You may have heard there are some important elections coming up in the United States — ones that might have an impact on how some minor governance issues we’ve been having could play out.
The return of big elections means the return of large-scale election polling, and if you were alive in 2016, you may recall that that doesn’t always go well. …
Rather than the traditional model — a poll is conducted, analysis is done, results are reported — the Times will be showing the results of its polls in real time, phone call by phone call. …
Personally, I find this stuff fascinating, I don’t put any particular emotional weight on a 1-point lead in one direction or another, and I applaud the Times for putting this much work into exposing the inner workings of what typically gets reduced to a plus sign and a positive integer.
But I do wonder if the laudable “transparency” at work here will have any of the intended impact. CONT.
Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab