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Do you envision FiveThirtyEight.com as a narrative, as telling a story? If so, what is the story you're trying to tell?
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I see the election as a narrative, I suppose, in the same way I see a baseball season as a narrative, with clues about the ultimate outcome revealed a little bit at a time. In some sense, we're simply trying to tell the story of the 2008 election. But also, a lot of the political commentary out there is present-focused; it will be oriented around what the polls are now, but will probably devote little attention to what they were in the past, and even less to what they will be in the future. So we're trying to provide content that, if you go back and read it two months from now, will seem prescient, predictive, and contextual.
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How did you decide to do your “On the Road” series? What do you hope it adds to FiveThirtyEight.com?
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Like a lot of things at FiveThirtyEight, it just came up organically. My co-writer, Sean [Quinn], was looking for a “beat.” He likes to travel, he likes talking to people, he wanted to do some on-scene reporting in addition to armchair analysis. He pretty much just signed himself up for the task. What we want to provide is proprietary content, stuff that you can't get anywhere else. Crunching numbers is one way to do that, but so is getting out and reporting from the scene.
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Do you consciously switch voices when writing about different subjects? Do you write differently about presidential candidates than you do burritos?
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I basically proceed from the assumption that I'm writing for a group of friends. It is also a style that I hope matches the way that people consume content on the Internet, which is fairly non-linear. Tangents and detours can work well; the inverted pyramid does not. If I'm writing for a newspaper or a magazine, I may change things up.
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You said in an interview that "statistics are meaningless without context.” How do you go from interpreting baseball stats to interpreting political stats?
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I'm used to reading newspaper accounts involving statistical information with a critical eye. As a politics “fan,” I was seeing lots of bad information reported about polling data. To take a simple example, people were paying much too much attention late last year to the Clinton-Obama national polls that had Hillary 20 or 30 points ahead, when a quick glimpse into the history of these things will tell you that those polls are all but meaningless until Iowa and New Hampshire vote.
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With so much polling history and expertise out there, why has FiveThirtyEight.com made such a dent?
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Precisely because there is so much polling data, we've found a niche. Before, polling was fairly sparse, especially at the state level, and the principal problem was compiling it in a user-friendly way; this is what RealClearPolitics did, for example. But now there is an abundance of polling data, with at least a dozen or so major polling firms active, and so there's not so much value in simply collecting the data. Instead, the value is in sorting through it for you, distinguishing the good polls from the bad and telling you what it all means.
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You have an economics degree. Is the political blog a labor of love, or does it make money?
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If we had an election every year, I'd make pretty decent money from it. Unfortunately, we don't.
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Once all the dust settles and the voting patterns have been interpreted, what will happen to FiveThirtyEight.com?
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I think we'll probably go in two directions: (i) reporting on the activities of the Congress -- there is lots of data to be interpreted there too, and (ii) some “pop economics” blogging, sort of like what you see at the Freakonomics blog.
But I have a ticket to Vegas booked for the Friday after the election, so I'm looking forward to the workload being a little lighter.
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