2020 OK Engaged Election Night; OK Engaged Live 4C

And we're back one final time here on Oklahoma engaged live voice of the voter. I am Logan Layden, managing editor here at KGOU. I've got Dick Pryor, the general manager of KGOU. He's joined by Amy Sue Gooden with OU Poll, who we've based so much of the stories we've done this election season off of. We also have our two reporters, Katelyn Mills and Robbie Corp with us still for the last part of the hour. It's an end of an era, Dick. We've been doing this show for a month and just when we got it down, it's time to say goodbye. But we'll be back, of course, next week. Everybody's going to want to tune in on election night, not only for our national coverage on NPR and our local cut-ins, but also for our second screen experience with me and Rachel Hubbard and yourself and all kinds of panelists and guests that night as we look at the local races. But in the meantime, let's continue the conversation we were having

before the break there. Sure. And I want to talk to Amy a little bit more about what we were discussing just before the break, which is where Oklahoma voters tend to get their information. And then I know you have a couple of questions for Robbie and Katelyn. I have one for them as well. But let's go beyond the debate, which seem to be very important to voters across the board. Faith and the influence of religious leaders is much higher among Republicans in Oklahoma. It's third overall. It ranks low among Democrats and Independents. Is that consistent with findings you've seen over the years? It is. And it just speaks to those kind of those social identity issues that we have and how we kind of affiliate our choices and how they influence our behaviors. I thought it was also do you have anything else on that? No. No. No. No. Okay. I thought it was also interesting and maybe shocking. But social media, Facebook and Twitter are the lowest rank sources of information for all groups and the numbers actually are very low. They are. They were

almost nonexistent in our scale below, you know, one on that zero to 10 scale, which is kind of interesting light of all the hype we see and talking about, you know, tweeting and censorship because it's in the media every day. So I don't know if it's a function of people not wanting to admit their active users or if it just really is not meaningful to the average individual out there. And that was especially low for Republicans. And as far as media consumption overall, the OU poll research that you did indicates for Republicans rely a lot less on the news media of all kinds than to Independents and Democrats. Is that also consistent year to year? And second, does age matter in those preferences? I think in terms of these sources that we're looking at, age does matter. But it's the types of messages, right? Because most of the people that I see

and in the media and in the analysis, those people, the younger people actually tend to focus a lot on other messages from like Snapchat and Instagram, for instance. And those were some media sources that we didn't really touch on. And I think it would be interesting to find out how much of those roles really play out. And maybe we're kind of tapping some of the wrong sources out there. Well, it could be true. And also TikTok is playing a role in gaming devices as well. So a lot of younger voters are being reached through games. And that's something we did not test during this. Logan, you have a couple of other questions, right? Well, sure, yes, indeed. And I want to kind of bring our reporters back in just a little bit. You know, when it comes to the OU poll that was conducted, again, a lot of our reporting is kind of trying to bounce off of that and analyze it. In general, when it comes to religion as a motivator for voters, that's something we're going to be looking into midweek from our KGU reporter, Caitlin Howard.

And I just, you know, it was kind of an interesting aspect of that story that she's working on that there are, there's this golf. I mean, if you're an evangelical, they also don't fall into one block, one voting group, all for Trump or all for Biden. You can find evangelicals on both sides. I wonder what was that was were there differences between men and women as far as the impact that religion has on the influencing of of the vote that we saw in the poll because some of the more kind of stark differences I saw throughout the poll were between men and women. When it comes to the religious aspect of that, did you see that? That was interesting. So there is is some break in there in terms of religious affiliation at the personal level among men and women. Women are slightly higher to to rate it. However, that distance on terms of

personal traits is not a statistically significant difference. It was just a nominal difference in how they evaluate it personally in terms of an influence. But looking at it in terms of, you know, and even as faith and religious leaders, they're pretty balanced in terms of how they focus on those as as information sources out there and how it influences their decision making. Yeah, and certainly some of the more interesting aspects of the poll were the questions related to the COVID-19 response. I want to bring Katelyn Mills in here. We had to talk just briefly there in that first segment about this audio postcard that you're going to be doing this week that everyone will hear on not only our station, but across our public radio partner stations that that kind of focused on unemployment. That's been one of the big factors in the COVID-19 pandemic is all the people who have lost their jobs or were furloughed. Tell me just a little bit more Katelyn about

