(upbeat music) (graphic pops) - Hello and welcome to "Journal," I'm Steve Kendall.

Bowling Green State University's Democracy and Public Policy Network seeks to provide critical information to help citizens and policy makers make better decisions that will better serve the public good.

Joining us are Dr. Robert Alexander and Dr. David Jackson from BGSU.

Thank you both for being here.

Dr. Alexander, kind of talk about the network, how it developed, the purpose behind it, and why it's important, it's value, to people.

- Sure, I mean, I think most people can see that we're living in some pretty difficult polarizing times.

Kind of a confusing era in American politics.

And I think that Bowling Green State University wanted to take things in a little different direction, try and get people to understand the political system around them a little bit better, to get people more connected.

I had done some work down at Ohio Northern University for a number of years, launching an institute there and the opportunity arose to come here to Bowling Green.

And it's been really exciting to kind of get things off the ground through public opinion polling and policy, a piece on policy briefs, and all kinds of things.

So we're really excited to kind of see the things that we've been doing.

- Yeah, and I know that you've been doing polling over a certain amount of time, and I guess the good news is it's all based on Ohio and how it's affecting Ohio and the people, which a lot of times you'll see national polls and it's generic in terms of what it means for the country as a whole.

But it's good to have something that talks to Ohioans about how they feel about the state issues and the national issues.

Because you do that... How often have you been doing polling?

- [Robert] So I've been doing public opinion polling for quite a while now.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Robert] But here at BG, and I know Dr. Jackson and Melissa Miller did some polling a few years back.

- [Steve] Right.

- [Robert] But we did four public opinion polls this year.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- It's pretty robust to do four samples in the state of Ohio in one year.

And just kind of launching this initiative, and we've gotten some really good response and feedback both locally, at the state level, and in nationally and even internationally.

People are still interested in what's going on in the Buckeye State.

And there is quite a bit that's happening here that isn't just presidential politics.

- [Steve] Right.

- And isn't just gubernatorial politics or senatorial politics.

So I think that that's one of the kind of missions that President Rogers really wanted was for us to kind of really help us understand what's happening here in the Buckeye State.

- Yeah, and I know Dr. Jackson, we've talked, when you've been on the show before, about the fact that Ohio, although it for a long time was this bellwether kind of state, presidential elections has shifted a little bit.

So as you guys are doing this, you're finding information about maybe why that's happening or if it is happening, the way it's perceived to be happening.

So talk a little bit about that, about the shift Ohio, the perception that it's made from being like a bellwether state to being now pretty much a leaning red state, if not a red state.

I'm being kind here to be red, red, whatever, but okay, yeah.

- [David] Yeah, the audience is probably gonna get tired of hearing me say this, but, you know, my colleague Dominic Wells and I have been working for a couple years now on looking at Ohio politics, looking at Ohio politics in comparison to Michigan, given that demographically Michigan and Ohio are extremely similar, yet have gone completely different directions.

- [Steve] Right.

- In some ways, Ohio was heading in the same way as Michigan with the marijuana referendum, with reproductive rights referendum.

But then the failure of Issue 1 on gerrymandering sort of stopped the convergence that seemed to be happening between Michigan and Ohio.

So what the polling allows us to do is to look at a sample of Ohio voters who look like the group of voters who voted in the 2024 presidential election.

So the poll that we...

The two most recent polls are framed around that.

So the samples are plus 10 or plus 11 for Donald Trump.

And that tells you a couple of different things.

The most important thing it tells you is what the electorate of 2024, were it to vote again in 2026, would do.

And it's important then.

And the second thing that that does is it requires some caution because it doesn't tell us what voters overall or potential voters overall are thinking.

You know, this polling concept is as much an art as a science.

- [Steve] Right.

- And so you're trying to, you know, make the sample look like what you think the population is like.

And so with our population, what we're thinking about is those who are actually going to vote.

And so for Professor Well's work and mine and what we've shared, it can be pretty disheartening to people who think that Ohio could be or should be competitive again to look at the samples as we produce them.

But we have to caution people that those samples are based on an assumption of the same kind of electorate that turned out in 2024 turning out in 2026.

And that's not necessarily a guarantee.

- Right, right, now, when we talk about trying to... And people, obviously, sometimes look at polling and go, well...

The perception is it's not as accurate as it used to be when the reality is it's probably, at least at some levels, a lot more accurate.

Dr. Alexander, when you go to assemble that pool of people, how do you make sure, what safeguards do you have to say, "Yes, we are comfortable with the population we sample that it is reflective of the people in Ohio," or the goal of finding out what the people of Ohio are feeling about different policies, whether it's state or national policies?

