In today’s Roll Call, the Winston Group’s David Winston discusses voter reaction to President Biden’s State of the Union address.
Some of the media, working off the same script, seemed to love Biden’s SOTU, praising the president’s atypical delivery, calling him feisty and fiery at every turn. But there is a fine line between feisty and angry. Biden crossed that line with his delivery, but more important than theatrics, Biden, as he has over the past year, tried to sell the same statements that a majority of voters don’t believe.
Inspired by the headlines about elite colleges bringing back their standardized testing requirements (with Brown joining the list last week) we have been focused on issues related to tests and grade inflation. This week, we look at grade inflation through a slightly different lens, analyzing the extent to which voters connect grade inflation with pandemic-related learning loss. Data from the latest survey for Winning the Issues (February 24-25) suggests that, for many voters, grade inflation and learning loss are linked.
Overall, when voters were asked where they think students currently are in their learning, given the school closures during the pandemic, 57% say they are at least somewhat behind (30% somewhat behind, 27% significantly behind). Another 27% said students are only slightly behind, with about 1 in 10 (11%) saying they are not behind at all.
Though there has been some fall-off in the share of voters saying students are significantly behind, the current number is not far off from where it was in April 2023 when we asked the question last (29% significantly behind, 31% somewhat behind, 22% slightly behind, 9% about where they would normally have been).
Views about the extent to which students are behind are somewhat related to views about grade inflation. Among those who say that students are significantly behind, 72% say that grade inflation is a widespread problem. But even among those who think students are doing just fine, only 16% say grade inflation is not a problem at all (26% widespread problem, 30% an isolated problem).
Only about 1 in 5 voters (19%) say both that grade inflation is a widespread problem and that students are significantly behind because of the pandemic.
In today’s Roll Call, the Winston Group’s David Winston writes about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overrule the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot, and some challenges from Trump going forward.
The exit polls also raised some important challenges for the Trump campaign going forward. The most obvious is the potential impact of the indictments. Voters were asked whether they would consider Trump fit to be president if convicted.
In North Carolina, 30 percent said no; in Virginia, it was worse, at 37 percent. This is not a new dynamic. We saw a similar response from South Carolina primary voters at 36 percent. Not surprisingly, in these three states, these voters overwhelmingly voted for Haley.
A topic we have been keeping a close eye on in the last several months is standardized tests in college admissions.
A key reason many of the colleges chose to reinstate the testing requirement is that test scores tend to be better predictors of academic success than grades alone. It is likely that this stronger relationship for test scores than grades is at least partly due to grade inflation.
But how big of a problem to voters think grade inflation is? Data from the latest survey for Winning the Issues (February 24-25) sheds some light. Overall, 47% of voters say that grade inflation in US high schools is “a widespread problem,” with 22% calling it “an isolated problem” and 6% saying it is not a problem at all. By party, a majority of Republicans (53%), nearly one in two independents (48%) and 40% of Democrats also call it a widespread problem. Among parents, 47% call it a widespread problem.
The shares calling it a widespread problem have grown at least slightly since we last asked the question about a year and a half ago. On the July 2022 survey, 40% of voters overall called it a widespread problem, as did 50% of Republicans and 37% of Democrats. Parents saw a larger growth in the share calling it a widespread problem, going from 39% to 47%. But the group with the largest growth was independents. In 2022, 33% called it a widespread problem, a 15-point difference from where they are presently (48%).
Clearly, voters are becoming more aware of an issue that has become an area of focus for education researchers. Our January 29 Emerging Issues newsletter looked at two recent studies showing a weakening relationship between grades and test scores since the pandemic. But grade inflation was an issue even before Covid. As the University of California faculty senate report, dated January 2020 found, “Grade inflation is part of why the predictive power of HSGPA [high school grade point average] has decreased since the last UC study.”
In past presidential elections, the Winston Group has analyzed the primary and general election debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are the most important for them in choosing for whom they will vote.
The following report continues our analysis for the Republican primary debates in anticipation of the general election next fall. This report covers the third Republican Primary Debate, hosted by NBC News on November 8, 2023. Topics covered include the distribution of issue topics in the debate questions, the number of questions asked of specific candidates, and candidate speaking times.
