The new Kansas speak survey of public opinion generated by the docking Institute of Public Affairs at Fort Hays State University. It's out. It checks the pulse of Kansans on dozens of issues the list that ranges from views on public officials the economy, guns, abortion, election, security, housing, health care, education and climate change. Here to mind some of the numerical nuggets from the survey. Our Brett Zoolander, director of the docking Institute at Fort Hays, his colleagues at the institute Jen sun, as well as Michael Smith of Emporia State, Alexandra Middlewood, of Wichita State and Patrick Miller of the University of Kansas. Welcome to the Kansas reflector podcast. We're at let's begin with a concise explanation of what Kansas speaks actually is. And if you will, was there anything about this year's survey results that stuck out to you?
Well, thank you, Tim. Sir, appreciate you having us. On the research team that is responsible for Kansas speaks every year, I guess I would just offer a few remarks about why we do this. The donking Institute of Public Affairs looked around the state and about 2008 and said, you know, we don't have any kind of public opinion polling on a regular basis that touches on various issues of public affairs that we hear, often debated and voted upon in Topeka during our legislative sessions. So we said, let's start doing something like that. And and we certainly weren't the first in the country to do this. Many such polls exists in other states. And so what we've done is over time, since 2009, we have had a set of questions that are fairly perennial, where we we measure Kansans, attitudes about some quality of life issues, and also attitudes toward their elected officials and elected bodies. But then we also have a large section of our questionnaire reserved annually for contemporary public affairs items. And we feel it's important to bring those items to the attention of legislators, but also, you know, fellow Kansans, so that everyone can see what others in the state are thinking. I guess I'm going to mention again, that Medicaid expansion will almost certainly be talked about this this legislative session. And once again, we find high support for Medicaid expansion in the state. It's about 72%. This this year, which is really close to what it was last year, about 73%, I think. And both of these years are up about 10% from the prior two years. So 2019 and Swanee on that part of the reason people support it, I think is they largely agree that it'll help rural hospitals in the state. And they also agree that people who qualify for Medicaid are deserving of it. Both of those items, achieving two thirds and up to 75%. On on the the agreement that will help rural hospitals. The other thing I would point out is this year, we added a series of questions quite a few questions about engagement with and perceptions about institutions of higher education. And we measured institutions, at the vocational technical level, community college level and the university level. In those in all three of those levels, we're seeing high support for a higher education in terms of its ability to help with workforce development, research and design that will be beneficial to business and industry, and also an overall economic development, we had 80% and more agreeing that all three of those levels will help in those three different regards. And then finally, I would mention that Kansans also believe that those levels of education all contribute to the quality of civic life in the state with over 70% agreeing that it or feeling that it's very important or important that all three of those levels are contributing to the civic life in Kansas.
Patrick Miller, I know there are lots of numbers in the 2022 survey, but can you talk about a prominent finding
might give you two and a half hours to go over the first one. I think I'll start with abortion. A little bit of background so I started commenting on our writing about abortion attitudes in Kansas back in 2017 2018. And in the survey that we did for Kansas speaks last year, I wrote this new set of questions that fortunately was included, that I think gave us some more detail on how Kansas feel about abortion rights. And I think if there's one piece of feedback that I heard for the last five years before the amendment though in August It was it was from people who did not believe that most Kansans favored the fundamental right to abortion access. I mean, sure, plenty of them support restrictions. But I think from where I'm sitting, the most vocal feedback was from people who just didn't believe that there's no way Kansas could support abortion rights. We saw it reflected in a survey last year that in fact, most Kansans did support that basic right. And of course, we know how the August amendment turned out. I think in in thinking about the abortion questions this year, and I contributed some of those. One way that I wanted to go with that was to add some new questions that really get at where abortion bans are going. You know, for right now, we're not going to have an abortion ban in Kansas. But I think a lot of supporters of that ban have made it clear that they're going to continue to work towards that, likely through changing how judges are selected. And I think one thing that's missing from public opinion surveys to a large degree right now is these questions that ask us about the nuts, the nuts and bolts of enforcing these bans. So for example, who's going to pay for prosecuting women and doctors? How willing would you be to report a woman who has an abortion, questions like that, that if you think about if you, if you're going to ban abortion, you're going to prosecute people and you're going to have punishments? What are those going to be? So it was interesting for me to see in this survey, that most Kansans are not interested in recording a woman or a doctor who