| The pundits, the polls, the Needle — they all failed you in 2016. No one gave Donald Trump enough of a chance, and the world was left slack-jawed when he won the presidency. On Monday, the Democratic presidential nomination process will begin with the Iowa caucuses, and, let’s face it, it doesn’t really look like the media-industrial complex has learned any lessons.
But we have. I’m OZY’s politics editor — I live in North Carolina, nowhere close to the Beltway — and we’ve been continually reinventing political coverage in the Trump era.
In 2017, our indefatigable roving reporter Nick Fouriezos took you to all 50 states to show you what binds us together as a nation, rather than the usual quotes from voters in swing state diners. We’ve brought you clear-eyed, multipartisan coverage of Trump since day one. And we’ve gotten smarter about predictions.
We first got together with the data and technology firm 0ptimus in 2018 to build a better prediction model for the midterms. And we nailed it: One week out from the midterms, we correctly called the number of House seats each party would win.
Primaries are far more dynamic and harder to predict, but we’re not letting that stop us. We’re proud to partner with 0ptimus and its sister election results company, Decision Desk HQ, to produce The Forecast. This isn’t just another poll; it’s a sophisticated prediction engine that pulls in polls, demographic data, even media coverage and simulates the race 10,000 times. At this moment, we show Joe Biden as the national front-runner by a wide margin. But we’re also seeing this year as the best chance in a generation for a floor fight at the July Democratic National Convention.
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| Don’t trust any numbers? I get it. You were burned before. We come at this challenge humbly, and these figures will shift as the race carries on. Plus, this data-driven coverage is only part of what we’re doing to bring you the full story from the 2020 campaign trail, from how candidates and their teams are mobilizing voters to how tech is changing the game. But the No. 1 question everyone has is: Who’s going to win? And we aim to tell you first. Click the button below to follow The Forecast and learn more about its methodology. |
