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

Salvanto, Anthony

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1501174835 ISBN 13 : 9781501174834

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 2018

A propos du livre

Extrait :

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, Election Day, Midtown Manhattan

My Election Day began well away from the Broadcast Center and the Decision Desk. Fifteen hours before I made that call for Trump, long before the studio heated up and we started the broadcast, I’d gotten to see an early indicator of what might happen. Just after noon I’d gone into the TV networks’ Quarantine room, at an undisclosed location in Manhattan—essentially a borrowed, nondescript office space with no windows—where a handful of representatives from each of the participating networks can go to privately see early exit poll data while voting is still going on, hours before it will be made public.

The exit polls are the first way we get a look at what’s unfolding on Election Day. Thousands of interviewers had fanned out across the country from the opening of voting places that morning, some in place by 6 a.m., heading out on behalf of the TV networks to thousands of precincts. They were handing out questionnaires to voters leaving those polling places: single sheets of paper with large-type font, our TV logos printed across the top along with “CONFIDENTIAL” in capital letters, and a handful of questions arrayed below like “In today’s election for President did you just vote for:” then checkboxes along with the candidates’ names, and “When did you finally decide for whom to vote?” “What was most important in your decision?” and all ending with boldfaced instructions to fold the paper and drop it in a box. When all was said and done they’d collect more than 100,000 of these questionnaires.

At this point in the afternoon, those interviews with voters had just begun. The interviewers transmitted the first set of the morning’s initial data from the interviews, then went back and kept interviewing. My counterparts at the other networks and I all want to see those first reports to get a jump on preparing stories, but because they’re so preliminary, and because people are still voting across the country, we need to make it as private as possible. So it’s only piped into the Quarantine room (dubbed the “Q-room” for short) where there are no Internet ports, no Wi-Fi, and as you enter you turn in all your electronics to a guard at the door, and agree that you can’t leave until 5 p.m. You even get escorted to the bathroom down the hall, complete with our it-doesn’t-get-old joke that someone who wanted to leak the numbers might hide a cell phone behind the toilet, like Michael Corleone with the gun in The Godfather.

Sitting in the Quarantine room, in my read of the morning’s data, the presidential contest was effectively even. That first round of data suggested Clinton was up, but only narrowly at best, and there was plenty of reason to think the trend was moving toward Trump as the voting went on that afternoon. The question was whether it would keep moving, in enough places, and I suspected it could. Through the afternoon those exit polls are incomplete. Millions of people still had yet to cast ballots and the voting was still open everywhere. The trick for us is to figure out who’s still left out there to vote, who it is we’re not seeing yet among our interviews; which kinds of voters might show up later that night, or who might have even just skipped taking the poll altogether.

I ran some comparisons against the precincts, and noticed people who might still vote were older, whiter, and working-class: just the kind of voters Trump was going after.

The first task in calling races is knowing the difference between the seen and the unseen. If what we’re looking at any moment—in this case, those first exit polls—could be different from the rest of them, we wait. We don’t know the whole story yet.

I left the Quarantine room after 5 p.m. and made my way across town to the Broadcast Center. When I got there at 5:30 all the producers and anchors had gathered in the conference room for a quick briefing as we prepared to go on the air live. “This,” I told everyone, “is a contested race.” And I told them to get set for a very late night.

That much, at least, I was sure about.
7:30 p.m., CBS Decision Desk, Studio 57

The show is on the air now. The big U.S. map waits to be filled in, state by state, with red and blue for the winners as we call them.

When I was a kid I remember staying up late in front of the TV on Election Nights like this, but I didn’t watch for the politics, at least not at first. I was initially drawn in because I liked sports, and to me all this was being presented in the same sort of way as a big game. They showed stats and numbers on the screen, that U.S. map like a scoreboard; there were winners and losers, and it all looked like the Super Bowl of Serious Things. I remember thinking it was cool that it all happened despite its enormous, national scope—in fact, it was amazing because of its scope.

As it turned out, I was wrong about Election Night being like sports.

A game unfolds play by play, and events and scores come sequentially until time’s up. But tune in on Election Night and you’re watching the results from events that are over. When we talk about a state, the polls have closed there, all the ballots are sitting in bins or a counting machine and so the result—the voters’ choice—is final. It’s just that nobody knows what it is yet.