has an illegal abortion. Some of course, were, but most were not. I also thought the funding attitudes were interesting. You know, when we prosecute state level crime, that's typically the counties that pay for the prosecution of those crimes, you know, local prosecutors are making decisions. Typically, those crimes are prosecuted in more local courts. But most Kansans prefer that the state take on the cost of paying for those prosecutions, which is interesting, because that's not typically how abortion bans are going to be enforced in many of the states that surround us. So I hope that as we go forward, we can continue, especially as we see more of our neighbors, banning abortion and having prosecutions get better data on exactly how that's panning out to see how people feel. And I'll also add, one thing that in particular I contributed this year was some of the questions around election integrity, election security. I've never seen that really polled in Kansas before or even much detail in many other states. It was interesting to me to see that most Kansans feel that we generally do have safe and secure elections in the state. I was actually most interested by the percentage of people who didn't have an opinion, which I think probably reflects just maybe not a lot of knowledge about how elections are run. But I think even though we see that Kansans mostly trust our election process, I think we have to square that with how these attitudes often get meshed out in reality, I mean, take, for example, Republican primary for a Secretary of State, where an election denier who called for violence and war against Democrats and liberals in 2020, took 45% in the secretary of state's primary. So I think, you know, people have these attitudes, that our elections are safe, our elections are secure. But then how these attitudes are going to get translated into electoral politics and policy attitudes and partisanship is a lot more evident, I think is a different creature. But it's useful to have this base of this measurement base for how people feel about elections in our state.
Jensen, it's your turn, what came to the forefront in your mind as you helped pull together this year survey results?
I'll just comment on a few things on the perennial questions we asked her every year. And one thing that is very salient this year is that people's perception of the economy kind of declined as compared to was last year. And we have several questions asking about people's perception economy. And the as you can see the percentage of the people seeing kasi economy was excellent or very good. dropped from about 21% to last year to 16% this year. And also almost half of Kansas status at Kansas economy is getting worse. And in 2020 wine was 33% and also a larger percentage of people become more concerned about their family welfare as compared with last year. However, although The perception of the Kansas economy are lower than in 2021. But we notice about two thirds of the respondents still saying that Kansas is on the right track. And this has remained very steady during the past three years. So I think we can interpret this as people who are largely optimistic about the future of the state. The other thing I want to point out is that we asked about people's satisfaction with a few elected political figures, and government bodies. And people's satisfaction with Scotland County has been always the highest among all of those political figures and government bodies. And the percentage of people seeing some styles, century with commentary is about or close to 50%. In the past three years, and people satisfaction with Kansas Legislature was always about the 30%. And the suspension was so the court never exceeded that 25%
Alexandra, a highlight from the survey of 500 people conducted in September and October.
So for this year's survey, the questions that I really wanted to have included, were questions about various types of gun control, or gun restrictions. And this was on the 2019 survey or the 2019 survey, I did have some of these questions included. And we did expand that this year and included 10 different policies of various types of gun control. And we found that every measure had majority support from the respondents of this survey. Some differences that we saw between 2019 and 2022 survey is that there was actually lower support this year for background checks or expanding background checks. Though the 2022 question was more specific on that. So the 2019 survey just asked about background checks. In general, the 2022 specifically mentioned, having background checks on private sales and gun show sales. So we did see some lower support for that one, we did see higher support considerably higher support for requiring gun owners to be 21 years or older to purchase a firearm. So that was when we saw increased support for most of the other measures that we had from 2019 to 2020 stayed about the same, though we did add a question about teachers carrying guns at school, specifically if they had been trained to do so. And this had the lowest support of all of the gun control measures that we asked about though it was still a majority. So about 53% of respondents did say that teachers who are trained to do so should carry guns at school. And this is not or the responses to these questions are not necessarily driven by people who are anti gun. So for the first time, we added a question to measure gun ownership on the survey. And 49% of the respondents who answered the Kansas speak survey did say that they had a gun in their home. And so we're not talking about people taking the survey who are anti gun, almost a majority of them are about half of them own a gun themselves. We still saw overwhelming support for most of the 10 gun control measures that we asked
about. And Michael Smith peel back the onion on a couple of findings that you think are interesting.
