In this episode, Grace, Katelyn, and TJ discuss voting patterns and information sources with a series of voters. They delve into whether voters typically choose straight party tickets or evaluate candidates individually, revealing various personal approaches and experiences. The conversation also touches on where people get their news, illustrating a broad range of media habits from traditional newspapers to social media. The hosts and guests reflect on the perceived bias in mainstream media and the importance of diversifying news sources.

00:00 Introduction and Today's Topics

00:33 Voting Habits and Personal Experiences

02:45 Diverse Voting Perspectives

09:30 Sources of Information

14:10 Media Trust and Generational Differences

21:45 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Copyright 2024 Grace Cowan

• The Alliance Coalition - South Carolina
• All Things Frogmore Stew
• SC Votes - South Carolina Election Commission
• The Poets of Rhythm - "South Carolina

We're back. It's Grace. Katelyn.

Hey, Grace.

And TJ.

Hey.

And today our topics are just for the voters. We're going to ask what kind of voter are you and where do you get your information? What do you guys think about that?

I love these topics.

I think we'll be a bit surprised. At least I hope we're a bit surprised. I hope it's not, just, The generic one or two channels kind of thing, yeah.

In the state of South Carolina, about 60 percent of Republican voters vote straight party ticket and about 40 percent of Democrat voters vote straight party ticket. Katelyn, do you usually vote straight party ticket?

I don't. I definitely go through each person and often have an outlier, and have most of my voting history.

How about you, TJ?

I've only voted straight ticket one time in my life, and I did not vote straight ticket this time.

I have not voted yet. I'm voting on election day.

I voted on Monday, and I have to tell you, Grace is not going to be surprised to hear this, but I cried.

You are a weeping one, aren't you?

I am! I am! Listen, I just don't understand what is happening to me in my old age, but

I know, Katelyn, I think I know,

I know. Anyway, so I cried but it, I was a little overwhelmed by the experience, not in a great way. And I think one of our listeners actually saw me, I was sitting on a bench, my friend was giving me a hug, and she saw me and just scratched my shoulder and said hi on the way out, and I was like, these people probably think I'm absolutely insane.

I was nervous simply because I was the only car in the parking lot that did not have a Trump sticker on it. So I just,

where did you vote TJ?

At the Episcopal Church on Wadmila. And, I just made sure that as I was getting in and out of my car, I flapped my jacket back so they could see my open carry.

Oh, t. J.

Cause I'm an armed libtard. I'll tell you that right now.

Okay. Okay. All right. Oh my word.

We accept all kinds here at Frogmore Stew.

Yes, we do. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. We need to get to the voters.

We need to get to the voters.

do you usually vote straight party ticket?

I'm just loyal to a fault, so I do to straight party, even if I'm bitching, oh, can I say that? Even if I'm complaining on the, other side, I'm still going straight party. I figure we'll figure it out once you get in the office, we'll work through the kinks, but no, I'm not one to nitpick over the ballot.

it's 80 20. Majority of straight ticket, more than Democrat, and every blue moon is the same. One individual Republican who kind of speaks to issues that's really paramount to me and the times that we live in. And also again, subject matter is important. What's going on in our society and how it relates to individuals like myself who's a gun violence survivor.

A straight party unless there's some compelling reason or some compelling person that I've met or have had an experience with. I'm also very pro life and that was something that I started feeling very strongly about in my early thirties.

I don't. There's been some lunatics on both sides, I think over the years. So there are, no, I don't, I actually have never voted straight tech.

For the most part, I strike party ticket. However, when it comes to very local things, I tend to do my research on that because I feel like, especially for local small elections, that it can be under a hundred voters, under 50 voters, under whatever it is that make the difference. And I don't want to take that chance on that. So I really try to do some research on local voters.

I used to be a straight party ticket because I thought that was the most simplified way to do it because they my party choices would say that everyone should have my line of thinking or supporting the same issues that I'm most passionate about.

