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Polling
The first workshop in the Transparency Series takes you through techniques for looking at one or more polls over time. Your instructor is Harry Enten, a senior political analyst at FiveThirtyEight. He will be assisted by his colleague Neil Paine, another talented data journalist and sportswriter. The day-long workshop will present tools and strategies for working with polls — starting at the very beginning with simple random samples, and leading to the detailed models that are employed today. All the while, we will emphasize how to find and tell interesting, novel stories with polls. No prior experience in statistics or data analysis is needed.
Bios: Harry Enten is a senior political analyst and writer for FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism website. He studies polling and demographic trends to try and tell readers who and why candidates and parties win and lose elections. Previously, he was a writer with The Guardian in New York. Harry graduated from Dartmouth College. At Dartmouth, he started his own blog Margin of Error, where he blogged about political statistics. Neil Paine is a senior sportswriter at FiveThirtyEight, with writing on all of the major American sports. Before joining FiveThirtyEight, Neil was a Basketball Analytics Consultant for the Atlanta Hawks and also worked for Sports Reference LLC. Neil is a graduate of Georgia Tech.
Join us in at Reuters for a discussion on polling and its importance in the presidential race. As the 2016 election nears, we pore over opinion polls looking for subtle (or not so subtle) clues about how things will fare on November 8. We say Clinton is ahead because most of the polls have her ahead, yet there are polls that have Trump ahead. Which polls are right? Or reliable? To journalists, of course, the polls themselves aren't the story, they help tell us a story. The narrative power of polls extends far beyond a single number on a given day. Taken collectively and in combination with other data, we can tell deep stories about the nature of our public’s opinions.