This is Cross Tabs, the newsletter for the podcast that will try to explain how polls are designed and conducted, how to understand what they say, how to discern what they don’t say, so that you can navigate yet another “single most important election in our lifetimes.”

Each week, Farrah Bostic – strategist, researcher and dabbler in political focus groups – and friends will unpack a publicly available political poll: we’ll walk through the methodology, the survey design, the questions they asked, and how the data was reported. We’ll summarize what you can find in the poll’s results, and we’ll point out what you can’t find.

And we’ll take a poke at how the political press reported the poll: Was their reporting accurate? Did they characterize the data correctly? Did they compare this dataset to another dataset – and should they have?

Along the way we’ll explore ideas like sample design (source, size and representativeness); how pollsters define a “likely voter”; how we determine if someone really is a Democrat, Republican or Independent; what “swing voters” are; how and why pollsters weight their samples and how that impacts their analysis; who the pollsters are and why they’re conducting polls; and more.

We won’t “un-skew” the polls for you. We won’t provide the biased political analysis of ex-campaign staffers. In fact, we won’t engage in any punditry, and we’ll make no predictions. But we will try to show our listeners that all polls are not created equal, and that they’re not mysterious.

Anyway, we’re just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you’d like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!

And, if you’ve got a question about polls, or a poll you’d like us to take a look at, drop us a message in comments, or send me an email at [email protected].