And I typically vote within the party. But I also make certain and I clearly understand the issues because there may be some issues outside of the party that are worth considering and reviewing as a standalone in and of itself. It could be a specific candidate that I've Come to know that I'm familiar with that may not be a part of the straight party ticket, but I would be willing to make that adjustment.

I wanted to just draw attention to the sister senators who came together on abortion issues. I gained a lot of respect. I am no longer a straight party, but I do want to make certain that I'm clear on what my voice is in this space. Another point that I wanted to just draw to that is I was a part of a panel with the National Newspaper Publishers Association.

They had their annual conference in Baltimore, and it was a young person. People's panel. And they were saying about the economy, about the issues in Israel and how that is becoming their Vietnam. so they had some very passionate position on certain things that I was willing to listen to it.

So in the final analysis, one of our senior, advisors, who was a national civil rights leader. said, but what you have to understand is that every checkbox that you need may not be checked. in terms of your candidate. But sometimes you have to be willing to take one for the team or the greater good of the communities in which we live.

So you may have five critical elements and your candidate may not support all five. But if you can get three out of that candidate

you have to look at the issues at hand, who is going to be representing and who has your greatest interests at heart.

I do not vote individuals. I vote a straight party ticket. The reason for that is when people tell me they're voting for the person, not the party, I wonder if they understand what a majority party can do in the Senate and in the House. And I think we're always electing a new Speaker of the House. We're always electing a new Senate Majority Leader. So I vote straight Democratic. I do that on the state level, too. And I've already done it this year.

Yeah, I always pull my ballot before going and research the candidates and decide. an independent, so I vote straight. For whoever I think the best candidate is.

In my lifetime I don't think I've ever voted a single party ticket.

For the most part I've been straight party but I think there's different issues that involve different things and taking a look and learning more about it as opposed to just voting for someone because they're in the right party and going from that.

One of the things that I think is interesting is that there wasn't a pattern with our voters, And I realized, again, this is anecdotal, not a scientifically based, polling, exercise, but I feel like. Of the people we talked to, most of them said they typically do not vote straight party ticket.

But there's one thing that is going on right now. The nonpartisan races, I've been getting blown up of friends texting me saying constituent board, who do I vote for? And there are races like that where there's no information about the people that are running,

like for the constituent board, those are the people that are separate from the school board, but typically their job is they oversee expulsions and, some. issues in conjunction with the school board, but they are separate to each district.

And I think that, it's so hard when you're in the voting booth because you pick three usually, and there usually are only two or three people running. So it doesn't really matter if you choose them or not, but it just feels like like you said, TJ, I don't like voting for someone that I don't know anything about, even if it's for a position like that.

And again, I go back to the fact that what if that kid's being expelled because. They're identifying by a different gender, right? So for me and the way I view the world, I would want somebody who is taking into consideration childhood trauma and the full spectrum of gender and they're, making sure they get mental health resources and maybe expulsion isn't necessary. Whereas somebody else might say this kid is a disruption to other kids who are learning and they need to be expelled.

And that's exactly my point. You want someone on there that is empathetic. And I feel like we have no idea who these people are. And so I don't like feeling forced to vote for them because there are only three seats and there are only three people running.

So Grace, the thing is these voters obviously are voting in a variety of different ways, don't you feel like we need to know where they're getting their information?

Funny that you say that, Caitlin. Because I asked them.

It's like I knew that.

So TJ, let's hear from our voters.

So I listened to a lot of podcasts. I listened to Frogmore Stew. Oh, amazing. I love listening to you. I love hearing your guests. I love hearing your viewpoints. I think that even though you and I don't agree on a lot of things. I'd like to hear your side.

I think one thing I get worried about, especially with AI and all of the information that's out there now is getting stuck in an echo chamber. I don't want to be around people that only believe what I believe. So I get my news to answer your question directly. Podcasts. I read Fox news, but I also read CNN, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post. I try to read them all. I was a journalism major, and that pains me too because I can see the slant on all of them.