In past presidential elections, the Winston Group has analyzed the primary and general election debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are the most important for them in choosing for whom they will vote.
The following report continues our analysis for the Republican primary debates in anticipation of the general election next fall. This report covers the first Republican Primary Debate, hosted by Fox News on August 23, 2023. Topics covered include the distribution of issue topics in the debate questions, the number of questions asked of specific candidates, and candidate speaking times.
In past presidential elections, the Winston Group has analyzed the primary and general election debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are the most important for them in choosing for whom they will vote.
Across all the 2020 debates/town halls, Covid was the dominant question topic, accounting for over a quarter (27%) of all questions asked. Covid is followed by social issues (17%) and electability (14%) as a second tier of question priorities, followed by the economy (8%), the judicial system (7%), climate (7%) and foreign policy (6%). A next lowest tier was comprised of presidential priorities (5%), health care (5%), and immigration (3%), with a few questions devoted to other candidates (1%) or education (1%). In 2016, electability (29%) and foreign policy (27%) were the clear question priorities, while during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the priority was social issues (19%).
In past presidential elections, the Winston Group has analyzed the primary and general election debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are the most important for them in choosing for whom they will vote.
The following report continues our analysis for the Democratic primary debates in anticipation of the general election this fall. In the previous debate, before the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday, questions about foreign policy or national security were the most-represented, followed closely by questions about other candidates and their policies and/or prospects. Across all the debates so far, questions about social issues (a broad category including guns, abortion, and race relations, as well as general division and polarization in the country) have taken priority, with foreign policy and, somewhat more recently, candidate electability also emerging as priority topics in the debates thus far.
This report will continue our analysis, with information from the previous ten debates and the newest information from the CNN March 15 debate, featuring Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden only and moved to Washington, DC without an audience amid coronavirus concerns.
Throughout the general election season, the Winston Group has been analyzing the presidential and vice presidential debates to quantify how the question topics interact with voters’ key concerns for election day. As noted in our previous report on the last presidential debate, jobs and the economy remains the number one issue for general election voters.
In the debates, questions about electability and foreign policy are well-represented among all the debate questions. In fact, these two topics tie as the most asked-about topics across all three main debates and the vice presidential debate. As for the questions posed to each candidate, the two tickets are roughly even when it comes to the number of questions received pertaining to the different topics. Trump-Pence, however, slightly outpaces Clinton-Kaine in both number of questions received and overall speaking time. They also continue to receive more questions about electability when compared with Clinton-Kaine.
Here, we present our analysis of debate topics, number of questions addressed to candidates, and more for the third and final presidential debate. As we also stated in our last report, many voters report feeling dissatisfied with the current state of political discourse, a dissatisfaction that is markedly worse than it has been in recent years. As the election draws closer, understanding how well the debates address voters’ concerns is key.
The Winston Group has been analyzing the Republican primary debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are most important to them in choosing for whom they will vote in 2016.
Across the first two Republican primary debates, we continued to see a pattern we had first noticed while analyzing the 2012 primary debates — that while the economy is the top issue for Republican primary voters, it struggled as a question topic in debates. While the third debate, hosted by CNBC, was supposed to be completely focused on questions on the economy, the topic still fell far short as many other topics were introduced. Although questions about the economy comprised the greatest percentage of overall questions to date in the fourth Republican debate, hosted by Fox Business/WSJ, the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino dramatically shifted the tone of the debates and the priorities of the question topics. Questions about foreign policy and national security began to take center stage. Foreign policy and national security remained an incredibly important and much discussed topic moving into 2016. It was the most asked about topic in the January 14 debate hosted by Fox Business, a trend which continued in the ABC News Feb 6 and CBS News Feb 13 debates. In the CNN Feb 25 debate, immigration was the most asked about topic, but in the Fox News March 3 debate, foreign policy and national security returned as the most asked about question topic, followed by electability and immigration tied for second. In the CNN/Washington Times March 10 debate, foreign policy and national security tied with electability as the most popular question topics.
Here we continue our analysis of debate topics, candidate speaking times, and more, including information from the twelfth Republican debate and ninth Democratic debate. How well did the debates address the concerns and questions of voters?
