People living in Orange County generally are open to immigration, and most say non-authorized immigrants should get a path to citizenship.
Residents are bummed out about the direction of the United States overall, and about California in particular, but we’re upbeat(ish) about the way things are trending in the county.
That said, county residents also strongly view homelessness and affordable housing as the area’s biggest problems, and the high cost of shelter is a key reason more than 1 in 3 of us is thinking hard about moving away.
Those are just a few of the findings generated over the past 24 months by the UCI-OC Poll, a public opinion research project overseen by Jon Gould, dean of UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology.
Gould came to the county nearly three years ago, most recently from Arizona State University but after a long career in Washington, D.C., with a tricky mandate: Revive UCI’s once-vibrant polling operation and help the school become a bigger player in the broader, non-academic community.
It’s still early, as such projects go, but a new $300,000 grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation to expand the UCI-OC Poll suggests Gould is making headway.
Gould, a human rights lawyer by training, is the rare pollster who isn’t interested in horse race-style queries. To date, none of the eight polls he’s overseen has focused on how registered voters are planning to vote on a particular candidate or policy idea. Instead, Gould’s work has been based on the notion that public opinion – if captured accurately – can help community leaders create some kind of solution to big-picture problems.
A few days after UCI announced the new grant, we polled the pollster, asking Gould how the money will be used and about how he views his work.
Why poll Orange County?
The UCI-OC Poll is important in two respects. First, it helps county leaders follow and help to respond to pressing problems that concern residents. Second, it offers a window nationally into what is happening in a rare, large, purple county. If we, as a nation, are ever to get past this time in which the left and right seem unable to talk with one another, the answer is likely to come from a county where the left and right live and work alongside one another. Orange County offers insights into what views people share and which issues might offer a chance at consensus.
What can you do with the grant?
We are fortunate that this will provide funding for several more rounds of polling, allowing us to expand the frequency of our polls. I should add that it only covers our operations for a finite amount of time. If O.C. residents find the poll useful, we are hopeful that they and area businesses and organizations will want to support it – as many already have done.
You’ve been at UCI since early 2022. What have you learned from polling that’s surprised you about Orange County?
It’s truly a purple county, almost one-third Democratic, one-third Republican, and one-third independent. When I was growing up, the O.C. was bright red, and today it is one of only three large counties nationwide that is purple. It’s also interesting to see the number of issues on which there is convergence across political differences. The need to create more affordable housing is at the top of that list.
Explain some of the ingredients for a great poll question?
It’s one that seeks to answer “why,” not simply “what.”
So, for example, it’s important to understand who residents voted for, but it’s much more interesting to try to understand why they did so. Also – and this is getting into the weeds – it’s crucial that questions are unambiguous in what they’re asking. If folks are confused about a question, the answers are unreliable and unhelpful.
Since you’ve led the project, UCI’s polling has focused on attitudes and ideas more than “who are you gonna vote for?” type questions. Why is that? Also, is that likely to continue, or is there value in predictive polling?
There are lots of outlets nationwide that engage in predictive polling – that is, trying to predict who is going to win a race.
Our goal is understanding: Why did a result happen the way it did? What does that portend for the future? We have polled on political questions, but our primary mission – and I think, our best contribution – is helping O.C. leaders better understand how residents engage with the most pressing problems facing their communities.
For example, on homelessness, we wanted to know how people experience the issue, what priority they give it, what solutions have they considered, what messages might move them, and what are the “no go” options for them.
Do political campaigns reach out for your data? If so, do you let them use it?
No, and we would not. As an initiative within the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, we are entirely nonpartisan.
Part of the mandate when you came to UCI was to use polling to help the university be a bigger part of the community. Is that working? Are UCI polls sparking conversations that might help solve problems?
Oh, absolutely. Community engagement has been central to the School of Social Ecology since its founding more than 30 years ago. We are creating an advisory group from across the county to help us pick the issues on which to poll, and when we release the results, we work with area businesses, nonprofit groups and government leaders to share and discuss the results.
As a friend of mine says, a pollster that just drops results and retreats is annoying. We want to engage with community leaders and residents to use the poll as a vehicle to understand and help to respond to the problems that vex many of us.
For several election cycles, national pollsters, and polling in general, have been hammered for inaccuracy. Some (but not all) of that criticism has been fair. Broadly speaking, is America pollable? Is Orange County different?
Polls are only as good as the willingness of people to answer questions. So, we’re all experimenting now with different technologies to help us reach the random, cross-section of people needed for a reliable poll. Believe it or not, AI may play a role, since it can adjust to meet a respondent’s preferred language.
You’ve said you might use AI to poll Orange County in multiple languages. Can you explain the good and bad of that, and why it might be important?
It’s only good. We do not use AI to write the questions, and if we do end up employing AI in the future, it will be only to identify a respondent’s preferred language and administer the poll in that language. The translations will be checked, of course, to ensure they’re clear and accurate. Letting someone answer in their preferred language increases both the reach and reliability of a poll.
Do you answer polls?
Only when I know the entity conducting the poll to be reliable. There are lots of shoddy “push polls” ahead of elections, in which partisans try to “push” respondents to answer a particular way to help show that their candidate is ahead. I have no use for that.
What would you ask you?
I’d ask what I like about the polling, and here is that response: I am fascinated by people, what they think and why, and how they act and what motivates that.
In my school, we like to say that social sciences are the truly “hard” sciences, because trying to understand people and their behavior is much more difficult than explaining the natural world.
If I could go out into Orange County and sit down with most residents, I would rarely be bored. If done properly, polling is a time- and cost-effective way of understanding what people think and what motivates them.