Podcast: Curiosity Unbounded, Episode 11 — Get out the vote

This episode of Curiosity Unbounded was recorded on November 7, two days following the 2024 presidential election.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Hello. I'm Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT. And I'm thrilled to welcome you to this MIT community podcast, Curiosity Unbounded. One of the great pleasures of my job is the opportunity to talk with members of our faculty who recently earned tenure. Like their colleagues in every field here, they're pushing the boundaries of knowledge and possibility. Their passion and brilliance, their boundless curiosity offer a wonderful glimpse of the future of MIT. And this podcast is a way to share that inspiration with the world.

Today, my guest is Ariel White. Ariel is an associate professor of political science at MIT. She studies voting and voting rights and examines why voters do or do not participate in elections at all levels of government. Very timely. Ariel, welcome to the show.

ARIEL WHITE: Thanks very much for having me.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So let's start because we're right in the thick of the, I would say, the aftermath. Let's talk about the recent presidential elections. Were there any surprises for you in voter turnout?

ARIEL WHITE: So it's early days to be completely sure about turnout. But it doesn't look, for example, we will see anything that surpassed 2020. And there were certainly some predictions that we might see particularly strong turnout among specific groups. I am not someone who makes a lot of election forecasts. And so sometimes I get to say, well, I didn't predict anything that was wrong, which is true here.

But no, I think that we will have to see in the weeks and months to come, just who did end up turning out, not just geographically but across various sectors of society. And that's something that we'll know a lot more about in, as I said, the weeks and months to come. It's something that takes a while after an election to put together.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yeah, it's interesting because I think we tend to think of people voting for a variety of different motivations and reasons. And I'm wondering, do you think there were particular issues in this election that were bringing people to the polls, keeping them from the polls that might have contributed to turnout overall?

ARIEL WHITE: Well, this is something that I am generally pretty reluctant to piece together a narrative about in a couple of days after an election. And that's, I think, particularly why political scientists can be frustrating to people who want to talk about politics, because that's of course exactly when we want to talk about an election is right after it happened. I feel this intensely.

But in talking before this podcast, a couple of days ago, about what we should cover here, I think I said basically, in a couple of days after the election, we will know, we'll know probably who won, which we do. And we probably won't quite know how or why. And that unfortunately continues to be true.

I could speculate, but I would be speculating pretty wildly. And so I would say, it's worth approaching with some caution. Anybody who tells you in the week of an election that they have a very clear picture of what it means, both about the electorate and the coalitions that support a given party or candidate, as well as perhaps what it means about the broader structure of American public opinion. Election returns are not necessarily our best or only guide to those kinds of things.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So well, let's think a little bit then, maybe look back at previous elections, and think about the degree to which single-issue voting is prevalent. And does that tend to be at the really local level as opposed to at the presidential level? And how much do you think single issues really impact turnout?

ARIEL WHITE: Yeah. So there are certainly some voters who care very strongly about specific issues. As you say, some of them at the local level, especially if that's how they got activated to know that there were elections happening at the local level, which can be a little variable, as well as at the national or state level, there's both the set of people who care deeply about an issue consistently. And then there's sometimes this broader sense of issues that matter across the electorate in a given year, even if those aren't necessarily people we would usually think of as a specific issue-driven voter.

But there's also just a lot of other things that shape the vote exactly as you suspected. So people come in with their own partisanship. They come in with habits. They come in with really varied information about both the candidates and parties and really varied levels of, I would say, attention and interest in politics.

And so this is something that I think can be really hard for people to picture when they themselves are very interested in politics. This is certainly the problem for many political scientists.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: How could you not care?

ARIEL WHITE: Yes, especially when elections are as contested and as high stakes as they have been in recent years. And yet it is the case, we see in a variety of measurement efforts, that people often don't have a ton of information about politics. They don't necessarily like politics enough to be wanting to spend more time on it. They have plenty of other stuff going on in their daily lives.

And so yeah, there are certainly people who care about a specific issue, follow it, and vote on it. There are also a lot of people who don't necessarily have the kind of detailed ideological world view that people might be picturing when they think about the kinds of decisions that voters are making.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yeah. I mean, at least in terms of press coverage, it always seems that the economy, purchasing power, et cetera, is an overarching issue for many people. Now, that may be a press narrative. But particularly in this election, we're seeing that as an explanation of voters splitting from their previous social convictions and voting differently from how they have in the past. And do you think that's an accurate narrative that people-- not just about this election but that people vote with their wallet?

