Episode 12: Allegiance & Belonging with Professor Ray Block Jr.
How polling can help us check assumptions about patriotism and civic participation
Friday Polls – Make It Make Sense
Members of the Biden campaign, including Biden himself, have told the press they believe that “polling is broken.” It’s hard to say which part of polling they have issues with, or whether they simply don’t like it. It’s not unusual for Presidents and presidential candidates to have love/hate relationships with the polls. But maybe there’s…
Friday Polls – The Seven States
That WSJ seven-swing-states poll, and a margin of error revelation. Hi, happy Friday. Today I want to share some technical observations about the reporting of the WSJ’s swing state polling that got a bit of coverage this week. The topline report is available as a PDF here. I’ll attach it here so you can click…
Episode 6 – What’s “the voter file” anyway?
This week we talked to Paul Westcott of L2 Data about voter files and how they’re used by campaigns and pollsters. You can listen to the episode here (or on your favorite podcast app) The Journey from Raw Data to Actionable Insights Voter data starts with public records maintained by states and counties, but these…
Friday Polls – 30 Day Makeover
An outlier polls caught the eye of pundits, but how much stock should we put in a new poll from Pennsylvania showing Biden up 10? CORRECTION: Hi – the headline that went out with this post was wrong. That’s my fault. I started writing this post based on an article I found that cited the…
Episode 5 – Internal Polls v. Public Polls
An interview with Natalie Lupiani and Shannon Janean Currie of Benenson Strategy Group on the lastest episode of Cross Tabs As the political landscape grows increasingly complex, the art and science of polling have never been more crucial—or more controversial. While public trust in polls wavers, strategic research consultants work behind the scenes to craft…
Episode 4 – Data Experiments & More
We’re four episodes in now, and I’m really excited about this series of interviews I’m doing. Last time, I talked to David Radloff, co-founder of Clarity Campaign Labs about how campaigns model turnout and party preference – and how campaigns put those models to good strategic and tactical use. We also talked a lot about…
Super Tuesday
Welcome to March 5, 2024. It is the first Tuesday in March in a quadrennial year, which makes it Super Tuesday. Voters in 16 states and one US territory will have their first opportunity to vote for their preferred presidential candidate. About a third of each party’s delegates are awarded as a result of today’s…
Episode 3 – Turnout Models v. The Horse Race
David Radloff, co-founder of Clarity Campaign Labs which provides modeling and analytics, polling and strategy for Democratic campaigns, progressive organizations and non-profits, joins Farrah to talk about how campaigns create and use predictive models – about party preference and about turnout – to develop campaign strategy and predict electoral outcomes.
Episode 2 – Weights and Measures
The second episode of Cross Tabs went up yesterday (February 12) – it was supposed to go up sooner but things have been busy and well, you know how it is. We’re about to engage an editor (the fantastic Alison Preisinger of AMPStudio, who also edits In the Demo), so that will help us get…