Surveying American Public Opinion on Climate Change, with Jon Krosnick

Notable Quotes

• The gap between desired and perceived federal efforts to address climate change: “What’s really striking in these surveys is that Americans are not seeing nearly the effort [to address climate change] that they would like to see. In contrast to people saying they would like the federal government to be doing a moderate amount or more—about 80 percent—only 50 percent think the government is doing that.” (13:20)
• Americans favor mandates over incentives to reduce emissions: “Americans are clear that they’re actually willing to pay for policies that will reduce emissions. They’re not so enthusiastic about policies that might reduce emissions or might reduce emissions by unknown amounts.” (16:12)
• When given the facts, Americans overwhelmingly support equitable climate policy: “Fully 85 percent of American adults said that the government should help poorer people more than richer people in coping with the effects of climate change.” (31:16)

Top of the Stack

• Climate Insights 2024 report by Jon Kronsnick and Bo Maclnnis
• Surveys of Consumers from the University of Michigan
• “Is Gen Z Less Supportive of Israel? We Don’t Know. Recent Polls Can’t Be Trusted” by Ellen Konar, Jon Krosnick, and Joe Wlos

The Full Transcript

Kristin Hayes: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Kristin Hayes. I've got a repeat guest joining me today, someone we haven't heard from in quite some time. That's Dr. Jon Krosnick.

Jon is a social psychologist who does research on attitude formation, change, and effects. He also looks at the psychology of political behavior, and he does a lot of work on survey research methods. He is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Communication, Political Science, and Psychology at Stanford University, where he directs the Political Psychology Research Group. He's also—I'm very happy to say—a university fellow at RFF.

Jon is coming back on the show today to talk about the results of the Climate Insights 2024 survey series, which he leads with his Stanford colleague, Bo MacInnis. He also has support in this work from survey firm ReconMR and from RFF. This periodic survey is, I would argue, one of the preeminent lenses into Americans' public opinions on climate science, policy, and action. The 2024 edition features some unique questions on environmental justice, workforce issues, and more. Stay with us as we dive into the rich set of findings in this year's series of Climate Insights reports.

Hi Jon, and welcome to Resources Radio.

Jon Krosnick: Thank you, Kristin. Nice to be with you.

Kristin Hayes: Great. This is my second recording in person, which is quite a treat. Welcome to the RFF offices. Let me just start. We always like to ask a little bit about the background of our guests, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background—your very multidisciplinary background—and maybe a little bit about what brings you to Washington, DC, today.

Jon Krosnick: Well, what brings me to Washington, DC, today is my powerful and long-standing connection with Resources for the Future. Back in 1995, I was invited to a little conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute, to have a group of social scientists think about global warming. When I was invited to that conference, I said, "What's that?” I didn't actually know what it was. The inviter said to me, "Oh, don't worry about it. We'll have a climate scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who will tell you and the others about it, and then you'll talk about it for a couple of days." That ended up leading to getting a research grant and then doing a series of surveys, and I got addicted to this topic.

From the very beginning, it was obvious to me I couldn't do it without Resources for the Future. In particular, Ray Kopp, who I had worked with on a number of other projects, happily and quickly jumped into action as my collaborator. He advised me and collaborated with me in making decisions about the very first surveys that were done first in Ohio and then, eventually, nationally. Ray actually went to bat to get money from the federal government for the first survey that we did collaboratively at a national level. He and I have been partnering ever since in doing that work. So, where else would I be, but RFF, to talk about this work.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah. Ray certainly loves the survey work, too. It's been a long-time favorite of his as well. We have had you on the show previously to talk about the 2020 edition of Climate Insights. So, here we are four years later, in another big election year, another important year in the evolution of climate policy and climate impacts. Really quickly, before we talk in more detail about this year's results, I want to give you an opportunity—you've already started saying a little bit about the history of this survey and the set of reports—but say a little bit more about how long you've been conducting this work and how it's evolved over time.

Jon Krosnick: The first survey was actually inspired by something that the Clinton administration did in the fall of 1997. The Clinton administration hosted the White House Conference on Climate Change, and Al Gore was the vice president at the time. This was his opportunity to take the stage and sponsor presentation after presentation by leading climate scientists with the goal of focusing the country on this issue, leading up to the Kyoto Protocol signing in December of that year. For me, as a social scientist, and Ray, as well, this was a really special opportunity, because very rarely do we get warned in advance about something big that's going to happen and that may move public opinion. It gives us an opportunity to collect data before that thing happens and afterward.

