San Francisco State University history lecturer Steve Leikin, left, talks with a student at a university election rally in October. Leikin was working with the campaign against Proposition 32. Photo by Ian Hill/KQED.

Leading California pollsters are raising questions about the accuracy of the Edison Research exit poll (viewable on the CNN website) in terms of how big a share young voters — and non-white voters — comprised of all those casting ballots in California in last Tuesday’s election.

What’s not in dispute: Young voters and “ethnic voters” (which is to say Latinos, Asian-Americans and African-Americans) played an influential role in California’s big Democratic turnout… helping to pass Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax hike measure, and giving President Obama a 21 percentage point edge in the already-blue state.

As we reported last week, Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo cast doubt on the share of last Tuesday’s voters who were under 30. The Edison exit poll put 18-29 year olds at 27 percent of Californians who voted in this election. But 18-29 year olds make up just 16 percent of all registered voters in the state, said DiCamillo. And in 2008 exit polling showed this age group was 20 percent of California voters.

“I certainly believe that the story line of this elections the power of ethnic voters, and that younger voters turned out in high numbers,” DiCamillo said. “It has to do with the governor [specifically Gov. Brown's campaign for Prop. 30] and online registration [which went into effect in September and has so far been used mostly by young Californians]…. But I can’t believe the 27 percent. That’s a huge number. To move the needle one full percentage point is a big thing, to move it seven or eight points is beyond credibility.”

And the incredulity extends to the Edison exit poll’s reported share of voters who are not white.

• DiCamillo and others note that of all the registered voters in California, 5.5 percent are black, and they typically turn out roughly in their population proportion. But according to the exit poll, they are 8 percent of Tuesday’s voters.
• Asian Americans make up an estimated 10 percent of the state’s registered voters. The exit poll put their share of the turnout at 11 percent.
• And Latinos are 23 percent of registered voters in California. are Latino. The exit poll showed them making up 22 percent of Californians who voted this election. But Latinos are younger and are less likely to have gone to college, on average, than the overall population, while older, better educated people historically vote at higher rates. “So even with good turnout, I would expect they would be a couple of points below their total registration,” observed Di Camillo.

Other political observers concur that the exit poll may not have gotten a perfectly accurate picture of who voted in California. “Because of early voting, exit polls no longer quantify the electorate accurately,” said Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin. “I would use exit polling for how people voted, not quantifying what the electorate looks like.”

Sacramento blogger Scott Lay has come up with his own “blending” of pre-election Field Poll turnout predictions and Edison exit polling to estimate actual turnout as somewhere in between the two.

Over the next couple of months, pollsters, scholars and political analysts will be digging in deeper: looking at turnout information from the Census Bureau’s November Current Population Survey, as well as the number crunching of private campaign consulting firms such as Political Data Inc. — to get a more accurate sense of the shape of the electorate: who turned out and in what proportion.

In the absence of precise figures, plain old political common sense prevailed.

“It was a very good night for Democrats,” said Mark Baldassare, president and chief pollster at the Public Policy Institute of California. “It just suggests to me that you must have had this high turnout of Latinos and younger voters, and a very poor showing among Republicans.”

“How did California Democrats win a supermajority in the legislature?” Tulchin asked. “The Obama coalition of young voters, Latinos, Asian Americans, African Americans, and throw in some white liberals: It gave Obama a big margin. His win exceeded what polling showed would happen. It’s the same with Prop. 30…. And in California, a young voter is overwhelmingly Latino or Asian.”

UC Irvine Political Science Professor Louis DeSipio wondered why the turnout of young people in the state did appear to get a substantial boost, while in the country as a whole it did not.

“Was there something unique in California?” asked De Sipio. “There’s no particular reason that the presidential race would mobilize more young people in a noncompetitive state like California. Maybe people turned out for some tight Congressional races, but the unique issue in California was the mobilization around Prop. 30. One big effect [if the measure failed] was to diminish funding for community colleges, the UCs and the CSUs. There was a message coming from college administrations and unions organizing, and young people felt it.”

