Here’s how and why we commissioned a statewide poll on some of Idaho’s top issues
When abortion became mostly illegal in Idaho earlier this year, I wondered: While Idahoans overwhelmingly elect Republicans, do they share that party’s stance on one of the most controversial issues in our country?
And there’s really only one way to find out.
So we commissioned a poll through independent research company SurveyUSA, which gave us the chance to ask Idahoans about not only abortion, but also many topics that lead to fiery debates in the Idaho Capitol and living rooms across the state.
Marijuana use, both as medicine and for recreation. Discrimination protections for our LGBTQ residents. Same-sex marriage. DACA. Education spending. The 2020 election. And the grocery tax — one topic where we found broad agreement.
We’ve published the results throughout the past week, broken down by topic. You can read all the stories in one place in this Sunday’s eEdition or at IdahoStatesman.com/topics/idahostatesman-surveyusa.
Many of the stories include interviews with Idahoans who participated.
“I like these surveys. I’ve always participated in them, because I think that we need to hear each other,” Kristen Johnson, 77, of Pocatello, told reporter Ryan Suppe. “If we won’t hear it in conversation, hear it in print.”
Some of the polls provided easy answers: 68% want to repeal the sales tax on groceries; 68% want to legalize medical marijuana; 85% want legal abortion to preserve the health, not just the life, of the mother; 85% have high or moderate trust in Idaho elections.
Others highlighted divides: 51% want abortion to be legal always or with some limitations; 48% want legal recreational marijuana; 49% support same-sex marriage; only 27% agreed with the statement that Joe Biden truly won the 2020 presidential election.
Our hope is that these polls add to the conversation about these topics beyond, “Republicans think this way and Democrats think that way.” Even a majority of Republicans don’t like the grocery tax that the GOP-dominated Legislature has hesitated to repeal, and they support protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation, too.
Our reporters — Ryan Suppe, Nicole Blanchard, Kevin Fixler, Rachel Spacek, Alex Brizee and Becca Savransky — have done an exceptional job placing these poll results in the context of the ongoing political debates. Each of their stories, provided free to all readers, are worth your time.
How we did it
Now, I want to explain the process we used to commission these polls.
The biggest impediment to this type of polling is cost. Our parent company, McClatchy, set aside some money for projects in local markets that weren’t otherwise budgeted. I submitted a successful grant request, which is how we were able to do this.
I talked to two polling entities, taking advice from each, and commissioned SurveyUSA, who had done recent work for The Seattle Times, among others. SurveyUSA also has been highly rated in FiveThirtyEight.com’s pollster ratings.
One piece of advice I received from another pollster was that, specifically in Idaho, we needed to do some phone polling to ensure we reached older and rural residents, so we included that in our plan. That’s why you’ll see that 69% of our respondents answered online and 31% by phone.
Our editors then brainstormed topics we’d like to hit and roughed out questions within those topics. We submitted the questions to SurveyUSA, which turned them into functioning poll questions. We went back and forth a couple of times with edits before finalizing the slate of questions.
SurveyUSA returned the results within a week, having obtained responses from 550 Idaho adults with an effort to match that pool to Idaho’s U.S. Census figures for gender, age, race, education and home ownership. The pool was 56% Republicans and 13% Democrats, which roughly matches Idaho’s voter rolls. Only 18% of respondents live in Ada County and 11% in Canyon County, so this was truly a statewide poll.
Most SurveyUSA polling is done with 500 to 600 respondents, so that put us in line with its norm, too.
If you’re interested, each story links to the complete results for each topic area. You can see how the voting broke down by gender, age, race, registered voters, party affiliation, ideology, education, income and more. You can see the full composition of the respondent pool, too.
The results pages also include a “credibility interval” for each question. The credibility interval on our questions ranges from 3.4% to 5.2%, which indicates how much the results might vary if the survey were run again.
Our coverage of the results
Here are links to the seven poll stories:
Chadd Cripe is in his second year as the Idaho Statesman editor and 27th year on staff. Email him at ccripe@idahostatesman.com.