Take Hurricane Katrina as a contrast case. People saw that coming, but days before, not weeks or months before. In this case, we had a lot of warnings. In fact, it was some National Public Radio broadcast in the morning that I heard, when President Clinton announced that this conference would be happening and that the effort would be made to start a national discussion on this topic.

So, I was prepared in a way that allowed Ray and I to get money. I will say, fortunately, the National Science Foundation is especially prepared in instances like this to zip funding to investigators when there's an urgent need. Luckily, we were able to do that in that case and watch what happened before and after that discussion. 1997 was the first survey, 2024 is the most recent one, and it's a long time in between that we've been watching public opinion in a way that allows us to not only understand the dynamics of people's thinking on this issue, but to compare it to how Americans think about lots of other issues, as well.

Kristin Hayes: That's fascinating. I don't think I asked you about that origin story last time, so it's good to know that's what was the original impetus for this.

There is a tremendous amount in these reports. We are only going to be able to skim the surface in our conversation today. I would definitely encourage our listeners to take a look at the actual reports themselves. There really is so much in here, but let's do our best to hit the highlights as best we can.

The first report in the series focuses on American understanding of climate change. It covers a range of foundational questions on Americans' beliefs and certainty around climate change. I'm going to ask you a tremendously broad opening softball question—where is the American public today, in 2024, in its sentiments around climate change?

Jon Krosnick: Kristin, let me answer that by putting it in the context of what came before 2024. What's really striking is the consistency of Americans' views on this issue. If you think back to that first survey in 1997, when I personally didn't even have a good understanding of what climate change was, the American public was way ahead of me. At that time, 77 percent of American adults said they thought the Earth's temperature probably had been warming over the last 100 years. That answer—that percentage, that 77 percent—is almost identical to what we see right now—75 percent.

That's very typical of American public opinion on the vast majority of issues. People formulate views, and those views are pretty stable over time. There are some striking exceptions over a period of decades; for example, Americans’ views of race changed a great deal much in the egalitarian direction. Another striking example is gay marriage: in a very short period, Americans went from leaning away from it to embracing it.

There are those exceptions, but for the most part, the vast majority of issues that Americans think and debate about are accompanied by very stable views over decades. In the case of climate change, this is particularly interesting, because there have been major events over the last 25 years that could very well have changed opinions: Hurricane Katrina; Hurricane Sandy; Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth; literally hundreds of millions of dollars spent in outreach, advertising campaigns, and efforts to push the public.

There are claims being made these days that the fossil fuel industry created a disinformation campaign. And yet, what we see is essentially no notable movement at all in these numbers. However, that overlooks an important point that will be obvious to our readers when they take a look at these reports, which is, as compared to 2020, our last survey, the new 2024 survey shows slight decreases—but statistically significant decreases—in what I'm going to call “the greenness of the American public” on various issues involved in the climate change survey.

One example is that, in 2020, 83 percent of American adults said they thought the Earth had been warming, and that number dropped to 75 percent. That's an 8-percentage-point drop in 2024. Now you might say, “Wow, sounds like America's turning in a not-green direction.” But as I told you before, they're actually going back to baseline. They're going back to where they had been.

So, why was 2020 unusually high? The answer has to do with some really nice work that my collaborator, Bo MacInnis, did in showing that you can think about the American public as divided into two groups: the people who trust scientists, which is about two-thirds of the country; and the people who don't trust scientists, and that's about one-third of the country. For the people who trust scientists, the message from the scientific community has been very consistent that climate change is happening, it's a threat, and we need to deal with it.

For those people who don't trust scientists, how are they going to answer our survey questions? How are they going to formulate opinions? It looks like one of the things that they do is stick a finger out the window and say, "What's been happening to the temperature lately?" As it turns out, every early winter—January, February—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA both put out reports on last year's average temperature. Those reports, it turns out, get into the news, and those low-trust-in-science people seem to be paying attention to that, or they actually somehow experience it personally, because what we see is their views go up and down in response to changing world temperatures.

Now, what's a little humorous about this is it might seem like we don't need scientists for that. That's the truth, that's the temperature. But how do you get the average world temperature for the last year? Through science. There is a reliance on science even there. But as it turns out, in the run-up to the 2020 survey that we did, those measurements of Earth's temperature showed a marked increase that prior year. That is not the case prior to the 2024 survey. So, it looks like that group may have been pushed around by temperatures going up and down, and we fully expect those ups and downs for those folks to continue.