ARIEL WHITE: Yeah. So I think it's a plausible narrative about this election, though, as I said--

SALLY KORNBLUTH: As you said. I know, yeah.

ARIEL WHITE: But it is absolutely a broader story about how voting works in the US. Certainly, yeah, I mean, there is work on economic both shocks and over time economic status that is certainly predictive of how especially the incumbent party does. And so there are models that predict election outcomes based on the fundamentals earlier in the year.

And I think a fair number of people who are running those models earlier this year said this is going to be a tough election for the Democrats to make headway in, especially as they also look not just at historic US patterns of voting and election fundamentals, like the economy, as well as when they looked at international comparisons to what's been going on with incumbent parties in the last couple of years, as we see this kind of post-COVID inflation period.

So it is not only the US where the incumbent party has been pretty roundly thrown out this year. So yeah, there are broader trends there that we can certainly see as predictive and probably part of the story, even as I hesitate to say, this is definitely the one thing.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yeah. I mean, it's actually kind of interesting when you think about it, because first of all, the direct impact of any individual leader or even any individual party holding power on the economy, there's impact, but it can be pretty loose. I mean, there's extreme examples, like the New Deal. But from year to year, it can be pretty loose. But the other thing is the lagging indicators so that each person inherits the policies of their predecessor. And there's a lag. It takes time.

ARIEL WHITE: Yes, yeah. I mean, the question of how to assess a given candidate and a given party in the wake of four years of information with a really difficult set of counterfactual stories of what would have happened, that's a really daunting task to ask of voters. And it's worth keeping in mind that different people will approach how to do that in really different ways.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yeah, exactly. So you've been hesitant to make any sort of conclusions about this particular election. But what kinds of data are available immediately after an election? What can we learn from that? And if there's not a lot available immediately, what's the lag? When will you feel comfortable saying, this is what happened in this election?

ARIEL WHITE: So it gets better and better in the weeks and then in the months after the election, which is like, again, why political scientists are just no fun at parties. But in the days immediately after the election, we typically have some at least preliminary returns. I mean, some places are, of course, still counting ballots, depending on their approaches and turnout. But we have a general sense of about where turnout landed at a high level of aggregation. So we know about what that looked like nationally. We know what the vote outcome was nationally as well as by state and, in a lot of cases, by county and city.

And then we have some preliminary exit polls about what people said, who they said they voted for, and some of their personal characteristics, as well as why they said they voted for them, which I would say we particularly want to be cautious about as a question. We can come back to that if we want to.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Post facto rationales.

ARIEL WHITE: Yes. This is not the kind of question that human beings are good at answering, I would say. And so we want to be really cautious about those. We also know that exit polling can depend on a variety of sampling approaches and assumptions about the electorate that are hard to maintain, especially given the many ways that people vote right now.

So I would say we want to be ready for those to be revised as we learn more about who was actually in the electorate and how to think about how different sectors might have voted. So that's, I would say, a work in progress in the time after the election. But then as time goes on, we start to get other sources of data.

So we have, for example, more and more granular information about voting, about, for example, how many people turned out, not just at the county, not just at the town level, but at, for example, the precinct level. This is something one of my colleagues, Charles Stewart, puts together in his lab. And then we also start to be able to combine that with data at the individual level from voting records. So we can see not just what's the vote count in a precinct, but we can also see, who voted there? Who are the people who actually turned out? And so we can map those things.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Do you get party registration data as well?

ARIEL WHITE: In many places, yes. And so you can start to say some things demographically and partisanship-wise about who was part of the coalition of the different parties. And you can also start to sometimes map that to survey data that may have asked much more detailed questions about issue preferences before the election than we're ever going to get out of something like exit polling. And so by next spring, when nobody is interested in talking about it anymore, I think we should have a very clear picture of just kind of what all came together.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So what do you think about-- you talked about exit polling. Obviously, that's a particular sampling. What do you think about mail-in voting and how that influences both turnout? And does it actually impact an election outcome? I always wondered about places that have-- particularly with geographical differences-- the impact of what's happening in earlier returns, particularly in states that don't count the mail-in voting until after election day or on election day, how that flow of information impacts turnout or decision-making at later polling places.

ARIEL WHITE: Yeah, this is something where a lot of recent election changes, whether it's vote by mail or early voting, these things that spread out the election do have the potential for people to be operating in a different information environment depending on when they happen to cast their ballot. And it's a hard thing to quantify. In a few cases, we see variation in how these get rolled out or implemented. But often, it's a state doesn't have mail-in voting. And then it does. And so the kinds of the units that we can observe here are pretty small.