First of all, going into an election in a few weeks. That huge gap between approval for Governor Kelly and approval for President Biden. I think it's around 20 points maybe a tad lower that we've seen all these commercials trying to tie Governor Kelly and other Democrats to President Biden, I don't know about the other Democrats. But clearly, there's some evidence that Governor Kelly's plan to portray herself as a Kansas Democrat, which is basically an independent and a moderate, not tied to the National Democratic Party. This survey would indicate that it is working that Laura Kelly is Laura Kelly, and she is not necessarily associated with President Biden or other national Democrats. So I thought that was interesting, especially the size of the gap and public approval really struck me. The other thing that struck me is I love I love Kansas speaks I love these real meaty public opinion polls. So many journalists tried to misuse public opinion polls to do things like predict who's going to win an election and report on the horse race and we political scientists and sociologists now Oh, that public opinion polls are best when they really drill down into the dynamics of public opinion. They weren't designed to, to handicap horse races. And we also know and we've known since before any of us were born that most Americans just don't forget fit into our nice little boxes of liberal and conservative. And really good example of that is the gap between the public opinion poll on transgender girls playing on girls sports teams, and the opinion on books in school libraries. Now, the conventional wisdom, of course, tells us that liberals support transgender girls playing on girls sports teams, and keeping the books in the libraries and conservatives are the reverse, take the books out and keep the transgender girls off the girls sports teams. But Kansans went opposite directions. There's a rather large majority that believes that that kids and young adults playing on sports teams should correspond to this exercise, which you could call the conservative position. But then when they ask the questions about taking books out of the school library, and this one really grabbed me, Chairman, even elementary schools, elementary schools, most Kansans do not support taking controversial books out of the school library. And when you move up through middle school and into high school, it's a very small number, I think it was only about 15.7% that wanted to take books out of the high school library. So again, just a great reminder that we like to put politics in these liberal conservative boxes. But that's not how voters think they see those two issues as separate and they have different opinions on them.
Brett, skipping back to you tell us where someone could go online at Fort Hays State to read details of this survey?
Absolutely. Thank you. They can just go to fhsu.edu/docking. And there they will just scroll down and find Kansas speaks. Once they click on the Learn More button, they'll have access to all of our years reports.
Okay, excellent. I do have a couple of questions about motivations of voters at this time of year just before the November election. Anybody can jump in and answer this. But I was wondering whether you think this general election will draw back to the polls, voters loyal to former President Donald Trump, as well as the pro choice voters who rejected in August The proposed amendment to the Kansas constitution that threatened abortion rights. Patrick Miller, can you please go first?
I mean, I would just say, I think by all the indicators that we see from Kansas, and across the board that I mean, this may well be a relatively high turnout election, probably not the highest we've seen, I believe 2018 might be had been the record for the highest turnout post World War 220 14 was actually the lowest turnout nationally, and a midterm since World War Two. We'll have to see how that pans out. And you know that turnout may well be across the board and may be concentrated more in certain areas. You know, we have very few states that have had elections since 2020. In Virginia, and New Jersey were one of them. And they generally saw quite healthy turnout across the board a little more in some areas than others more drop off particularly among young and minority voters than other demographics. So we'll have to see how that pans out. It could well be that those strong partisans on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, you know, when we speak about the trunk, strongest Trump supporters really often speaking about the strongest Republicans. And if we when we think about the most or most avidly anti Trump, we're usually thinking about the strongest Democrats, those attitudes about Trump are typically just an expression of how strongly we root for our party teams. I'm sure those those those voters will be back and large numbers this year. The question about the amendment turnout will be quite interesting, especially with the number of first time voters that we saw voting on that referendum. And here, you know, I think I'm particularly thinking about people like my my students, my younger students, my, my my first time voters who might have voted in August, younger people are more likely to drop out of the electorate in a midterm election. But yet many of them showed up for that amendment vote. And that's not something I think we have any good data to handicap or predict that. But I think that will be an important thing to look at that may have margins and impact on who wins the race like Governor
Alexandra Wichita State. Go ahead, please.
I would echo what Patrick just mentioned, but also add that we know that when people show up for an election, they're more likely to show up in future elections because they now have more familiarity with the political system, how to go through that process of voting. Do we did have a lot of first time voters in August, which tracks with the high voter registration we saw throughout the summer. And so those people are more likely to vote in this November election, because they have voted before. But to echo what Patrick said, there are a lot of first time voters, there's a lot of women, there was a large Hispanic turnout. And a lot of young people turnout in the August primary. And a lot of those people were voting for the first time. And so statistically, they're more likely to vote again, because they've already voted one. But abortion is not directly on the ballot, you are now taking those opinions that people have about a specific issue and trying to translate them into partisan and candidate politics. And it's not a one to one matchup. So we really don't know how this is going to turn out. And we won't know until people show up on election day.