Kristin Hayes: Interesting. That is fascinating. Where I thought you were going with this is that the survey that came out in 2020 was pre-pandemic and whether the pandemic had changed levels of trust in science, as well. I am sure that there are fascinating ways of parsing out this data. That's great. Thank you for talking me through that.

I'm going to summarize, though, and say it still sounds like 75 percent is a very significant majority of Americans who still believe in the existence and the threat of climate change. Now, let me ask you another thing that the survey teases out, which is, Who do they think should be doing something about it? And how has that changed over time? Maybe I'll just add: How does that match their sense of who actually is doing something about it?

Jon Krosnick: Our surveys have asked about four categories of actors—the US federal government, governments of other countries, businesses, and ordinary Americans. What we have found is, when we ask people about how much effort, for example, the federal government has been putting into this issue … When we offer people five answer choices—a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, or nothing at all—that when we take those top three categories, a moderate amount or more, what we see is about 80 percent of Americans are saying they would like to see their government doing a moderate amount or more. And they see similar numbers for businesses, about 78 percent for businesses; for ordinary people, the number's a little bit lower. It's around 70 percent.

For me personally, that's understandable in the sense that I can change the car that I drive, but I'm going to have essentially no impact on the planet. This has to be big-level changes. But what's really striking in these surveys is that Americans are not seeing nearly the effort that they would like to see. In contrast to people saying they would like the federal government to be doing a moderate amount or more—about 80 percent—only 50 percent think the government is doing that. When we actually look at what percent of Americans tell us they want the government to be doing more than it is doing, that's actually 67 percent.

A huge majority are saying that, no matter what level they want, they want more than they're seeing. That's true for foreign governments, businesses, and ordinary Americans, too. It's very striking that when the Obama administration took over, Americans were apparently aware. That's also true in the newest survey. They’re aware that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration, have both been stepping up the federal government's efforts in this regard. So, people are less likely to say they want more effort from the government, because they're seeing more effort from the government. But on the other hand, after the Obama administration ended, public demands for more action went back up again.

Kristin Hayes: Interesting. Let's talk a little bit … You've led me well into my next question, too, which is about specific policy choices. You mentioned that the Biden administration has leaned into climate change as one of its issues. It's passed a number of really seminal policies.

The survey does speak to individual policy choices related to climate change. It asks about a range of different policy options, everything from taxing electricity and gasoline that might lead to reduced consumption to subsidizing certain types of clean energy. Of the policies that are touched on in the survey, which do you see as least and most popular? Were there any surprises there?

Jon Krosnick: To start with, it's important to note that in the newest survey, as we have seen before, Americans endorse the idea of government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. In the newest survey, 74 percent of Americans, for example, said the US government should limit greenhouse gas emissions by businesses. That's what we call the “principle side” of it. And then, we get to what we call the “implementation side” of it—what policies should the government enact in order to cause that outcome to happen?—in many arenas, we see what's called a “principle-implementation gap,” where people say they would like racial equality in principle, but then any policy to achieve it they don't like in nearly the same numbers.

We don't see that here in the climate change arena. What we see is the same type of three-quarters support for policies that are mandates. Americans are clear that they're actually willing to pay for policies that will reduce emissions. They're not so enthusiastic about policies that might reduce emissions or might reduce emissions by unknown amounts. The nice thing about mandates is that, in principle, at least, the government can say, “We are going to reduce emissions by this amount, and the Congressional Budget Office and others can do a calculation of what that's going to cost.” And then, we can ask Americans about their willingness to pay for that outcome.

But if I were to ask you, How much are you willing to pay for your next car? Well, we'd have to decide what car you are going to buy, and is it new or used, and all kinds of other details you'd want to know, before you're willing to tell me how much you're willing to pay for it. No one would ever go into a car dealership and, before you ask what the car is, have the car dealer say, "Okay, I've got a car for you. How much are you willing to pay for it?"

In this case, we see the same thing in surveys. If we ask vague questions, we get vague answers. If we give people specific questions, we get much more concrete answers, especially about willingness to pay. In the surveys we've done so far, the American public, remarkably, appears to be willing to pay as a whole what the Congressional Budget Office has said it would actually cost to produce those greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

As we know, though, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the Biden administration's centerpiece of efforts in this regard, is really not about mandates; it's about incentives. When people sometimes talk about carrots versus sticks, this is a carrot policy. Americans are less enthusiastic about that, because there's simply no guaranteed outcome from that in a beneficial way. Now, the Biden administration might very well say, perhaps they even have said, "Look, it's the best we can do. You wanted us to do something." The fact of the matter is Americans would be more enthusiastic about mandates, and the new survey shows that.

