Before things get heavier this fall, a conversation about the plumbing: CNN Polling and Election Analytics Editor Ariel Edwards-Levy joins Farrah to talk about why survey response rates keep sliding, what fraud and burnout look like from the respondent's side, and a fun experiment Ariel ran called "Why Are You Talking to Me?" — which breaks down, by age, race, and party, the real reasons people bother answering a poll at all.
Guest
Ariel Edwards-Levy is CNN's Polling and Election Analytics Editor, where she covers public opinion research and helps shape how CNN reports on polling.
In this episode
- What actually happens at AAPOR (the annual gathering of, as Ariel puts it, "survey nerds")
- Why response rates keep falling, and what that forces researchers to do with weighting
- The fraud problem in online panels: bots, incentive arbitrage, and people gaming their way onto U.S. panels from outside the country
- "Fit for purpose" research: why the right sample depends on whether you're trying to measure opinion, predict an outcome, or build a persuasion strategy
- Low propensity voters, low social control, and why the people least likely to say their voice is heard elsewhere are often the ones most willing to take a political survey
- Survey-design experiments that backfired — including one where researchers tried to end a survey with a joke and had to kill the test because it tanked completion rates
- Ariel's own AAPOR presentation, "Why Are You Talking to Me?" — a 2025 survey experiment asking respondents their real motivation for answering: making their voice heard (43%), the incentive (29%), or just enjoying the questions (22%) — broken down sharply by age, race, and partisanship
- Why "make your voice heard" recruitment messaging pulls in a very different (older, more partisan) respondent than other messaging
- What it takes to get people who don't trust polling, or don't think of themselves as political, to participate anyway
- How Ariel thinks about her job as a journalist covering public opinion — presenting what people think without telling readers what to do with it
- A behind-the-scenes moment from CNN's State of the Union video-response project, and why hearing an actual respondent's voice changes how the data lands
Notable quotes"Don't jerk survey respondents around." — Ariel, on what she took away from a wave of survey-design experiments at AAPOR
"When there's no incentive to lie, people tend to be lazy and not lie." — Farrah, on why paid respondents tend to answer honestly
"I worry for anybody who feels very prepared for an election season — that demonstrates to me a worrying level of confidence." — ArielReferenced in this episode
- AAPOR (American Association for Public Opinion Research) annual conference
- VeraSight's AAPOR omnibus (their annual free-question booth at the conference)
Coming up on Cross Tabs
This one's the calm before a harder run of episodes — next up, we're getting into the midterms, political identity, what people actually want out of policy, and the future of democracy.
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