- [Robert] Sure, sure, so public opinion polling can be a pretty thankless business.

- [Steve] Uh-hmm.

- And then when you see results, at the end of the day, people want to know like, why wasn't it exactly this?

- [Steve] Right.

- [Robert] And of course, we always see these things called margins of error.

- [Steve] Yes.

- [Robert] And so we have to build in this idea of a margin of error because we don't know anything with certainty.

We actually contract with YouGov.

YouGov is a international company.

They have a panel of participants.

So there's a panel of participants always at the ready to take polls.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And so what we do, as Dr. Jackson alluded to, is we track backward to kind of think forward.

And so we look back to the 2020 election, we look back to the 2024 election and we kind of say like, what do those demographics look like?

And you know, as he said, new voters turn out, some voters don't turn out in every election, so that's gonna create some error there.

But that's how we work to model the electorate, is by looking to the past that's prologue to the future.

- [Steve] Yeah, and then Ohio has a reputation the last several years of...

It seemed like holding an election on something every three or four months, because there were years where there was not supposed to be anything in August, then suddenly there was an August election.

We just had one a few weeks ago, early in May, and turnout was like 8, 10%.

So that would not be a population you'd use, say, "Well, let's use these to reflect people who are turning out to vote."

When we come back, we can talk about maybe more of the results of your most recent 100-day poll, which is now just a couple of weeks old or a few weeks old, that addresses what the first 100 days of Donald Trump's administration has been like.

And also touches on a couple of state things with regard to the governor's race, and maybe a surprise.

Although one of the candidates in the poll has now since dropped out.

But we can talk about those and kind of see the application in real time.

So, back in just a moment with Dr. Robert Alexander and Dr. David Jackson from Bowling Green State University here on "The Journal."

Thank you for staying with us on "The Journal," our guest are Dr. David Jackson and Dr. Robert Alexander from the BGSU Democracy and Public Policy Network.

Dr. Alexander, you recently conducted a poll on Donald Trump's first 100 days, and it got into some other things too, but kind of talk about some of the topics that have been on the news, obviously, tariffs, but there's a lot in there as well and some of the other policies.

So kind of give us the overview and some of the detail of how people sampled with regard to how Donald Trump is doing in his first 100 days according to the folks you sampled here in Ohio.

- [Robert] Sure, so we actually did a poll back in February as well.

- [Steve] Uh-hmm, right.

- [Robert] So we wanted to hit one in February and then kind of see where he was at 100 days later.

- [Steve] Right.

- [Robert] And in those, we took a look at a lot of his executive orders and his proposed executive orders, and we did some testing of some of those things back in that February poll.

And then didn't do the test in the 100-days poll.

But we found some really interesting things.

First of all, Donald Trump is still a polarizing figure.

- [Steve] Hmm.

- That has not changed.

Even though he won the state and, you know, our sample is a plus 10 Trump sample, you know, part of that could be choice, right?

The kinds of choices that people have at the polls.

And maybe Kamala Harris wasn't the strongest choice.

And so you see that in some of the polling because people, Republicans, solidly behind him.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- Democrats solidly against him.

- [Steve] Oppose him, yes.

- The change that we saw was with independents between our February poll and our 100-days poll.

So wherever we saw some change in the numbers for support of him, it was with independents.

We did see that, you know, he was, I think, plus six or plus seven back in February.

He's negative 1 in the 100-days poll.

- [Steve] Yeah, hmm.

- And that movement really was- And in Ohio, again, this is plus 10 Trump voters.

- [Steve] Right, so that, yeah.

- So that he's got this negative favorability is something.

This is a state... And again, there's not a lot of state poll out there, so that's why it makes the kinds of things that we're doing really valuable.

- [Steve] Sure.

- But you know, like you mentioned the tariffs, that's one thing that Ohio voters are not excited about.

Most think that it's personally gonna hurt them, that it's gonna be bad for the country.

Just like one in five think that that will be helpful to them.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- So it's not a winning issue for Donald Trump, even in a state like Ohio that he carried pretty strongly.

You know, border and immigration, those are things that he still is pretty strong on in the state.

You take a look at...

But, you know, I wanna kind of say, like we did kind of do- And this is what's kind of interesting about this, is that, you know, you can poll these things and kinda get the headlines, but you can also do a little bit of research stuff.

And that's the kinds of things that we're doing.

And so we did some tests in that February poll.