DiCamillo was startled to see that white voters in California dropped to just 55 percent of all who voted, according to the Edison exit poll. “I’ve never seen an election in California below 60 percent white,” he said. “It jumps out at me. Wow. I don’t think we’re that far down the road yet. I think it’s coming, but I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Whether young people and non-white voters exceeded turnout expectations in California this year, the Golden State is pointing the direction for where the rest of the country is headed, observers say.

And Di Camillo gets the last word: “The main message of this election is that the ethnic vote really powered the Obama victory in California, it really powered the Prop 30 vote on the yes side. And the same thing goes with the youth vote. It was the youth vote that turned out in force that probably made the difference on Prop. 30.”

Vanity Fair reporter Michael Lewis played basketball with the president during his six months of reporting. (Pete Souza: The White House)

It was a “flakey” idea, one almost certain to go nowhere.

“Someone should write a piece just trying to put the reader in the president’s shoes,” Berkeley journalist Michael Lewis told Terry Gross on Fresh Air this week. He was describing an email he had sent to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. He was requesting near-unprecedented access to President Obama. Lewis got a call the next day.

And much to his surprise, his pitch was accepted. Lewis, author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker, observed the president over a period of six months last year — in meetings, on Air Force One, even on the basketball court — largely to learn about what it’s like to be president: what your day is like, what it’s like to make decisions a president must make — and how he makes them. Lewis’ article, Obama’s Way, appears in the October issue of Vanity Fair.

Lewis told Gross of many scenes from countless meetings, crises and travels. But his trip to Obama’s “favorite place” in the White House particularly resonates. As Lewis described it, you could almost imagine what it would be like to walk along with the President into his home:

To get to the Truman balcony, you have to go up in the residence. So he took me up in the residence, which he just doesn’t do. His staff doesn’t go up to the residence. He clearly hadn’t prepared the family that he was dragging a stranger home after work. …. We get off the elevator and luckily Michelle is not there, but his mother-in-law IS there and she’s clearly shocked. You know, ‘Who’s Barack bringing in?’ And I apologized, I said to her, ‘I’m sorry to invade your house.’ And she kind of laughed and said, ‘It’s his house, he can do whatever he wants.’ And he starts walking me around the residence. …

He loves the Truman balcony as it turns out, because it’s the one place in presidential life where he feels outside. He said you feel outside the bubble and it’s true; it’s gorgeous. Surrounded by trees. You can see crowds below on the south lawn. It’s an almost normal place to be sitting. And as he’s showing me this sanctuary of his, he turns around and points to the spot where a gunman’s bullet hit a year ago. A crazy gun with a gun, a high-powered rifle had shot at the Truman Balcony … and hit basically where Obama would be sitting in his sanctuary. And I realize, this is his one spot and he still gets shot at here.

Terry Gross recorded her interview with Michael Lewis the day before the news from Libya of the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Lewis was at the White House last year on the day President Obama had to decide whether the U.S. should go into Libya to save the people of Benghazi — the people Libyan president Gadhafi had vowed to kill. Lewis described how Obama avoided articulating his own view:

Instead, he insists on people who are around the room who are junior people, who have different views of the Libyan situation, he insists on hearing their views, knowing that they will say, ‘We need to at least consider saving these people.’ So he elicits the views of people who normally wouldn’t be included in this discussion. …

What’s so interesting about this, in addition to the president having to solicit an option that his advisers didn’t give him, was that that there wasn’t anybody, no senior person in his administration, who wanted him to do what he ends up doing. He has no constituency to go and save those people. The system is telling him ‘don’t do it,’ or do something that protects you politically.

Gross asked Lewis if there were ground rules around the access — and the final article. Lewis says he did not show the White House the article before publication, but he did submit quotes for review.

And the truth is, the things they didn’t want me to write about were mostly kind of tedious, mostly they weren’t things I was going to write about anyway. To the extent they were filtering, they were filtering for this weird reality-distortion field that’s out there. They were thinking, ‘How could this be made to seem if someone took this out of context and ratcheted it up?’ It didn’t affect my game very much.

The complete interview runs about 40 minutes and is definitely worth listening to. (What’s it like to play basketball with President Obama? Don’t defer to him or you won’t be invited back.)

The complete 15,000 word Vanity Fair article can be found here.