It’ll emerge as a mosaic of reports that fill in across the country slowly and randomly, never the same way every year. Voting in the United States is run at the local and state level, and everyone’s little portion of those 130 million votes is, by and large, counted somewhere close to you, with each town or county or state going at its own pace. Knowing that’s going to happen means we try to get a sense of the whole picture from those tiny pieces as they pop up one by one. We look for patterns, commonalities in what’s emerging. We’re not predicting what will be, we’re revealing a story about what is. And my job now, on these nights, is to assemble that picture as fast as I can and relay it to you. That’s part of the tradition we carry, too.

And because there’s a kid out there somewhere whose parents are telling him to go to bed.

· · ·

The voting closes in North Carolina, a battleground both campaigns are contesting hard, but exactly what’s happening there is uncertain. I look at the statistical models on our screens and they show Clinton is up as the first reports arrive, with a sizable edge, but one we don’t suspect will hold up. These first tallies we’re seeing are from absentee ballots, which were mailed in and dropped off days or weeks ago. They’ve probably been sitting around, queued up first for the tabulating machines at county offices. If they’re first to get counted, they’ll be first to get reported now. From the television screens around the studio, we overhear our reporters at campaign headquarters say the Clinton campaign is confident about them because absentee voters tend to vote more Democratic, are a little younger, but working jobs with shifts and less flexible hours. I’d heard people describing Clinton as having “votes already in the bank” heading into tonight because of that. Meanwhile, though, the exit poll interviews from this afternoon tell us Trump did better with the voters who’d shown up to cast ballots today, and when their votes get counted, we figure Trump could make that Clinton edge shrink, or even disappear. It’s that race caller’s—and pollster’s—rule again: if what you’re looking at right now could be different from everything else, be careful.

Sure enough, within the hour, our models show Clinton’s lead down to two points and shrinking, her “votes in the bank” being quickly devalued as Trump starts to overtake her. Clinton would ultimately lose the state, her edge in advance votes not enough to offset Trump’s turnout surge on Election Day. In the counties where Trump was doing best, turnout was running almost even with what we’d expected, and sometimes higher. In the ones Clinton was carrying, turnout was just a shade under expectations. That, it turned out, was another sign, the start of a pattern we’d need to remember later.
7:58 p.m.

The broadcast gets set to return from a commercial break and the control room asks me for the “top of the hour” rundown: how we’ll characterize the races in states where voting closes in two minutes, at eight o’clock.

Nanc...

Revue de presse :

“At CBS News we all knew Anthony Salvanto was the best of the best in polling, but in this book we discover he’s also a great storyteller. Salvanto mixes election night dramas with candid insight into the strengths and weakness of polling and the growing influence that public opinion sampling plays on everything from the products we buy to the candidates we choose for public office. An excellent read for politicians, journalists and voters." —Bob Schieffer, CBS News                                    

"A revealing look at the numbers, how they're derived and interpreted, and how they sometimes fail us. Timely reading for the coming midterm elections." —Kirkus Reviews

“Anthony Salvanto's Where Did You Get This Number? is a witty, approachable, relevant and fun read...Whether you are a political junkie, or someone who uses market research to better understand your customer, or simply want to better understand how Trump beat Clinton, it is must reading. After doing research and surveys for hundreds of clients around the world, I wish all of them had read this book to understand how to turn data into insight and actionable intelligence. My favorite parts include his anecdotes about tasting his grandmother's spaghetti sauce to explain to non-statisticians how you can understand the entire public from just talking to some of them, and how picking the right movie to see with your diverse family is why all averages and percentages are not created equal. The book is a great resource to not only understand surveys and polls, but more importantly, to better understand other people...a real page-turner that's hard to put down.”  —David B. Rockland, Ph.D., retired Chairman and CEO, Ketchum Global Research & Analytics

“My admired friend Anthony Salvanto has written a good book about polling and you had better read it if you want to understand how professionals go about getting the right readings as they take the temperature of our country.”  —Peggy Noonan, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, The Wall Street Journal

“In his new book Where Did You Get This Number?, Salvanto begins on election night, the events of which surprised him less than they did most Americans. He proceeds, in digestible and timely fashion, to demystify the world of polling and pollsters.” —The Guardian

“Where Did You Get This Number?” is a useful and easy-to-read primer on the basics of modern polling. —The Washington Post

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1501174835
• ISBN 13: 9781501174834
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 256