VP at NRG | Public opinion researcher | Former @washingtonpost political data journalist | Dad, people person, math person!
- Tweets 19,324
- Following 809
- Followers 16,618
- Likes 11,156
David Byler retweeted
Polling is like democracy, it’s the worst one except for all the other ones
Polling always survives this stuff bc it's unique
There is no other reliable way to
- ask an arbitrary question
- of giant, complicated population
- get a representative answer
- relatively fast, any time
Survey data isn't perfect. But, for a lot of purposes, it's the only game in town!
3
18
4,627
Polling always survives this stuff bc it's unique
There is no other reliable way to
- ask an arbitrary question
- of giant, complicated population
- get a representative answer
- relatively fast, any time
Survey data isn't perfect. But, for a lot of purposes, it's the only game in town!
There are way too many otherwise knowledgeable people on this site asking questions like "how does polling recover".
Pollsters didn't do anything wrong! A bunch of people did fraud and got caught by pollsters!
2
11
73
14,841
if you built up any sort of a public profile prior to 2025 -> that might end up being a really helpful "I truly do know things / am not a fraud" flag for a while
1
1
18
1,385
re wedegewood -- more vetting is a good idea and my best bet is that it'll help! but it'll be really really hard to stamp out frauds/fakes in so many areas, given no guardrails social media + AI letting anyone just spin up things
1
2
2
2,367
as someone who has spent *many* hours wrangling polls off the pages of RCP (while there and after!) this button makes me so happy 🥲
This is super-exciting. If you go to the RCP website, you'll see the "RCP + AI" button. Signing up (which you should do with whatever email you use for AI) will send you to instructions on how to add a connector that you can then use for research into RCP's poll database.
1
8
2,395
even if you believe the writer came by that AI-ified language honestly -- why would you risk getting your publication into the pangram->somebody tweets it->virality trap?
1
6
2,724
newspaper editors, you know that i love you
how are you not running *everything* through pangram??
3
39
33,706
it has always been interesting to me how much of political media debate is truly new vs how much is repeat repeat repeat
1
5
857
a bot that quote tweets every poll and says "ha like I'd trust them after [[insert the pollster's worst miss in last three cycles]]"
6
1,546
a bot that quote tweets every poll and says "wow some suspect crosstabs here, i don't know..."
1
6
1,237
David Byler retweeted
Hey--I started a new RCP Substack. It's called "Poll Vault." It's where all of my RCP analysis will be from here on out. Publishing close to daily between now and election night. Be sure and check it out (and RT to help spread the word)!
pollvault.substack.com/p/wel…
11
47
164
36,033
In every history of TV, the roughly fourth sentence is about how people initially said "This is gonna beam Harvard lectures into everyone's houses!!"
It's okay that TV is not that! I kinda like it the way it is. But yeah maybe not everyone will use AI for really tough math
2
10
1,779
trying to have a healthy relationship with social media prior to the AI era was probably some of the best practice you could get, at the time, for this period
1
680
the people who say they hear positive AI news are talking about the "the 10 way this made my life easier" stories/posts and not like drug discovery
this is pre-latest-doom-cycle, but still gets the basic dynamic -- everyone hears the doom, users get practical help and those are the news streams
1
661
I'm supposed to put these links in replies? so they don't get buried? anyways, here! substack.com/home/post/p-218…
354