, right? Speaker 7 (1:23) Yes. I mean, the answer is. Voting by mail will look the same in 2026 as it did in 2024. That Trump's executive order attempting to add all these new rules and regulations to how people can vote by mail has been blocked for this election cycle, at least. So let's just start there. It's an important level set that I genuinely, as I cover this stuff. every single day. And the last couple of weeks have been very confusing for me. They have been very confusing for the entire American public. I talk to voting officials every day. This is basically all the questions that they're getting are about voting by mail and then broadly just federal interference in the process. Right. So that's there's one part of it is that the executive order is not going into effect. So it's going to look the same as previous election cycles. That isn't the same as people's confidence in it. There are real signals that it's possible that fewer people will choose to vote by mail this election cycle. There was a recent poll that just came out this week from UC San Diego that asked a bunch of different questions about trust in elections. And one of them was about specifically voting methods. And it asked about all these different how people vote and which gives you the most confidence in the accuracy and integrity of elections. And returning your ballot by mail was under 5 percent. That the amount of people who said. voting by mail is the thing I'm most confident in versus early voting versus voting on election day versus using a Dropbox. And, you know, Speaker 5 (2:45) to Democrats, what that tells you is that even if Trump didn't prevail in the Supreme Court, he did achieve one of his main objectives, which is to reduce people's confidence, not just in mail-in voting, but... in the integrity of elections. The more people don't trust the results, as Donald Trump has said many times throughout his entire career, any election he doesn't win is by definition rigged and fake and fraudulent. That's something that he also wanted to accomplish, which I think he has. Speaker 7 (3:13) Definitely. We just don't know if that's going to advantage him, right? Because I think one of the other things is that the people who are most helped by these sort of accessible voting methods are low propensity voters, which are... Trump has done very well with those voters, right? And so I guess it's very unclear what the political impact- Plenty Speaker 5 (3:29) of Republicans vote by mail. Speaker 7 (3:31) Right, right. Even though he Speaker 5 (3:32) firmly believes that voting by mail helps Democrats. He believes that, but there really isn't evidence to that. Is there, Miles? There isn't, there Speaker 7 (3:39) isn't. And frankly, the people who are most motivated to vote are going to vote no matter what method is available to them. And those people are Democrats this election cycle, it seems like. Speaker 4 (3:48) You know who votes by mail? President Trump. Speaker 7 (3:50) Yeah, right. Speaker 4 (3:51) Also, older people, rural voters, people who might very likely be Republican. I Speaker 7 (3:58) would say, though, if people do want to vote by mail, it's not a bad practice. Vote early. You know, there are there always post office delays every election cycle. Vote early. Potentially use a Dropbox. There are variables when it comes to mail voting that aren't related to misinformation. But there are things people can do to make it more likely that your vote counts. Speaker 4 (4:15) Yeah. Make sure to check that envelope. All Speaker 7 (4:17) right. And we also got a bunch of questions about. polling accuracy, like this one from Mari. She says, I'm so skeptical of polling anymore. How do we know what's really going on? Mara, I feel like this is firmly in your lane. Speaker 5 (4:30) There are good polls and bad polls. She's right to be confused because there are so many polls. But I would say that the most important thing to remember is that polls are not predictions. It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. But polls don't even try to do that. What polls are doing is a snapshot in time. They're telling you if the election was held today based on the pollster's best guess about who the electorate is. Here's what would happen. And there's a margin of error. Every poll has a little methodology section that you can read. Sometimes the margin of error is very big. You have to watch for whether a poll is a nonpartisan poll or a partisan poll. If it's put out by the Republican or Democratic Party, you should take it with a grain of salt. Also, there are polls that are just higher quality. They sometimes have a bigger sample. So polls can help us in a lot of ways. Polls tell us things over time. If you watch Donald Trump's approval ratings in polls going back to when he was inaugurated, you're going to learn a lot about what's happened to people's feelings about him. So the biggest poll that matters, of course, is the poll on Election Day. You hear politicians say that over and over again. And Domenico. Yes, and Domenico. But the other thing that is important to remember, and we do a swing voter focus group here at NPR. Focus groups are small samples of voters. In person, they tell us why they're feeling certain things. They're not statistically significant. They generally illustrate what polling tells us. Big polls tell us what voters think. Focus groups tell us why they think it. Speaker 4 (6:03) All right. I'm just going to let it stand. Well, actually, I'm not just going to let it stand there. There have been actual literal fake polls. This is one of the things that I cannot let go of this election cycle, is that there have been polls that have been put out by imaginary organizations that Like one of them was like, oh, we're just doing a social experiment to see if we can move the way people think by putting out a totally fake poll. It is wild. Speaker 5 (6:27) But polls do change the way people think. And that's why we have been flooded with polls in the last couple of cycles. In other words, the more polls, let's say, usually it was on the Republican side. Lots and lots of Republican sponsored polls that showed the Republican in the lead. And that was supposed to affect people's