On the other hand, I'll give you an example of something that people have traditionally not been enthusiastic about and remain not enthusiastic about, is consumer incentives. Some economic theory says, if you want to get people to drive less, just raise the price on gasoline by raising taxes. Or if you want people to use less electricity, raise the taxes on electricity, and that will do it. I think if you ask most Americans, Are you doing a lot of discretionary driving that you could just choose not to do? They would say no. If you say, Are you turning off the lights as often as you can already? Probably. Is there really that much discretion? Maybe not. Over time, we have seen only about 20 percent of Americans being willing to support increasing taxes on electricity to cause people to use less of it. About 30 percent of Americans say they support increasing taxes on gasoline. Those numbers are unusually low in the new survey.

Kristin Hayes: I imagine so.

Jon Krosnick: Only 15 percent are favoring increasing taxes on electricity, and 28 percent are favoring increasing taxes on gasoline. I'm sorry to say, when I talk about this work in many audiences, people say, "Ah, you see? People don't want to pay." That's not true. The evidence in the survey shows people are willing to pay, but if you increase the taxes on gasoline, there's a guarantee that the government is reaching into your pocket, taking out money, and you don't know what they're doing with it. Our survey questions certainly didn't tell them what happens to that tax money. There's absolutely no guarantee that anybody is going to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions at all as a result of that. That's exactly the kind of policy not to like. Now maybe if you took a lot of economics classes, and you believe in economics, you would see wisdom in that. But since most Americans haven't, it's understandable that they might be skeptical of that type of a policy.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah. Who's going to vote from the heart to raise their own regular expenditures? I can imagine that is a very difficult choice, but I bet all the economists are cringing. The sense of prices is leading to changes in behavior. That was quite notable in the survey to me, as well, that those were some of the least popular policy choices, unsurprisingly.

I did want to ask you a little bit more about mandates though, because you mentioned that overall the public is quite comfortable, if that's an appropriate word, with mandates. There seemed to be some exceptions to that rule, as well. I wanted to ask you about just one of those that jumped out to me in data. It was interesting to me that—and feel free to correct me if I'm interpreting this incorrectly—it seemed like there was also a trend, particularly in this last report, toward people saying maybe the government should just stay out of certain climate interventions in a way that I didn't really see in past years.

Humor me while I talked through just one example of this. There's a long-standing question about whether the federal government—and we know the public wants the federal government to do something—should spur building cars that use less gasoline, more fuel-efficient cars, other types of alternative-fuel cars, et cetera. I look back at 2006, at one of these early surveys, and 44 percent of the respondents said that the government should actually mandate the production of these more fuel-efficient cars. Forty percent said the government should encourage that production through tax breaks, which are, as you mentioned, really central to the Inflation Reduction Act. Fifteen percent said the government should stay out of it entirely.

So, we’re definitely leaning toward doing something, as opposed to nothing. But in this latest survey, those numbers are in some sense reversed: 37 percent said the government should stay out of it entirely, and only 19 percent wanted those mandates for this particular issue. And it does happen, there are some of these trends that show up in some of these specific levers. Can you say a little bit more about that? What's your interpretation there?

Jon Krosnick: You're certainly right. This is one of the various measures that show, in the latest survey, movement away from those kinds of emissions-reduction policies. What's interesting here is that when you think about, What American wouldn't want the best gas mileage they could get? Do people love going to the gas station and filling up, because it's so fun, and you can get a Twinkie when you're there? Probably not. Since we don't see any evidence in this survey of Americans turning away from government intervention in this arena in general, why fuel efficiency for automobiles in particular? One potential answer to that is people are actually pleased with what has happened to fuel efficiency in recent years.

Cars and trucks have become more efficient in the gas mileage they get. I'm not an expert in this, but one could argue that Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards have been successful in that regard. I would not be at all surprised, if we were digging deeply on this, to find that Americans are aware, if you ask them, The car that you drove 20 years ago, how many miles to a gallon did you get versus what you're getting now? I think it may also be that the fuels themselves are more efficient. So, that may be contributing, as well, to the sense that we're making progress on this issue.

There are other issues that the government should be focused on. As we all know, the big discussion these days involves all electric cars. I remember a year and a half ago, a year ago, seeing CEOs of major American car companies saying that by 2040, 2050, we will only be making all-electric cars. If I understand this correctly, there's been a pullback from that in the last six months or so. The Biden administration has been making efforts to push the country toward all electric vehicles. The reality is, in our new survey, support for the government encouraging making all-electric vehicles is at the lowest we've ever seen. It's at 46 percent. This is before any of the very recent Biden efforts to focus in that area that Americans are turning a bit away from that. They've never been enthusiastic at the levels that we see support for other policies.

