Vice President Kamala Harris’ decision to appear on the podcast “Call Her Daddy” has drawn scoffs from a scattering of established news outlets, but an experiment conducted by Democratic pollsters this summer shows why the party may need to try slightly unorthodox methods to reach young voters who avoid political news.
The experiment, conducted this summer by the Democratic group Navigator Research, looked at how young voters responded to polls differently depending on what platform they were contacted on. Some polls still call people on the phone, or recruit them to participate via text, while others use online panels or recruit them over social media.
The result ? Young voters who were harder to reach — meaning pollsters could only get them via text or on the phone — tended to be less Democratic, less liberal and more skeptical of politics overall than those recruited via online panel. Navigator conducted the survey in June, and found text and phone respondents were more negative about both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, and were more pessimistic about the economy.
They also watched a lot less television, which has long been the dominant method of reaching voters. A majority of young people recruited via social media reported watching live television every day, while just 12% of those recruited over text and 15% of those recruited over phone said the same.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with the press at Charlotte Douglas International Airport in Charlotte, North Carolina on Saturday.
The poll, in the end, paints a picture of a group of disengaged voters who don’t consume traditional media as much as their peers. This was the group Harris was aiming for with her appearance on “Call Her Daddy,” which began as a relationship and advice podcast aimed at young women and has since expanded to touch on mental health and social issues — both strongly of interest to Gen Z.
NPR reported on Monday that the audience for “Call Her Daddy” is 70% women and 93% under the age of 45. While any show aimed at young women is likely going to have a Democratic-leaning audience, 24% of its listeners are Republicans and 20% are independents. And notably, youth voters are predicted to be particularly influential in battleground states like Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia in 2024, according to Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
“Our polling confirms the reality that while we live in a fragmented media environment, that ecosystem is even more decentralized for younger voters. They are hard to reach in polling and they are also hard to reach with a messenger they trust,” said Bryan Bennett, the lead pollster for Navigator Research.
Harris’ interview with host Alex Cooper touched on a number of winning issues for Democrats, especially among the young women who make up the bulk of Cooper’s audience — mostly abortion rights, but also student loans and housing.
Bennett predicted more Democrats would follow Harris’ lead: “Sitting down for an interview with Alex Cooper on her wildly popular podcast brings in an audience that is not consuming political media but may swing the election. As trust erodes in mainstream media, this is what campaign media strategy will increasingly look like in the future.”
And while the Navigator experiment does show the less engaged group of voters to be less supportive of Democrats and less likely to consider themselves liberal, their opinions on key issues tend to lean to the left. Navigator found roughly 60% of them generally agreed with progressive statements on abortion, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and other topics, while roughly 30% agreed with conservative statements.
There was one area where phone and text respondents were more conservative than other participants: guns. Just 57% of respondents agreed with a progressive position on the issue, while 36% agreed with a conservative one.
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