And how you frame issues matters quite a bit.

So if you're talking about, you know, stopping illegal migrants at the border that are fleeing persecution, that's one thing.

- [Steve] Right.

- There's some support for that.

But if you say seeking asylum, there's not as much support for that.

Because people don't understand that seeking, you know, protection from persecution is asylum.

- [Steve] Right.

- So how you frame those issues matters quite a bit.

So we see a lot of issues there.

And, you know, Trump still is pretty strong in the state, clearly.

Republican seeking his endorsement.

- [Steve] Right.

- Seeking his approval.

But there's some reluctance and hesitation among Ohio voters, not among Republicans again, but independents.

He's gotta be a little cautious kind of thinking about 2026.

- Yeah, and Dr. Jackson, I know that one of the things we talk about, and I don't wanna mention the R word, but redistricting, of course, has been an issue in Ohio.

So even if the population, in general... And independents are where the vote gets swung, for the most part, in a lot of states.

Here in Ohio, if you're a congressman and you're looking at these numbers, you're like, "It doesn't bother me so much because my district is so ironclad.

I can basically maybe vote against the way some of my constituents are saying and still be okay."

And that's one of the issues we've had with the states redistricting for the last 10 years now.

- Sure, so in a broad sense, you know, what the Democracy and Public Policy Network does is take a slogan that BGSU has, which is a "Public University for the Public Good," and help explain in a sense what that means.

- [Steve] Right.

- And what it boils down to in one way is that people in the state of Ohio benefit from the existence of Bowling Green State University even if they don't attend it or send their kids here.

- [Steve] Right.

- And so what we're doing is producing data and evidence and generating knowledge about the people of Ohio for the people of Ohio.

- [Steve] Right.

- And one of the things that we've been looking at in the poll lately is organized labor.

Organized labor is a pretty significant constituency in Ohio.

And so we measure if somebody's in a union household by...

If anyone in their household is a member of a union, we define that as a union household.

And it's around, I think, 14% in Ohio or in our sample.

And we look at, you know, the opinions of that group.

That group voted in favor of Donald Trump in Ohio, a little less than people who were not members of a union household.

But now we can look at where people who are in union households stand on issues.

And we mentioned the tariff issue.

- [Steve] Right.

- You know, there's sort of this image of union members, you know, wearing hard hats and working in car factories.

And so they're gonna be in favor of tariffs because it'll keep, you know, the prices of foreign automobiles high.

But that's not what organized labor is really like.

I mean, it's a much more complicated group than the traditional, you know, Ford plant with 40,000 workers- - [Steve] Or Teamsters or whatever.

- Doesn't exist anymore.

Well, you're throwing in a Teamster, right?

- [Steve] Yeah.

- I mean a Teamster benefits from, you know, the trade.

- [Steve] Right, yeah, because the movement of goods.

- Products, and so union households in Ohio are very, very skeptical about the benefit of tariffs for themselves, for the country.

Who they think they will actually benefit is not themselves, but wealthier corporations.

And that tells us a couple different things.

Number one, it tells us that, you know, President Trump needs to think about the policies that he's pursuing in terms of how they're affecting a group who, in this case, in Ohio, supported him.

But then secondly, it tells the labor movement something about itself, that they are more complicated- - [Steve] Than even they know.

- And it reminds them that they are a coalition of, you know, public sector, private sector, teachers, dock workers, you name it.

- [Steve] Yeah, the whole spectrum of employment out there now, yeah.

- And so then to wrap it up with that concept of the public university for the public good, that is information for policy makers, for activists, for leaders that would not otherwise exist or be made public where it not for the network.

- [Steve] Yeah, when we come back, we can talk more about that.

And then also, too, because obviously there's some other topics in here and we've got information on the governor's race, which is still more than a year away, or the election, more than a year away, but there's already been some shifting there.

Back in just a moment with Dr. Robert Alexander and Dr. David Jackson from Bowling Green State University back in just a moment.

Thanks for staying with us on "The Journal."

We have two guests from the BGSU Democracy and Public Policy Network, Dr. David Jackson, Dr. Robert Alexander.

Dr. Jackson, one of the things you look at in the polling is, within that, the demographic shifts that may or may not be taking place.

So talk a little about that, that we're seeing some shifting, especially maybe in the younger demographics, from where they were eight years ago or so to where they are now with regard to national politics.

- [David] Yeah, so I mean, what the poll allows us to do is generate a large amount of data that we can use for, you know, traditional political science research reasons.

