It's kind of like if you keep folding a piece of paper, you can only like fold it

so many times.

Wait, sorry, what?

Like you can't fold a piece of paper in a number of times.

Well, 100% agree, but then play that out for me. What does this have to do with polling?

Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics podcast. I'm Gailan Druke.

Last week, President Biden announced executive actions on gun control after a number of recent high-profile mass shootings.

He's limited in what he can do unilaterally, which gets at the bigger reasons why no gun control measure has been signed into law during the past

27 years, despite polling showing Americans support stricter laws. We're going to talk about those reasons today

also a growing number of Americans identify as

independence. Why is that? In an environment where partisan polarization has come to dominate everything, are these independence rejecting those divisions?

Or are they simply saying that they don't like the political parties, even if they still disagree

vehemently with those who think differently than them?

And whatever the reason, how do these independence shape our elections and governments?

And then lastly, we're going to check in on some changes that Pew Research is making to how it conducts its polls

after finding that Republicans are underrepresented in their panel. Here with me to discuss it all are editor-in-chief Nate Silverhaney.

Hey, Gailan. Also, this is politics editor Sarah Frostensen. Hey, Sarah.

Hey, Gailan. And elections analyst Jeffrey Scallie. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Gailan.

So we basically have two good use or bad use of polling segments today

and the first, as I mentioned, is on guns and then we're going to take a look at some of the changes that Pew is making.

So on Thursday, Biden announced executive actions on guns that include cracking down on ghost guns, which are homemade firearms that lack serial numbers that could be used to track them.

He's also moving to tighten restrictions on pistol stabilizing braces, a device used in the recent Boulder, Colorado shooting.

...