Where Did You Get This Number?: A Pollster's Guide to Making Sense of the World - Hardcover

Salvanto, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501174835 ISBN 13: 9781501174834

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

CBS News’ Elections and Surveys Director Anthony Salvanto takes you behind the scenes of polling to show you how to think about who we are and where we’re headed as a nation.

As Elections and Surveys Director for CBS News, it’s Anthony Salvanto’s job to understand you—what you think and how you vote. He’s the person behind so many of the poll numbers you see today, making the winner calls on election nights and surveying thousands of Americans. In Where Did You Get This Number? A Pollster’s Guide to Making Sense of the World, Salvanto takes readers on a fast-paced, eye-opening tour through the world of polling and elections and what they really show about America today, beyond the who's-up-who’s-down headlines and horse races. Salvanto is just the person to bring much-needed clarity in a time when divisions seem to run so deep.

The language of polling may be numbers, but the stories it tells are about people. In this engaging insider’s account, Salvanto demystifies jargon with plain language and answers readers’ biggest questions about polling and pollsters. How can they talk to 1,000 people and know the country? How do they know the winner so fast? How do they decide what questions to ask? Why didn't they call you? Salvanto offers data-driven perspective on how Americans see the biggest issues of our time, from the surprising 2016 election, to the shocks of the financial crisis, the response to terrorism and the backlash against big money. He doesn’t shy away from pointing out what’s worked and what hasn’t. Salvanto takes readers inside the CBS newsroom on Election Night 2016 and makes readers rethink conventional wisdom and punditry just in time for the 2018 midterms. He shows who really decides elections and why you should think about a poll differently from the forecasts popularized by Nate Silver and others.

Where Did You Get This Number? is an essential resource for anyone interested in politics—and how to better measure and understand patterns of human behavior. For any American who wants to get a better read on what America is thinking, this book shows you how to make sense of it all.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anthony Salvanto, PhD, is CBS News Director of Elections and Surveys. He currently conducts all polling across the nation, states, and congressional races, and heads the Decision Desk that projects outcomes on Election Nights. He appears regularly on Face the Nation, the CBS Evening News, CBS This Morning, and more. Where Did You Get This Number? is his first book.

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Where Did You Get This Number?

Chapter One

The Seen and the Unseen

At 2:52 a.m. on Election Night at the CBS News Decision Desk, I reached for the intercom button with my left hand and told the broadcast’s control room we were ready.

What had once seemed unlikely was now certain.

I was staring at big monitors filled with numbers, at vote reports coming in from Pennsylvania: the polls had closed seven hours ago and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were still less than a point apart. We weren’t really sure those reports were finished, but now we knew we’d seen enough of them; enough to know for sure what was happening.

Figuring out just what enough is, that’s always the hard part on nights like this.

With my right hand I pulled up a small menu on the screen and then a little gray box that’s been deliberately tucked away, in a spot where it can only be pushed on purpose. It has the “W” in it—for “Win.”

“We’re calling Pennsylvania for Trump,” I said into the headset. My click signaled graphics to light up the state in red on the big U.S. map, it sent the state’s electoral votes over into the Republican column, and pushed Trump’s count over the 270 he needed—which is why we’d been so focused on Pennsylvania for the last hour. I need to be right on every call, but I really need to be right on the one that decides everything. “. . . and projecting the presidency with it,” I followed. “Donald Trump, elected.”

The name “Decision Desk” is newsroom slang for what’s really a long U-shaped set of tables behind the anchors here in CBS’s Studio 57, the hub of our Election Night coverage. If you watch the show you can see those tables stacked with computers and the monitors that we’re squinting at all night, as data feeds stream in with vote results from every corner of the country. There’s a big lighted sign hanging over it that reads “Decision” and from here my small cadre of pollsters and professors and I call the races for the network: who’s leading, who’s trailing, who wins, and who loses across fifty states, hundreds of contests, 130 million votes. There were times in past years when the Desk was hidden out of sight in a different room with no cameras—let alone any big lighted signs—and known only by its proclamations of who won. But I love that we’re out here in the main studio where the viewers can see and hear from us as the night rolls along. These are, after all, their votes we’re looking at.

