Segmentations powering digital ad targeting: Targeting advertising on the basis of individual-level segmentations is not a new idea: other organizations have collected custom survey data – time- and cost-intensive, to create static segmentation of persuadables, as a one-size-fits-all solution for digital targeting of the entire campaign. PredictWise offers a radically different approach. We have created Read more

Just this weekend the mainstream media highlighted three ways that its unwritten rules actually encourages extreme and non-normative political behavior. 1) If the mainstream media sees details of a policy, it will tear it apart. But, if it does not see details of a policy, it will take its supporter's word for what it does, Read more

Note: this post is a work in progress. I may update from time to time as I try to formulate my thoughts. Any budding political theorist want to work on an academic version of this post, drop me an email … There are two ways to gain legitimacy as news organization covering US politics (1) Read more

This is an update to a piece I wrote in early 2018. Republicans, media, and sadly Democrats all seem to believe that Republicans are into the Constitution. But, they are not: Republicans hate the Constitution. Here is the full text of the Constitution. You should read it, it is not that long. In this post Read more

President Trump is compromised to Russia. Russia knows a lot of secrets about both his business and political dealings which, if revealed by Russia, would/should cost Trump (and his family) politically, financially, and possibly criminally. Here is the briefest, Twitter-friendly overview: Business. This is just what we know: what is really scary is what we do Read more

Antisemites think they have Jewish-Americans in a tight spot. When a Jewish American says something about opposing an ethno-nationalist state in America, they retort: what about Israel! They have an ethno-nationalist government! Do you think they should have open-borders?!? Here is the problem: 1) As Americans, Jewish-Americans are under no obligation to have an opinion Read more

  PredictWise Calibrated Polling explained  Late in the cycle, we introduced a new method we dubbed PredictWise Calibrated Polling. As a brief reminder, this is Calibrated Polling: As we have maintained through the cycle, estimating who people will vote for, conditional on them turning out, was easier than estimating the composition of the turnout composition of the Read more

I (i.e., David Rothschild) live in constant regret for spending way too much time in 2016 worrying about who was going to win, and way too little about what information that I could produce that would actually be useful for a well functioning democracy. That is why for 2018, I (along with my partner Tobias Read more

  Three late breaking polls We have launched three late-breaking polls into interesting and critical races, Nevada Senate, Texas Senate and CA-22 – all polls make use of our newly developed method, Calibrated Polling, making use of live-updating early voting data to calibrate our expectations of the turnout space. Let's start with the letter: We Read more

We spent the last few cycles doing academic research on politics, pushing the boundaries of both methods (data collection, analytics, and consumption) and domain understanding (mapping public opinion, effect of advertising, and news). And some of this work has had an impact on how actual practitioners create and use data around politics. But, we missed Read more