what you found in talking to these people and what we can expect to hear from you. Yeah, so both of the people that I talked to, they both got laid off in the early part of the year. They weren't expecting it to happen. One was able to find a job within like a month's time. The other took kind of took a little bit longer, working part-time, but still up to a 40-hour thing. But I think what's interesting about one of the people that I talked to was that before this year, she wasn't particularly, I mean, she voted. It wasn't like she was a non-active voter, but this year when it happened, she found like, I do have time to actually give some of my time to the campaign of my choice. So she started doing phone banks and all kinds of stuff, and she's like, you know, this was something that I wasn't expecting to do. But both of them, both of them in the that I interviewed talked about how, you know, the experience of being

unemployed didn't change how they planned to vote at all. In fact, for some of them, especially for the woman I interviewed, it solidified it. So it made her even more like having going through the unemployment process. It made her want to be more active and put more of her opinions out there on her social media platforms, and she even had, you know, she's like, you know, I even talked to my parents about all this stuff, and they're not, you know, the same politically, you know, motivated like I am, like they don't have the same political views, but there is a respect there. They're proud of her. Actually, you know, she told me she's like, yeah, they're really proud of me for donating some of my time to the campaign of my choice. And so I think what's been kind of something that I know we've talked about Logan with these audio postcards is steering away from having people say who they're voting for or say who their affiliation is, because I feel

like it's almost like, you know, it's kind of sad because whenever you talk to voters sometimes, it's like they hear Republican or Democrat and it just shuts off like nobody wants to engage with it past that point. So that was like one of the reasons why I started doing the postcards in this way was so, you know, you don't necessarily know who this person's going to vote for. And maybe, just maybe it has been listen a little deeper. Listen a little deeper. And that's, you know, you both Robbie and yourself had talked about that as you engage with those students about how sort of open-minded they were, which is something that, you know, we kind of lost a little bit here in kind of our adult politics. So, you know, listening better. You know, as a point of kind of personal privilege here, doing these store, doing that audio postcard, engaging with these kids and trying to organize that, it isn't easy. I'd like for each of you to talk about, you know, how your reporting has been impacted by all of this. It wasn't easy for you, Katelyn, to find

unemployed people to talk to you, right? No, in fact, I was working on finding an unemployed person for another project on KOSU. And I know that it's, and I even put this on Twitter. I was like, I know this is like a really personal thing to ask somebody to talk about. And so I was really glad whenever, you know, Katherine, she has a way bigger Twitter following than I just, she like shared it and we got two people in. So it was actually the fastest that I was able to find somebody for a postcard after like months of like having a hard time, I guess, but this year, in general, with reporting, you know, I'm immunocompromised. So it's like, it's been hard throughout the year with having to pick and choose like, oh, is it safe enough to go to a certain area? Or is it safe for the people that I would go visit? Like, I live in the city and I, you know, a lot of my projects were this year were supposed to be rural outreach and stuff like that. So it's like, is it safe for me to go and visit these people? And that's been really hard. And with the postcards in general, you know, you're interviewing these people over Zoom. And a lot of the times

whenever I do it, I ask them to bring their phone along because Zoom audio can be kind of tricky. So I'm asking them to record themselves with their cell phones and you're having to kind of play this like teaching them how to be an audio journalist, while also interviewing them. And it's a, you know, I wouldn't have had to experience this without the pandemic, I guess. So that's exactly right. And Robbie, you know, we're on Zoom right now. I can see your glorious locks of hair, but the rest of the listeners cannot. And that's because you've been there in your apartment doing this reporting, even this engagement with these students was done by remote. How has reporting during the pandemic affected you? Well, I think we've, the, the challenges you face reporting in a pandemic are just like the challenges that all of our listeners have faced. You have, you know, personal and ethical questions about how you behave. Do you wear a mask? Do you, you know, remove yourself from certain situations through work? I've never in my career

had so many sort of ethical questions about just, you know, going to a place for a story. You know, because you don't, the coronavirus is cases are at a record high right now. Hospitalizations are off the charts. So as we, as we face this down, you know, and, you know, it's been like that all year. And so as we, as we face this down, you have to look, you have to weigh sort of your duty as a journalist to tell people that story with your duty as a human being to stop the spread and to keep the virus on. And that's real. But I think a, you know, one worth taking on. Well, it has been a challenge. And I mean, the name of this program, the name of our, the name of our whole election project is Oklahoma engaged for a reason, because we want to engage with people. And that's the point. And it certainly has been a challenge this year. But we've