In Studio 57 there is no offstage: the anchors sit at a round glass table in the center; there are producers around the perimeter typing and talking softly but urgently; robotic cameras whirling remotely and black-clad cameramen with Steadicams pointing from place to place; giant screens, floor to ceiling, are alight with the red and blue vote map; live streams with remote views of cheering crowds at some campaign headquarters and sunken faces at others; displays flashing Twitter feeds scrolling past too fast to read.

For eight straight hours that had all been a swirl of kinetic energy but now, at this moment, nearly 3 a.m. and the presidency decided, it slows a bit and the focus shifts elsewhere: Donald Trump is at a podium in New York addressing his supporters.

I took off the headset and stepped back from the desk. After we call a presidential race, I always try to take a moment and recognize the history we’ve just seen, whoever wins. On the exposed-brick wall next to us, the set designers had laid out old tchotchkes, campaign memorabilia, photos, all juxtaposed against our technology and those screens, reminders that the Decision Desk has a great history of its own. I have one shot of Walter Cronkite in 1968 in front of a board showing Richard Nixon’s and Hubert Humphrey’s vote counts; right next to my seat is another black-and-white photo of pinstripe-suited CBS staffers in the 1950s frantically tallying votes in chalk on a big blackboard. These are the traditions we follow even as the politics and the technology change through the years. The dress codes change, too, it occurs to me: those guys in the photo are still dutifully wearing their suits even amid the chalk smears, and at this point I’m in rolled-up shirtsleeves, jacket off, tie down. I just pull the tie back up when I go on camera beside that big touchscreen to explain what’s going on—which I’d done more of on this night than any before.

Tomorrow would be busy for me, too. Everyone would be trying to understand how Donald Trump had defied the expectations: the ones set by the pundits, the forecasters, and some—though hardly all—of the polls. We’d just seen some of the answers as all those votes had poured in. At the Decision Desk, our job is to show you what’s happening when you can’t see everything; when you don’t know every vote, or every county, or every person. But the numbers and the winners we light up are just the attention-grabbing parts at the end. The real discoveries come in trying to figure those numbers out in the first place.

This story begins with how we do that on Election Nights, and what this very late, very close one showed us.

Sunday, November 6, two days before Election Day

Two days earlier, on the weekend before Election Day, we’d gathered in the studio to rehearse scenarios that might unfold that Tuesday night, kicking around ideas of what we’d need to see to make a call in every state, and what we’d say on air in each instance. We’d run all the anchors and producers through scenarios for both a Trump win and a Clinton win; what states might flip, what the timing might look like in either case.

In the newsroom someone asked me as we worked through the Trump scenario: “Why does The New York Times say Clinton is going to win?” The Times wasn’t actually declaring her a winner at that point, of course. But the forecasts running on the paper’s website, which were trying to predict the contest in advance, did seem to us to be overconfident in Clinton, offering up assessments of her chances that most people would mistakenly interpret as certainties. On our Face the Nation program that Sunday, we’d released our own final round of pre-election polls from the states of Ohio and Florida showing they were moving in Trump’s direction. The national polls also had him closing the gap. And if all that was moving, other states we hadn’t polled might be changing, as well. It couldn’t be ruled out.

I’d run into our chief White House correspondent, Major Garrett, a few days before that in the Green Room, the waiting area before we went on CBS This Morning. Major had spent the year covering the Trump campaign. I was planning to go on and describe a tough-but-doable Electoral College path for Trump that ran through the states of the Upper Midwest (which later turned out to be the one he took) or maybe Colorado (which he didn’t). I’d been describing Trump as “down, but not out.” I started bouncing that idea off Major, but he beat me to it. “He could win,” he said emphatically, noting the size and enthusiasm of Trump crowds he’d seen in every venue at every hour of the day. I nodded. Neither of us thought that meant Trump would win, but we agreed the possibility was there.

12:00 Noon,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1501174835
• ISBN 13: 9781501174834
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar