Hey everyone, remember how polling sucks and you can’t trust it anymore because no one answers polls these days and you have a plethora of sketchy outfits spitting out garbage numbers?
Back in late 2012, Dr. Drew Linzer—one of the top political statisticians in the country—and I chatted about the state of polling. …
We hated the idea of snapshot polls, the traditional scattered 600-respondent moment in time. Sure, that might produce good numbers at that instant, but there was little way to see what moved opinions, and who specifically (demographically) was changing. And these surveys always missed any movement between polls. We wanted something that tracked results EVERY SINGLE DAY. Crazy, huh? It was like science fiction, except for politics.
And then we wanted something that would ditch the telephone, because no one uses those things to talk to strangers anymore. (Or, really, to talk.) So the internet it was. And we wanted a way to visualize the data in a better way than the crappy results table. And we wanted daily results down to the state level.
And guess what? WE DID IT. We built a polling and data operation that completely re-imagines what polling is. And believe it or not, that’s not exaggeration or hyperbole. CONT.
Markos Moulitsas