Flickr/U.S. Navy photo, Todd Hack

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act June 28 has consumed lots of attention. Republicans are talking about repealing the act, while Democrats defended the law as “transformative of our society.” Why is it that this has become such a polarizing issue?

Pew Research Center President Andrew Kohut, a veteran pollster, shared some insight, based on his public opinion surveys, in a wide-ranging conversation this week with PBS NewsHour’s Jim Lehrer:

“Instrumental to the dislike of this program is the mandate,” said Kohut, referring to polling last month that showed that Americans are divided on the Obama-backed health reform law but that a majority disapprove of the “individual mandate,” that requires individuals to purchase health insurance coverage or face a penalty. “What has been overwhelming is the reaction to the mandate in particular and the concern about the role of government.”

The role of government… in health care and so many other aspects of American life… has become a central point of debate this election year.

Take a look at this graph from the Gallup poll: A decade ago, roughly 6 in 10 people believed the federal government had a responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. Now just 5 in 10 think so.

Gallup health care survey 2000-2012

Yet, the government’s role in ensuring health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act is a much smaller one than in other proposals Americans have debated in recent years.

Remember the “public option”…? That was the proposal for a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers as part of the health care overhaul. It was widely popular, according to a New York Times poll in 2009.

The national telephone survey, which was conducted from June 12 to 16, found that 72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65 — that would compete for customers with private insurers. Twenty percent said they were opposed.

But it didn’t pass muster in Congress and didn’t end up in the final version of the law.

Looking back a little further, Ezra Klein, writing in the New Yorker, reminds us that the “individual mandate” that conservatives now consider a government intrusion, actually began its life as a conservative idea.

The mandate made its political début in a 1989 Heritage Foundation brief titled “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans,” as a counterpoint to the single-payer system and the employer mandate, which were favored in Democratic circles.

Here’s a link to that brief, by Stuart M. Butler with the conservative Heritage Foundation, which formed the basis for a Republican alternative to President Clinton’s plan for health care reform in the early 1990s.

A lot of Americans still don’t fully understand what the Affordable Care Act would do (or what the Supreme Court did last week). In fact, the New York Times reports, some of the politicians campaigning to repeal the law are actually proposing to replace it with… elements that are already in it.

A spokesman for Representative Rick Berg, Republican of North Dakota who is seeking a Senate seat, told a reporter in his state that Mr. Berg wants to replace Mr. Obama’s health care law with one that does not deny insurance coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and closes the “doughnut hole” — a gap in pharmaceutical coverage — for people on Medicare. Those are two of the most popular provisions of the law Mr. Berg would repeal, which would be difficult to replicate without the regulatory mandates and tax increases he has vowed to reverse.

So what IS in the law? For an easy overview, check out this animated video from the Kaiser Family Foundation. It was produced before the Supreme Court’s ruling (and has been viewed more than 400,000 times) but most of it still holds true:

And then let us know what you think: What IS the role of government in terms of health care?

We’re six months out and the 2012 presidential race is gearing up. President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney are moving into general election mode. And the Super PACs that support them — and can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money — are charging into the race.

The cash is flowing. The ads are flying. But what will voters take from it all?

The Obama campaign announced it would spend $25 million on ads just in the month of May. The first salvo is a strictly positive ad, touting the president’s hard work to dig the country out of the recession he inherited.

Meanwhile Americans For Prosperity, the conservative Super PAC, has unleashed its own anti-Obama ads, complete with allegations that American tax dollars meant for green job stimulus have been spent overseas.

It’s going to be a long, expensive and probably vitriolic election season. And while California is likely to be spared some of the vitriol, since it’s not a swing state, the question remains: What do we the voters get out of all of this?

The other day KQED got to be a fly on the wall at a couple of political focus groups conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California. The pair of round-table sessions probed the concerns and priorities of Democrats and then Republicans.

Of course the two groups had different views on taxes and spending and the role of government. They even used different language: Democrats talked about kicking in a little more to ”help the weak,” while Republicans worried about too much government “taking away our freedom.”

What the groups shared was a sense of frustration with partisan gridlock and the role of money in politics. Is there any way in this election season to cut through the diatribe and engage in some constructive dialogue? That’s what we’ll be trying to do here.