How We Cover Elections: Live Polling

Author: Melina Delkic / Source: New York Times

In an effort to shed more light on how we work, The Times is running a series of short posts explaining some of our journalistic practices. Read more of this series here.

For the 2018 midterm elections, The Upshot partnered with Siena College to conduct polls in key districts and publish the results in real time (a first for any news organization).

Siena has worked with The Times on other polling projects, including a handful of races in the 2016 election season.

For this project, Siena employed four other call centers in the United States and Canada to call more than 2.6 million people.

Back at The Times, a large team of journalists in graphics, digital design and interactive news worked together to present the results in a way that was clear and engaging.

Below, Amanda Cox, the editor of The Upshot, and Nate Cohn, an Upshot domestic correspondent, answer questions about the project. Their answers have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How did The Upshot come up with this idea?

NATE COHN Amanda wanted to know whether it was possible to do polling live, in real time. At first I thought it was totally crazy, on a number of levels.

I remembered that when we were doing polling with Siena in 2016 they had given me access to this very simple interface that lets you see how many people have been called. It was actually a really educational experience for me. I know things like the margin of error as abstract concepts, but when you look at a poll that has 120 people in it and it says something totally different than what you expect, you freak out a little bit.

How did you decide to cap the completed responses at 500?

COHN There are diminishing returns to polling in general.

If you had a curve of what the margin of error looks like, at 100 respondents it’s 10, at 500 respondents it’s like four and a half, at 1,000 respondents you’re at like three. So you get most of your gain in the first 500 respondents and then you have pretty limited returns after that. That’s true for everything.

How do you know if polling works? If a candidate wins?

COX I think it’s…

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