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Wake Up To Politics - February 24, 2020

Wake Up To Politics Podcast: Episode #3

New polls are being released almost every day telling us the state of the 2020 elections. But how trustworthy are they? How did political polling become so ubiquitous. . . and where is the industry going in the future?

All of the questions (and more!) are answered in the latest episode of the Wake Up To Politics Podcast. The episode features my interviews with two of the top polling analysts in the country — NBC News national political correspondent Steve Kornacki and FiveThirtyEight reporter Nathaniel Rakich — discussing everything you need to know to understand new polls as they come out.

I think there's a lot of valuable information in the podcast, and I'm really excited to share it. You can listen now at stlpr.org/wakeup and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Stitcher! If you enjoy the Wake Up To Politics newsletter, I'm confident you will appreciate the podcast as well. As always, I'd love to hear any feedback you have: just reply to this email or leave a review on the podcast platform of your choice.

Some further reading on political polling:

  • The last segment of this week's episode focuses on the future of polling: online surveys. While Steve and Nathaniel told me that online polling is improving, there is still some ways to go: here is a study released by Pew Research Center this week that unearths some of the remaining risks of online opt-in polls.
  • We talked with Nathaniel about some tips for understanding polls: you can read more from him in that topic, in his post on "how to read 2020 polls like a FiveThirtyEighter" last year.
  • The polling episode also discusses the track record of political polling in 2016 and how firms are making changes headed into 2020. Another one of my go-to sources on polling, Ariel Edwards-Levy, dug into the shifts being undergone in the polling industry in a great piece for HuffPost.
  • Finally, if you want to hear straight from a pollster, you can also revisit my interview with Ann Selzer, the widely-respected "queen of Iowa polling," from a special edition of Wake Up To Politics in January.