We don't, I would say, have a lot of evidence that making it a little bit easier to vote, convenience voting reforms, necessarily have big effects on turnout, on participation, as we might have thought. Generally, in the context of the modern US, things like early voting don't seem to bring more people out so much as they often make it easier and more convenient for the people who would have voted to vote. If you're thinking about the margin where we do tend to see more people actually make it to the polls, I would think about voter registration ...

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Oh, interesting, yeah.

ARIEL WHITE: ... where in cases where you have to know to register and know how to register a month before the election or even a couple of weeks. You can get people who might have made it to the polls if they were able to register on the day, or if they had been automatically registered. So that's the stage of the process I would look to there.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yeah, interesting. Your work has actually provided evidence in support of simpler election law and policies to help draw people to the polls, alleviate the burdens of voting. In general, what are the largest hurdles? Is it registration? Is it transportation? We always hear about the famous effects of weather. I'm just wondering what you've actually seen.

ARIEL WHITE: Oh, there's a lot of reasons people don't vote, just like there's a lot of reasons people do vote or they vote the way they do. When I think about the whole universe of possibilities, I think about this classic book in political science about political participation that basically says, why don't people participate? Well, they can't, they don't want to, or nobody asked them. And that's basically the set of options.

And so for voting, that can be that people might struggle logistically with getting registered. They might not know how to take that step. In some cases, they're legally not allowed to, which is something that I also study. They might also just find politics distasteful enough that they don't want to. That's another big reason people don't make it to the polls. And then in some cases, like I said, nobody asked them, which we do have a real sense can matter for people's participation in a wide variety of actions.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I mean, actually, there are things that politically have made their way into law in some states that actually actively discourage people from voting, state laws that ban offering water to voters who are waiting in line, et cetera. Intuitively, you think they really do discourage people from coming to vote. Do you know empirically, is that the case?

ARIEL WHITE: This is a good question. And it is another one that I would say empirically is going to be really hard to observe, where we don't have a lot of variation in these kinds of state laws. But when you think of things that have been in place for a while that have been studied more. So things like voter identification requirements, for example, which we might think of on that spectrum of making it harder or easier for some people to vote. What we see is pretty clear evidence that they make life harder for people trying to vote, that they introduce barriers for people voting.

And we can characterize who is most affected by that. But as far as whether we see clear turnout effects from those laws, it's, I would say, not nearly as clear empirically that people are, in fact, that large numbers of people are being deterred from voting. We can see some individual people, for sure. In some cases, we can see some estimates among people, for example, who don't have a driver's license in a specific place. But in a lot of cases, it seems that people manage to vote, which is not to say that this was an OK way to treat voters.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Right. So you're more speaking of treating certain voters. Your most recent work details how people got back into political life as voters following a felony conviction or some other punitive interaction with the state. So can you tell us a little bit more about that work?

ARIEL WHITE: Absolutely. So some of my earlier work had been about how these kinds of negative or punitive interactions with government made people less likely to participate. And you can imagine the many reasons. That might be both from not knowing they were eligible to not thinking anybody wanted to hear from them to being unregistered. And so in a lot of ways, kind of invisible to all the political machinery that tells us about elections.

And so after doing that work for a while and telling the "here's a problem" story, I got to talking with some coauthors about, what do you do about it? Can people actually make their way back into political life after having experiences like a conviction or incarceration, where there are millions of people in this country that have had this experience but are eligible to vote?

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I was about to ask, not to interrupt, but how do the laws of different states impact that?

ARIEL WHITE: Yeah. Yeah, there's huge variation across states in whether people can vote after a felony conviction. And so in some cases, you never lose the right to vote, like in Maine and Vermont. And in other cases, you may lose it at various stages of serving the sentence or well after that.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So in Maine and Vermont, can people vote when they're actually incarcerated?

ARIEL WHITE: Yes, indeed.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Oh, interesting.

ARIEL WHITE: Yes. As well as in Washington, DC.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Interesting.

ARIEL WHITE: That said, some of my work is also on how in practice, even in these places like Maine and Vermont, people very, very rarely manage to use that vote. And so this is part of why we're thinking about what can change that exactly, is like seeing that even having the legal right to vote in some of these states doesn't translate into actually being represented in the electorate.

And so yeah, we got to thinking what could help people make their way back into political life, which is especially relevant for this group of people that often face some kind of specific barriers but also just have really high rates of non-participation. But we think there's also room to think about the broader set of people who are not only not voting but fully not registered to vote and just in some ways, like I said, not even visible to the world of election and campaign work.