And Michael Smith of Emporia State, your thoughts on this?
Well, I agree with Patrick and Alex. One thing that is interesting about the vote this August is that it turned out a lot more younger voters than we typically see in an August election. And everybody has been trying to get younger voters to vote for decades. I remember the MTV Rock the Vote campaign back in the 1990s. But the effect of these things is I think, usually been pretty marginal. It seems like the abortion rights issue, possibly student loan debt forgiveness to maybe the certainly the abortion rights issue, really turned out younger voters and like Alex was saying, having voted once you're more likely to vote again. On the other hand, that can also drop off. So one of the things to really watch, I think is turnout among younger voters this year, especially because midterms, if they do turn out, they tend to turn out in presidential elections, like in 2008 when there was a wave for Barack Obama, but this is a midterm election, will those younger voters continue to vote in higher numbers than previous generations?
My second question is about the propensity of candidates organizations to drop in October surprise on rivals Layton in an election cycle. Recently, Attorney General Eric Schmidt's campaign falsely claimed the administration of Governor Laura Kelly helped pay for an art event that included a drag show in Wichita. It's totally false. It's utter fiction. Still Smith's allies are pushing it on social media. Do you guys think this kind of appeal which feels like a desperate Gambit resonates with voters? Patrick, what do you think?
I think to understand a question like that we have to understand oftentimes, who are the voters who are undecided at the end of the campaign, when most voters make up their mind very early in a campaign, and that is just figuring out who that candidate of their party is, and they're going to vote for that person and party is the most important thing to them in the election. And those voters tend to be more engaged politically, when we get to this point in the campaign, the kind of voter who is undecided, typically pays less attention to campaigns pay less attention to politics knows less about the candidate candidates often cares less about politics and the candidates and issues, they're more likely to tell us they don't know what they feel about more issues, because they're often not informed enough about issues to have those solid opinions. So I think campaigns have a tendency to trot out things like this at the end of the campaign, because they often will get attention and hopefully break through to that person who is only casually or minimally paying attention. You know, we're not the only election. And this is not the only year where stuff like this, even if it is blatantly untrue pops up late in the campaign. So I think really something like that is often an attention grabber to hopefully get some of those last minute voters who, you know, they're often more personality voters rather than issue voters. And you really do have to work harder to get any of their attention.
Mr. Smith, your thoughts about these last minute attacks?
Well, I think there are a couple of things about it that are interesting. One is just to build on what Patrick said, not only is he correct about undecided voters often being less informed. But there's another piece to which is most undecided voters aren't 5050 sitting on the fence. They're leaning heavily toward one candidate and waiting for that candidate to close the deal. So we're talking about pushing voters who are leaning in one direction off the fence on the your side. And knowing that some of these so called undecided is on the other side. You're probably not going to win those unless something extraordinary happens the so called October surprise type stuff. The other thing that's interesting is that ads like this are not going for the old school undecided voter who's in the middle. This is clear The red meat trying to turn out the Republican base. And that is we're seeing more and more of that because there are fewer voters that are in the middle. And there are still some there is still some. But it's more about mobilizing your base. And the other piece we haven't talked about yet is, although Denis piles third party candidate, candidates, he probably won't get out of the single digits. If the race is extremely close, it could cost Derek Schmidt just enough votes to cost him the election. And so he may be trying to shore up those votes also, or the independent groups spending money on his behalf.
Okay, Alexandra will give you the final word.
Yeah, I would just echo what Patrick and Michael said. And this is, you know, going to affect very few independent or undecided voters. It's really about convincing his own base to show up and vote for Republicans who would vote for him anyways, but are maybe not sure they're gonna vote at all. Something like this is gonna get those people out to the polls, potentially.
I think we're gonna have to leave it there. Thanks to our guests on the Kansas reflector podcast, Brett Zoolander and Jen, son of the docking Institute at Fort Hays State Alexandra Middlewood of Wichita State, Michael Smith at Emporia State and Patrick Miller, the University of Kansas. Thanks for working on the Kansas speak survey and appreciate your time. Thank you for having