So, you say, "Why is that? Isn't the whole point of all-electric vehicles to allow that electricity to be made from green sources and to eliminate what comes out of the tailpipe in the back of the car?" The answer is you can make an all-electric vehicle if you want, but then it depends on how you make the electricity. At the moment, as I understand it, we have not dramatically reduced the amount of fossil fuels that we are using to make electricity. We are increasing the proportion of electricity coming from green sources, but the amount that comes from fossil fuels has remained remarkably stable, and it's still the dominant source of electricity generation in the country. So, you can't blame Americans if they say, "To be honest, I'm not all that thrilled about the idea of an all-electric car, because I just don't see the benefits for the environment."

We went into depth on this with our last survey and put out an entire report on all-electric vehicles showing that actually, at that time, only about half of people who were going to buy a car in the next few years were even willing to entertain an all-electric vehicle. There were many reasons for hesitation. People were concerned about the possibility that they would catch on fire. They were concerned about the expense of getting it repaired or finding somebody to repair it for them. A variety of different kinds of hesitations that no doubt come with transition of technology and range anxiety was only a small part of that. But, we'll see where this goes. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Americans are not going to be enthusiastic about all-electric cars for the purposes of climate change, until they actually will help significantly with climate change, as opposed to the promise of hopefully helping.

Kristin Hayes: Fascinating. You may or may not know this, Jon—we just finished a series on electric vehicles, so this is a topic close to my heart. That's a great additional contextual piece of information about a topic that I'm very intrigued by.

I want to get to two more things before we run out of time here. I mentioned in my introduction that each year's survey has some new questions. You mentioned a previous survey had electric vehicles. This year, one new set for 2024 focused on what I'll refer to as the differentiated impacts and costs from climate change on poor versus richer households. So, tell us a little bit about that set of questions and what you were hoping to understand from those?

Jon Krosnick: The theme of environmental justice is one that has come front and center for many people thinking about climate change in recent years. Stanford as a university, for example, is growing its faculty with a focus on environmental justice. At the center of it is that you might be tempted to think that climate change is a world problem that affects everybody equally. In fact, the environmental justice scholarly community says, "No, that's not true. Those folks who have more limited income, who don't have air-conditioning, don't have the strongest structures, don't have fire insurance and other kinds of protections that wealthier people have are more vulnerable to the impacts of environmental changes.” I can just turn up the air-conditioning, but someone else might not be able to.

Secondly, there are communities of people who simply live in harm's way more so than others. They live along coastlines where serious storms are likely to hit them. They live in wildfire-prone areas and so on. The question is, To what extent do Americans perceive there to be unequal impacts of climate change? To what degree are Americans willing to have government help when those effects occur?

I'll just preface me describing our new results by saying that, some years ago, I remember talking with experts, my colleagues at Stanford, about, What's the plan here? Are we in a place where we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to stop this damaging progress that you all are talking about? They said, "No, we're well past that point. We can certainly try to reduce emissions in the future, but we've got to accept that climate change impacts are here—they're going to continue, they're going to get worse."

Then, the question is, if they are affecting these more vulnerable subpopulations more, are Americans willing to help those individuals more? What's really interesting is that, when it comes to perceptions of the inequality of the impact, we ask this question: “In the future, do you think that global warming will hurt poor people in America more than richer people, will hurt richer people more than it will hurt poorer people, or will hurt poor and richer people about the same amount?” We found the country actually split. So, only about 50 percent of Americans—52 percent to be exact—said they thought climate change would hurt poorer people more than richer people. Almost everybody else, 42 percent, said they thought it would hurt poor and rich people equally.

Only about half the country accepts the premise. What was particularly interesting is that, when we then said to respondents, “Many scientists believe that global warming will make floods, wildfires, and hurricanes worse in the future, and many scientists also say that these events will hurt poorer people more, and poorer people, of course, have less money to recover after these events. Do you think that the government should or should not provide help to poor people to deal with these events after they happen?”

Now, Americans differ in their view of how people should deal with hardships. Some people say this is a capitalist society. People get what they deserve, and they deserve what they get. If people are poor, there's a reason for that, and it's not my job to solve their poverty. On the other hand, there are lots of Americans who say, “I don't want to live in a country like that. I want to live in a country where, when people stumble, especially when it's not of their own making, we are here to help.” If you're passing by somebody who accidentally trips on the sidewalk, of course you're going to stop and help them stand up. Do we do the same in this case?