So we started testing out approaches that might give people information to register and vote, might let them navigate that process. And then this election, we also started testing out ways that people might be able to help their loved ones register and vote. They might be able to reach out to their social networks and help them navigate that registration voting process.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I would guess some of those folks don't want to interact with the official machinery in any way, having had negative interactions. And so perhaps, as you say, friends and family, do things like political flyers or television ads have any positive effect?

ARIEL WHITE: So there's been less work, I would say, on how these kinds of mass media approaches can affect registration. Certainly, there can be smallish campaign effects on vote choice. So certainly, right before the election, when a lot of things can matter just a little bit, campaign efforts can matter a little bit too.

But as far as registration, we know a lot less about how to do it, partly because it's something that campaigns invest less in than trying to get out existing voters. And it's something where you don't, in some sense, you often don't know where to look, because unlike the list of voters that you can call or you can knock on their doors, the list of people who aren't registered to vote simply doesn't exist. There's nothing to work off of.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yeah. It's actually interesting for this election, in my case, I had moved to MIT from Duke. And we still own a house in Durham, North Carolina. And we have a driver's license here in Massachusetts. We voted in Massachusetts, registered to vote. But our names hadn't been taken off. There's no effective way to do that.

And with text messages now, there's a low barrier. And they're definitely tracking who's gotten to the polls in some ways, as you were saying, because I just kept getting, are you going to vote? We still don't see that you're voting. And I felt like, do you really think I'm not voting? But anyway, it just seems that those kind of efforts have ramped up just in terms of really direct to the individual hassling.

ARIEL WHITE: Yes. It's absolutely true. And as I tell my mom, when she complains about this to me, because you've seen both the promise and the peril of this, they do it because it works.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yeah, I bet. I mean, if I had not gone to vote, I would have been like, oh, my god, I haven't gotten to vote. And I wasn't go to ...

ARIEL WHITE: Precisely.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: ... text back to some anonymous, opt-out kind of thing.

ARIEL WHITE: Yeah. Well, and that's, I guess, the spectrum of possibilities there is texts actually work a little less well than if somebody calls you up, especially a real person, not a paid person. If they can get your neighbor to knock on your door, that does, it really does ...

SALLY KORNBLUTH: That does have more impact.

ARIEL WHITE: It gives people the sense that people will notice. And there is a norm of voting when people feel that kind of pressure. They do.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So in an institution that's very heavy, obviously, on science and engineering, we always think about experimental approaches. And I'm always curious about what sort of methodologies people use in different areas. And so you run field experiments to gather data. Can you give us an example of what that looks like?

ARIEL WHITE: Oh, certainly. So one thing, for example, that we were doing this very fall was trying to see if giving people better information about eligibility to vote and just how you would register and vote would help them, in fact, get registered and vote. And so with some coauthors, we put together a list of people that we could see had had some contact with the criminal legal system but were eligible to vote after that experience but hadn't registered.

And this is the kind of thing that you can do using large-scale administrative databases. There's a certain amount of triangulation across them and then trying to figure out how to merge them. That is, I would say, not the stuff of fun podcasts. But once we had done that, we were able to say, OK, what happens if you send out a letter with a copy of the registration form, because in some places in the US, you actually still need a paper registration form, and information about how to figure out if you're eligible? Does that actually help people end up getting registered and voting?

And we've done this in a couple of elections now with certain variations. And we can see that people will become more likely to navigate that process with even a little bit of help from us, though this election cycle, we're also going to see what that looks like when their friends can get in on that.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Interesting. So the other thing is, if you follow the news, which I'm sure you do, election news dominated media coverage for the last I don't how many months. Do you think Americans are actually that focused or interested in politics? In other words, the media acts like this is something that everyone wants to read and think about 24/7. And I'm just wondering what your sense of the reality is.

ARIEL WHITE: Yes, you're right to ask this because, no, a great many people really do not want to consume this kind of news. And we know that many of them don't, that given the option, they consume various other forms of entertainment, of course, in the era of streaming and social media as other sources of things. Yeah, a lot of people tune that out. There are some extremely invested political, I wouldn't say, junkies.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Junkies?

ARIEL WHITE: One of my colleagues at Tufts calls them political hobbyists, people who are very interested in politics and follow it as almost as one would follow sports. There are also a lot of people who are highly invested in the day-to-day work of doing politics. So yeah, there are a lot of people who really, really care about this. And then there's a very large number of people who pay a little less attention or almost no attention.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I guess that's true about everything. Actually, it was funny that election night, we could have been watching the returns and decided to watch season two of The Diplomat. I thought watching fake politics was-- felt better than watching real politics in real-time.