Do you feel like there's any news outlet that you read on a daily basis that just feels pretty in the middle, factual?

Again, mainstream media is such a big machine of news and money and a lot of these people are bought and paid for.

The local paper is online. It's sports driven. There's some local news, yes. And I do read it every day. But most of what I read is national. I read Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times.

I scroll through X. I click CNN and I then in Google, I just type news, which sources a lot of different types of news. So I'm not just getting the CNN feed. And I also like that cause I can look up local news and see what's happening in Mount Pleasant or Charleston. But I do again, try to listen. And I hear a lot from my, Folks, so that's another new seed.

look at Apple News.

I'm a CNN guy. I'm online a lot. I'm looking at YouTube .

I am an NPR junkie. And I can go to Alexa and ask for the NPR update, and I'll get a high level of just about everything. So I really love NPR and because I do work independently and I'm working from my home office for the most part, I typically watch C SPAN. 60 minutes is a must for me on Sunday.

But, if I have a chance to read a newspaper, like to hear the sound of the pages, and I like the smell of the ink but my favorite newspaper is, the Washington Post. I'll go second to the New York Times, and then the Baltimore Sun.

Oh, I hate saying this because it sounds like a quintessential millennial. I start with Instagram. What is on the gram? What are the people saying? And then I go to Twitter. I refuse to call it X. I go to Twitter and I don't know how to tweet, but I certainly know how to read. And so I see what's trending over there with those girls.

And then I typically go to CNN. That tends to be my hotspot. I used to be a CNN junkie, like it was on all day, but COVID taught me that was not healthy.

Twitter is a big one. It gives me perspective on what's just going on. And there tends to be soundbites on what that is. I used to listen to Fox News a lot. I really don't, I don't listen to Fox or CNN or any of that stuff very much anymore. I'll read the Wall Street Journal. That's one of the ones where the newspaper will actually be delivered.

YouTube and getting little soundbites of different people. That's been interesting to some of the anchors that have left some of the mainstream media and cable news and gone off and done their own shows. Been interesting to watch that develop.

For me, I get a lot of information off my phone, whether it's different apps or whatnot. There's a lot of stuff on social media going both ways. So it's. Primarily my main source of getting the news from as is most people my age I'm sure.

I read New York Times, Huffington Post, I scan the Atlantic because those articles are really long. if I see something that's Really in the news that is shocking. I will check out Fox news and see what they're saying about it, or if they're talking about it at all. And then sometimes I'll go on Facebook and check a few websites of things, but mostly it's just the online news.

I read CNN, which is funny because for years I listened to Fox news because my dad was all into Fox news and I got to the point where I couldn't take that. And then you've got MSNBC on the other side. I can't take that either .

That's all over the place. And one thing that I think is super interesting about it is generationally how people get their news. George in Columbia, who's older than most of the people on here reads the local newspapers. And then also Garcia, who was a little bit older, she watches C SPAN and listens to NPR. And then on the younger side, you have Scotty who gets all of his news from apps, social media, and a little bit of podcasts. And then everybody else was in the middle, And then lots of Twitter,

One thing was noticeable. Nobody listens to me. To international news. There were no BBCs or, Al Jazeera's or anything like that, which I thought was really interesting.

I was going to say I do.

Yeah, I do too. If I do watch television, it's going to be the BBC. I don't watch any American 24 hour news, at all. And I often read. Le Monde, to get a European perspective. I am also an Instagrammer. I'm like Kim, I start my day with Instagram and I'm like, what are the trending reels?

I'm a little different in that before the Internet, I was the daily news. I, I was the guy on the radio who did the news and gave you the news and told you what was going on today and that kind of thing. And I sourced for that entire time, almost completely. The AP. That was where most radio and TV stations got all of their news information, on a world and national level and sent reporters out for local stuff.

for that we used the newspaper. Now, newspapers are gone, for the most part, on a local level and, so my first news source is the Associated Press, followed by BBC, followed by NPR. try not to get any information through social media because you don't have any idea what the reality of that is. So avoid that as a news source.