In that context, this next number I'm going to tell you is jaw-dropping. Fully 85 percent of American adults said that the government should help poorer people more than richer people in coping with the effects of climate change. So, even though only about half the country already gets the premise that when you talk about the background of the logic of such unequal support, people embrace it in a big way. We asked about some particular ways in which the government could do it. For example, we asked about the people who own homes and can buy insurance to pay to fix the homes if they get damaged by wildfires or hurricanes, but many poor people who own homes cannot afford to buy this insurance. Do you think the government should or should not pay for some of the cost of this insurance? Sixty-eight percent of Americans said the government should pay for some of that insurance cost.

When we asked people … We told them, “People who rent a place to live can buy insurance to pay to replace their belongings if they get damaged by wildfires or hurricanes, but many poor people can't afford that. Should the government help or not in covering some of the cost of that insurance?” 66 percent of Americans said government should help. So, there is plenty of compassion in the country. The other policies like that that we asked about got, again, high 60 percent endorsement. It's clear that people are saying, "The tax money that I pay, I am willing to have been sent to help those folks cope with the effects of everybody's tailpipes."

It's particularly interesting to view this in light of some really important work many people don't know about done by the University of Michigan years ago through their survey of consumer attitudes and behavior. That study and others have shown that, instead of poverty being a chronic state for some people, it's actually a temporary state. It's like tripping and falling on the sidewalk. For most people who get into circumstances of poverty, they're in it for a relatively short period and back out. So, it's understandable if Americans say, "Yeah, when somebody trips, I want to help them." And that seems to be the way people are thinking at this moment.

Kristin Hayes: There's plenty of compassion in this country. That's a nice characterization for sure.

Jon, I am so sorry to say that we are, in fact, at the end of our recording time. I had multiple other questions on the tip of my tongue for you. Instead, I'm going to have to leave it here, but I am going to encourage our listeners to become readers and take a look at these series of reports in depth. There's just a lot of really great data visualization to make the findings really enjoyable and accessible for all. I would really encourage people to take a look. This is great.

It is always a pleasure to talk with you. Let me close with our regular feature, Top of the Stack. I'm sure you at this point know what Top of the Stack is, so I'll just turn it over to you and invite you to offer some recommendations for our listeners.

Jon Krosnick: To be honest, top of the stack for me—first of all, the stack is gigantic. It's gigantic because of how much excitement I think there is in the world for the social science that RFF helps me do. So, I'm grateful for the opportunity to be able to do the work. I'm grateful to be able to do it with you all. The downside is that it gives me a gigantic pile of things that I need to read.

I will humor you by telling you that, actually, when I walked into the house two days ago with a big shopping bag in my arms like I was carrying a baby, my wife said, "What's that?," and I said, "It's a bag of books." The reason was that I have come to realize I need to dig back into books that were written 50, 60, 70 years ago, because we as a society, it turns out, have lost a sense of something that people in my line of work have known for a long time.

This new survey that we talked about today costs a lot of money. The reason it costs a lot of money is because RFF and Stanford are committed to the best-quality survey research that we can do. That involves true random sampling of American adults. To do that costs money. You've got to be patient to reach a random sample of people and talk with them about their views. In 1948, the United States learned an embarrassing lesson about how, if you just interview 1,000 arbitrarily selected people instead of randomly selected people, you can end up predicting that Thomas Dewey is going to be elected president when in fact he did not win that election.

So, it turns out we're learning that lesson again right now. In the survey world, there are many survey companies that are offering the collection of data from arbitrary groups of people who volunteer to do surveys for money instead of random samples who we pay for. I think we at Stanford and RFF can be very proud of the fact that we're willing to spend this money, and we're able to spend this money to get this kind of quality of data.

So, I decided I needed to go get those old books and pull out those quotes from those folks saying, "Beware of sloppy methodology, because it's dangerous." And we're seeing it still today. Some coauthors and I have a piece that's an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle published a few days ago that is right on this point, if people want to take a look at that. There'll be more said about that. As we head toward the election in November, I caution everybody, believe polls that involve true random sampling, and watch out for all the rest of them. Unfortunately, there are too many of the latter.

Kristin Hayes: Okay. Great take. Thank you for that. It really has been a pleasure. Thanks for chatting with me today.

Jon Krosnick: Thank you, Kristin. Pleasure too.

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