And so a number of people in the department who've been working on the poll have, you know, written and submitted scholarly journal articles about that.

But those have, you know, a relatively narrow audience.

But they're important.

What it also allows us to do is to take a sort of bigger picture, look at the data, and one of the things that I've been interested in is the concept of generations.

Now a lot of people (clears throat) aren't convinced that there really is such a thing as generational effects.

I am, I think that there are differences, you know, in terms of experiences that generations have, where it can make some sense to, you know, understand political behavior by looking at certain periods and saying that the people of those periods have some characteristics in common and not others.

And so nationally, one thing that people have been noticing is that Gen X, the generation born after the boom but before the millennials, so roughly the mid '60s up until the '70s, is more Republican and more conservative.

- [Steve] Hmm.

- And to a lot of people from that generation, it's kind of surprising that a generation, you know, that listened to the Replacements and the Ramones turned out to be more conservative.

- [Steve] More conservative, yeah.

- But, you know, you had pot smoking hippies who ended up selling life insurance too.

- [Steve] Yeah, so, yeah, yeah.

- People can change.

And so we can look at the data and try to figure out, you know, what's going on with that.

And so I did an analysis of that and then did some looking at what other people are saying.

And our survey doesn't show this, but it does show that the Gen X were in fact more conservative and more Republican.

So what's the explanation for that?

So you get the data and then you gotta try to figure out why it's going up.

And there's a lot of different explanations that get offered: that that generation has poor memories of Carter's presidency, fond memories of Reagan's presidency.

And that's why we talk about generational effects, because your earliest political experiences can have an effect.

We look at that they're sort of a pinched-in-between generation in that, you know, they've got boomer parents that they have to worry about taking care of and they've got children who are becoming expensive.

And then there's also this third concept that comes up, sort of a cultural libertarianism about them, that they don't like being told what they can and can't say.

That is manifesting itself in so-called cancel culture and wokeness and things like that.

And so what we do with the survey is we find something in terms of a data point, Gen X seems to be more Republican and more conservative, and then that inspires us to contribute to the narrative and the conversation going on in the state and nationally about why that fact that we're onto might be the case.

- Yeah, and then with the goal, too, of that information we use to maybe address those issues and improve public policy decisions than based on that more in-depth view of a particular generation, as you said, with responsibilities that are different than the generation before them and probably the generation afterwards, and the experience that they had economically, educationally, that kind of thing.

- Yeah, and anybody can use the data.

The point about it is to get it out there for more people to understand and think about and to translate what we're doing as scholars and academics into something that a broader audience can contribute to the conversation of and benefit from knowing about, too.

From a policy perspective, from an activist perspective, you know, people on either side of the spectrum might see the data and the analysis and make choices about how they campaign.

That's up to them.

We just generate the data and the analysis and see where it goes.

- [Steve] They can use it.

Yeah, they can use it as they wish or not use it.

When we look at, obviously, too, there's, you know, we have a sitting governor who's going to be term-limited out of office.

The odds are he's not going to do anything else.

Although we don't know that.

When you looked at the polling that you did on that, is anybody surprised by who comes out on top on either the Republican or the Democrat side at this point, given that the elections in November of '26, and we're sitting here in May of '25, and yet it's ramped up already?

- [Robert] I think a couple of years ago, if you would've said that a guy named Vivek Ramaswamy would be at the top of the Republican leaderboard, I think people would've been shocked.

- [Steve] Right.

- [Robert] I think, it is a bit surprising also that he's come from this kind of national stage first and then thinking more statewide.

But that also kind of speaks to kind of the larger cultural push of like, you know, Donald Trump was successful in politics, who could be the next Donald Trump, right?

- [Steve] Right.

- So you see it with a JD Vance, somebody who's kind of got that celebrity persona who hasn't been involved in politics before.

- [Steve] No.

- So that kind of speaks to something that we're also finding in our polls is that Ohioans are disgusted with politics.

They really don't like anybody.

They are frustrated about the world around them.

They don't trust partisans of the other stripe.

- [Steve] Right.

- So if you're talking about how Democrats view Republicans and Republicans view Democrats, and this is the kind of the bigger kinds of issues that really intrigue me to kind of figure out like, how do we kind of push past some of that?

- [Steve] Yeah, you get it right, yeah.

Explain that and then make people feel comfortable dealing with the other side, kind of, yeah.

- You know, in real life you can't just take your ball and go home.

- [Steve] Right.

- That's not a fun, that's not a fun world.

- [Steve] Yeah, no.

- You want to be able to play.