ARIEL WHITE: Yeah. Once the votes are cast, it's like, they're going to get counted. And you're going to find out what happened.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Exactly.

ARIEL WHITE: The actual hour-by-hour slicing of it doesn't, in fact, matter.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Exactly. But you feel like it's having some kind of impact. So in your opinion, what's the most important thing we could implement in the US to get people to vote? Is there a single most?

ARIEL WHITE: Oh, if I could do anything?

SALLY KORNBLUTH: If you could wave your magic wand, what would you do to get everybody to vote?

ARIEL WHITE: I would probably start with automatic voter registration. I would probably just get everybody on the rolls. Or in some cases, there's election day registration. But automatic has the benefit, I would say, of, again, people being visible once they're registered.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: It's interesting because the state-to-state variation in that is also huge, which has to impact the outcome in some very closely contested, you know it has to be part of the mobilizing voter turnout in certain areas really having some impact, maybe not, on the presidential election. But you could imagine in other elections, it could have an effect.

ARIEL WHITE: Yeah, you're right that there is immense state-to-state variation in how you can observe and reach out to voters. And I don't think we have a full accounting of what campaigns then do. This is one of the things we so wish we could observe a little more of is actually you see a lot of discussion of the ground game in any given campaign. Political scientists share this interest because we've done some highly focused investigations into how various parts of the ground game matter. But what resources are actually being put into the ground game and exactly where they're targeted, extraordinarily hard to observe.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Because that would lose the edge if we all knew.

ARIEL WHITE: Precisely. So if only we knew exactly what was going on there, we would learn a lot of useful stuff.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Interesting. So I heard your interest in voting started in high school, which is unusual. Can you tell us about that?

ARIEL WHITE: Yeah, that's true. I was remembering the other day that in high school, at graduation, I got to give a speech. And so the day before graduation or whatever, we were doing a little practice where they brought everybody in the gym. And we all walked across the stage.

And so in the time that I got to practice standing at the lectern to give my speech, I did a little voter registration drive with all my peers ...

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Oh, that's really funny.

ARIEL WHITE: ... where it was like, under your seat, you will find a registration form.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: That's great.

ARIEL WHITE: You could fill it out right now. Give it back to me, which looking back, I guess, yeah, I was always interested in people getting registered, as it turns out.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I think I was more narrow minded. I ran for office and stuff when I was in high school. I was interested in that vote in particular. Not the national vote. So what do you do to get your mind off of politics?

ARIEL WHITE: Oh, goodness.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: What do you do when you're not here at MIT or you're not sitting at a podcast? What do you do?

ARIEL WHITE: Indeed. Yeah. Well, so I have a 10-month-old daughter. So she keeps us pretty busy.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: That keeps you occupied.

ARIEL WHITE: Yes, she is uninterested in the minutia of any given election. So she's been a real joy to hang out with this year. Also, in the last couple of years, I've tried my hand at gardening a little bit. We don't have a lot of room in Somerville. But it's been fun.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I like gardening. I was a little dissuaded. In North Carolina, I still remember. I was growing tomatoes every year. And I came out, and on the fence was a squirrel with a tomato in his front paws, eating it like it was his dinner. And it was downhill from there.

ARIEL WHITE: Heartbreaking, heartbreaking. I never thought I would have a personal feud with a specific rabbit until I got into this.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Exactly.

ARIEL WHITE: But I feel that pain.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: No political strategies work there. Anyway, well, this was very fun, very interesting, very timely. I'll be tempted to come back to you in a month, two months, three months, and then ask you a little bit more what you made of all of this.

ARIEL WHITE: More than fair.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: In the meantime, to our audience, thank you for listening to Curiosity Unbounded. I very much hope you'll join us again. I'm Sally Kornbluth. Stay curious.

Curiosity Unbounded is a production of MIT News and the Institute Office of Communications, in partnership with the Office of the President. This episode was researched, written, and produced by Christine Daniloff, Alexandra Steed, and Melanie Gonick. Our sound engineer is Dave Lishansky. For show notes, transcripts, and other episodes, please visit news.mit.edu/podcasts/curiosity-unbounded. And find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. To learn about the latest developments and updates from MIT, please visit news.mit.edu. You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at CuriosityUnboundedPodcast.

Thank you for joining us today. We hope you'll tune in next time when Sally will be speaking with Andres Sevtsuk, an associate professor of urban science planning. They'll break down the effects of planning on quality of life for city dwellers and look at sustainable mobility within an urban environment. We hope you'll be there. And remember, stay curious.