I have a couple of things to say about that. One is, so I start my day with Axios, which is, great. Love them. Fantastic news source. I get it, I think three times a day. And it's a recap of the news. You know,

a variety of things. And then you can go deeper if you want to go deeper, and there used to be, actually, I think it's still around this magazine called The Week, where it, gave you a blurb about one topic from all the different medias so you could see, where the slant was.

What I find really interesting is that this Sort of attack on the media really started with Nixon years and years ago, but it didn't take hold Until trump and when it first started people rolled their eyes and we're like, Oh God, he's attacking the media.

And now this is another way in which, his beliefs have really pushed our society into that becoming a mainstream belief a lot of people saying, and repeating, I don't. necessarily trust the slant on mainstream media. And it's coming from people of all political stripes.

What's also interesting is that Trish is a Republican voter. She's an anti Trumper, but she is a conservative voter, I should say. And, Hearing someone that is conservative, who lives in the upstate of South Carolina, surrounded by, pretty conservative, part of the country, she thought that CNN was the most moderate.

I also blame the death of media on corporate takeover of most media. Consolidation and all these groups with all their deep pockets who know nothing about the media who come in, buy it up, fire everybody. Wall Street is as at fault for the decline of American media, newspaper, and television. Radio and TV as Trump is,

during, I think the nineties is when it was deregulated.

You can blame Bill Clinton for that.

That's right. I think that, that's the beginning of the end of media, but it didn't really take hold. And that's partly to why we've lost. are, local stations.

Local TV the same way. They've been bought up by a handful of groups and fired everybody. And if you make more than an entry level salary, they're not going to keep you anyway.

I don't even watch network news anymore because they don't tell me anything. It's like they're just reading their Facebook feeds and giving us the headlines, the sensational crap without any detail in most cases. So I feel like I have to go find my own information thanks to Wall Street and of course thanks to trump.

I hear you on the trump thing and I agree with you that it's exacerbated. But I've told the story on this podcast before about my experience living overseas in Paris and the riots that were happening and my mom having a panic attack thinking that Paris was on fire.

CNN and all these, 24-hour news were just showing the same car going into the same building . And yes, it was burning. But it was one like, I think that there's been a growing distrust and Trump capitalized on that.

Yeah. No question. Yeah. Absolutely. the differential here is that, yes, Fox news opinion shows lean one way and they say ridiculous things and MSNBC certainly does as well. But I think that from a news perspective, those are entertainment shows. From an actual news perspective. The difference is in what stories they pick.

You can watch news stories about the same thing on Fox and MSNBC. And the angle that they take on it is totally different.

Because the news stations aren't in the news business anymore. All of them are in the exploitation and the entertainment business.

And this is why news feels so manipulated because the things that sell are things that we internalize as fear.

anyway back to the voters that we just heard from I think all of them recognize That you can't just get news from one source that you have to have a variety of sources you shouldn't just live in a silo from your newsfeed.

Agreed.

Yeah, I agree. You shouldn't, but I think most people do, don't you?

I think some people do, but like Michelle said, even when she watched Fox News a lot, she would click over to CNN to see what the other side was saying. I think, Ali, who is also very conservative. Said the same thing that she tries to read a little bit of everything. And also very generationally. Scotty saying, Instagram. Twitter and social media, and some podcasts, those are all, very generational there's no way that George is looking at Instagram reels every morning.

I can't remember which voter it was, but that they loved to get their paper delivered and have a coffee. And that used to be my Sunday routine for most of my twenties, which is, I know I probably have been an old soul for ages, but I loved it. and I would spend a couple hours on a Sunday, just really digging into some topics that I, had never educated myself on before. It was amazing.

So I think the takeaway here is that it is now a common belief the mainstream news has a slant to it. So if you want to make yourself feel better about your beliefs, you pull up whatever you will agree with. But most of our voters, which makes me happy, recognize that it was important to have a variety of sources. And with that, I think we should close out the day and come back for another episode soon.