iOS 26 threatens polling

A deep dive on political tribes, appreciating the Almanac and Michael Barone, Texas redraw, a new look at realignment, RCV patterns in NYC, the rise of college grads, California refugees.

No. 369 | August 1st, 2025

🗣️ Public Opinion

On X, I have a thread on how the release of iOS 26 threatens high-quality polling:

iOS 26 will move calls and texts outside of a sender’s close contacts to an unknown senders tab. Many will welcome this as a way to fight spam.

But a big unintended consequence of this will be to make it harder for pollsters to reach a representative sample of Americans.

Polling has been moving online for a while now, but for state and local polls, calling and texting the broadest possible segment of the public is often the only way to get a representative sample.

Online polling has come a long way and can be a great option for national and large area polls.

However, online polls are largely opt-in and aren’t always feasible at the local level.

The polling industry has adapted to the death of landlines first by moving to cell phone interviewing and more recently to texting.

The high-quality probability polls like NYT/Siena that you love around election time rely exclusively on outreach methods targeted by iOS 26.

Hiding these calls and texts may render these sorts of polls much more expensive, out of reach for all but the most wealthy and powerful institutions. That’s the best case scenario. The worst case is that they become impossible to do.

Recognizing the vital role polling plays in our democracy, bona-fide research is treated differently from telemarketing, exempt from the Do Not Call list and other requirements—so long as polls don’t lead to a sales pitch.

Apple should also apply this same standard to iOS 26.

By design, polls must invite the broadest possible cross-section of the public to participate. Strict opt-in requirements are antithetical to this. Policymakers have long recognized this, creating common-sense carve outs for survey research.

It’s not just political pollsters. Public health surveys are threatened too. Agencies like the CDC use these methods extensively too.

Polling will continue to evolve and embrace new technology. Text-to-web polling has been a key part of that over the last few cycles. And it’s important to understanding opinion at the local level, especially with local journalism in decline.

Texting is also a vital tool for GOTV and mobilizing low-propensity voters, for example allowing campaigns to reach out to voters to cure their absentee ballots in cases like signature mismatches. Making it harder for these texts to go through will disenfranchise voters.

Any changes to reduce spam must ensure that:

• The ability to do high quality polls isn’t compromised

• The voice of the voters isn’t silenced

• Political speech is protected

Bottom line: You can not like the deluge of fundraising texts and still support common-sense carveouts for survey research, similar to those on the books today. Polling texts are a tiny silver of overall traffic and don’t seek to inflame partisan passions. With the decline of telephone polling, texting is essential to getting high-quality probability samples that don’t rely on opt-in online panels. These have their place — Echelon is very much a mixed-mode shop — but polls that give a voice to voters at the state and local level depend on high-quality probability sampling methods, and that means a mix of phones and texting.

Thanks to Michael Baharaeen for his extensive coverage of our Political Tribes project, highlighting America’s overlooked political diversity.

In our latest focus group with The New York Times, Latino Trump reflect on the Administration six months in:

🇺🇲 2026

Mark your calendars: The 2026 edition of the Almanac of American Politics comes out September 2. This Poynter piece profiles the Almanac and its legendary founder Michael Barone. (Fun fact: My first freelance gig in DC was setting up Barone’s website.)

“Every new edition of the Almanac features profiles of all 435 members of the U.S. House, all 100 senators and all 50 governors, typically ranging from 1,000 to 2,500 words. It includes chapters describing each of the 435 congressional districts and all 50 states. It’s full of biographical, electoral and campaign finance data, and it even has profiles of the insular territories such as Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“The Almanac is more important than ever right now,” said Kirk Bado, editor of National Journal’s Hotline, a political tipsheet. “We are in an era where information is fractured, reality is partisan, and less than 8% of folks who do a search on Google don’t click a link if there’s an AI summary at the top. Good information is hard to come by when we’re flooded with bad information.””

Flashback bonus content: Michael Barone on the Pro Politics Podcast.

Texas Republicans’ new proposed Congressional map: Sabato’s Crystal Ball breaks down the 2024 presidential results in the proposed districts, which are expected to yield five new Republican seats.

🇺🇲 2024

Daniel Martinez HoSang, writing in the New York Times, argues minority voters’ movement to Trump in 2024 is part of a longer buildup of their social and economic disillusionment with the Democratic Party.

But the America that this version of the Democratic Party emerged from has changed drastically. The restructuring of the U.S. economy over the last 40 years, along with the yawning inequality it has spurred, has disproportionately hurt communities of color. The Democratic-championed civil rights protections and social welfare programs that have defined the party’s appeal to nonwhite voters have proved inadequate in the face of the interconnected crises that define America now. Policies to address residential segregation some 70 years ago can do little to ease the housing shortages plaguing many communities today. The 1965 Immigration Act was not designed to manage the migration driven by economic downturns, military strife and climate catastrophes unfolding around the globe.

Ryan Burge examines the shifting political views of Muslim Americans, even as they remain a difficult group to poll accurately.

Further analysis of the Catalist report shows that Harris performed worse than Biden did in 2020 among white college-educated voters, a group she needed to improve with to win the election.

🗽 NYC Mayor

Politico explores how previously overlooked South Asian voters helped drive Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory and how they’re emerging as an increasingly influential voting bloc.

Even so, in June, as primary voting maps show, those same South Asian areas in Queens and Brooklyn that had lost Democratic support and shifted towards Trump in 2024 went decisively for Mamdani. According to an internal analysis of voting data shared with POLITICO Magazine by a political strategist who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media, South Asian turnout increased by 12 percent between the 2021 mayoral primary and this year’s race in 13 assembly districts with a significant share of South Asians. This increase was driven primarily by Bangladeshis and to a lesser extent, Pakistanis — mainly in Queens and Brooklyn. First-time voters over 45 years old increased by over 6 percent across these 13 districts. The lion’s share of this increased South Asian vote went to Mamdani, despite the gross imbalance in campaign funding between him and Cuomo and the latter’s dynastic bona fides.

The New York Times tallies up rank-choice voting patterns in New York City. What’s striking is how much voters followed their preferred candidates’ leads: one ranking was by far the most common for both Mamdani and Cuomo supporters. For Cuomo supporters, it was him alone, and for Mamdani, one specific combination of five candidates.

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

This tweet from corporate PR maven Lulu Cheng Meservey breaks down why top AI experts are getting 9- and 10-figure comp packages.

Research from Pew finds that people’s web browsing behavior shifts when search engines answer their queries with an AI summary — for example, they're less likely to click on links and visit other websites.

AP/NORC reports that young adults use AI more frequently and in a wider variety of ways than any other age group.

👫 Demographics

No wonder why we have education polarization: there didn’t used to be this many college grads, so their discrete political tastes didn’t matter nearly as much as they do now.

The Public Policy Institute of California looks at the politics of California refugees. They’re more likely to be Republican and those leaving are sorting themselves further based on whether they choose to move to red or blue states.