gotten around it in some creative ways. And what you and Katelyn did with the students last week was one of those we were able to get voices from across the state, from Alvin to Duncan, to Durant, to Tulsa, Oklahoma City. So I encourage everyone to certainly stay tuned for the rest of the week so they can hear the, the product of your effort there. And I know also Dick certainly appreciate your hard work and may have another question or two for you. I, I do. And, but I want to ask Amy a question first. And that is this. What we're hearing is, of course, it's hard to report during the coronavirus pandemic. It's also hard to campaign. And one of the things that we indicated in the poll was that we saw in the poll was that Democrats tend to place a high value on actually meeting the candidate, which is very tough to do during a pandemic. But one thing that was consistent pretty much across the board is that sharing of values of voters, caring about people like you and having the same position on issues as voters was strong in each voting group, likely,

unlikely, and then the, the ambivalent voters. But it was highest among likely voters. Does that tell us anything at all about the value of empathy in an election? I think we need to somehow find a way to delve into that issue a little more because we do see kind of those signs of empathy. But what we don't know is, you know, what this means. We need to delve into the analysis a little more because is it more a personalized story? What causes those people to make those types of connections to where it influences their voting behavior? And I have a question for Robbie and Katelyn. And it's a similar question, but it's for the younger people that are the ones that you recently talked to. And it seems, at least for my point of view, that they may place a high value on empathy and that they probably are less likely to buy into what we normally consider to be

polarizing issues. Is that a fair representation? What did you find? Definitely. I think that's a fair representation. I think we just, as we were having these discussions, there was just a certain level of respect amongst the students, respects on not just for each other, but on the issues in general. They want, you know, they want what's best for the broader world, not just for themselves. And I think that there's a certain level of empathy and selflessness that really came across as we talked to them. I would agree. You know, at the start of each conversation, we had to set some guidelines as to how we were going to have a productive conversation. And a lot of it was like don't talk over each other, don't call each other names, actually listen to what somebody has to say before you let it affect your own opinion. And it's just a good reminder, I think,

to at least it was to me that that's how a productive conversation should go. So I definitely think that that was a characteristic of the students we interviewed. Amy, what about the age differences? So we have senior citizens who are reliable voters, younger people tend not to be reliable voters, but it appears that they may be turning out in much bigger numbers this year. Where did they fall? Number one, and number two, can you identify a voting group or group, our groups that are most likely to make a big difference in this year's elections here in Oklahoma or nationally? Oh my gosh, I'm not sure I can actually answer that question right now, just because it seems all over the board. I mean, on a lot of these issues that are really important to people, you know, those personal things, but we're talking about compassion and empathy and COVID and all that. I think across the board, we're seeing all those groups have seen those important to

influencing their vote decisions. So in terms of turning it into a prediction, I just can't even go there because I just honestly don't know from what I'm seeing because everything's so influential on that personal side. Well, I think that particular answer is pretty good for the year 2020, which has put a lot of things up in the air and we're feeling it right now as we head toward Election Day on November 3rd when we will have Oklahoma engage live voice of the voter on the website, Oklahoma Engage.com as well as on KGOU.org. And also we will have on KGOU, I should say on KGOU will have national results from NPR. Logan, it's been a great conversation and Oklahoma Engage live voice of the voter is nearing its final minute. That's right. Well, thank you very much, Dick. Yes, we've had fun. Stay tuned everybody to KGOU, all our public radio stations, so much more election coverage to come in the next week or so, and then of course it all culminates on Election Night. Or at least we hope it does. We'll see.

Working till midnight, homeschooling children, cleaning and cooking, the life of a single parent during the pandemic is an endurance marathon. It's like Tetris trying to fix all the pieces so everything is covered. I'm Audie Cornish, how single mothers are struggling this afternoon on all things considered from NPR news. It's all things considered today from 4 to 7 on KGOU, your NPR source. Your NPR source is KGOU Norman at 106.3 FM, KROU Spencer, Oklahoma City at 105.7 FM, KWOU Woodward at 88.1 FM, KQOU Clinton at 89.1 FM, and KOUAA ADA at 9.5.