And it's really hard when you find that 90% of partisans think that the other side are immoral or unjust or intolerant.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- You can't negotiate with that.

- [Steve] Yeah, you can't move forward in that situation.

Yeah, yeah - Right, and so, coming back to this issue of the gubernatorial election, it's not surprising that you see this outsider kind of at the top on the Republican side.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And so you see that... And what's also intriguing is, you know, back in our February poll, we asked Dave Yost, who's now dropped outta the race.

We asked about Heather Hill, we asked about Ramaswamy.

We didn't ask about Jim Tressel, right?

- [Steve] Yeah, 'cause he wasn't on the horizon at that point, yeah.

- He literally wasn't on the horizon, but, of course, we got asked all kinds of questions.

Why didn't you ask about Jim Tressel, you know?

And so we then included him in this last poll, and he hasn't said that he was going to run for governor yet, but he hasn't said no either, right?

- [Steve] Right.

- And so we did ask about him in this last one, and we did head-to-head with Tressel and Ramaswamy and Yost and others with other prominent democrats like Amy Acton, who has announced.

- [Steve] Declared, yeah.

- Sherrod Brown has not said that he's going to run for governor, but there's some chatter that he could run for governor or maybe the Senate.

We're not sure about that yet.

Tim Ryan, who's also, you know, good BG grad, who's also kind of been bandied about as a gubernatorial candidate.

So we did these head-to-head and we found that Jim Tressel did just, you know, nearly as well as Ramaswamy did.

- [Steve] Against the Democrats that might potentially be the opposition.

- [Robert] Right.

- [Steve] Correct.

- [Robert] And so kind of speaks to the Republican lean that we have in the Ohio electorate right now.

But it also speaks that, you know, Jim Tressel is somebody that would be probably a force to be reckoned with on a statewide ballot.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- You know, on the Democrat side, it's very interesting.

Like we said, Amy Acton's the only one that has declared, but there's a lot of chatter about, is there somebody else?

You know, is there somebody else that might be out there that might be more competitive?

In our early polling, it's really early.

- [Steve] Yeah, right.

- In 2026, it is early, but you know, the next election is always happening, right?

- [Steve] Yeah, it starts the day after the one, yeah.

The next morning it starts.

- [Robert] Oh, yeah.

- [Steve] After an election.

- [Robert] It's happening.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Robert] And I'll tell you, we're very confident that a lot of politicians, the folks that are out there in the real world, are paying attention to these polls.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Robert] You know, we're getting some feedback about this, so they're paying attention to these things.

And the reality is you look at the...

It'll be a midterm election, and in midterm elections, this is one of the most certain things that we find in political science literature is that the president's party almost always loses seats.

It's difficult for the President's party in a midterm election.

So if Democrats are to have a strong showing and be competitive and kind of, you know, Dr. Jackson had mentioned a few moments ago about how there's been these glimmers, that maybe were still a little purple here and there, every once in a while it comes out, that a midterm election would be that time for Democrats to do how well they could actually do in a statewide election.

- [Steve] And test some of the theories for maybe the two years later for the presidential election in Ohio.

- [David] Well, and Tim Ryan's been making noise, like he thinks we could go back to a state of competitiveness in Ohio back when.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [David] There's that old famous thing with the reverse letter C that you could draw in Ohio is where the Democrats were.

He thinks what we've gone to now is a bunch of little blue dots.

He thinks he can bring some of those reverse letter C's up in the northeast Ohio and the river, back into, well, you know, competitiveness.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Robert] And I would say that one of the other issues that you see, again, in the polling is that Ohio has always had a populous streak.

- [Steve] Right.

- Barack Obama won Ohio two times as a populist, right?

Donald Trump has really put that on steroids, right?

- [Steve] Yeah.

- So we have that in us.

And so, you know, having the right candidate on the Democrat side or the Republican side...

I mean, Ramaswamy's not running as a super wealthy fellow, right?

He's running as an outsider who, you know, wants to take down the system.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And so, you know, when we look at the tariffs, again, people think that it's the wealthy and the billionaires that are gonna benefit from it, not the working class.

- [Steve] Right.

- So those are the kinds of issues that you want to zero in on given the kinds of information that we are gathering through our polling.

- [Steve] Okay, well, we'll have you guys back as you go through this process over the next six to eight months and talk about where we are then, because obviously we can see how this is trending, so good.

Dr. David Jackson, Dr.

Rob Alexander, thank you so much.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at eight o'clock on WBGU-PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Goodnight and good luck.

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