Cross Tabs
No soft political analysis from ex-campaign staffers. No predictions. No unskewing the polls.
Cross Tabs is a show to help you understand how political polls are designed and conducted so you can make your own judgments about which polls to pay attention to, how to compare them to other polls, and simply, how to understand what a poll is actually telling you … especially in what is sure to be a strange election season.
Hosted by strategist and (qualitative) researcher Farrah Bostic with regular contributions from her more quantie friends, this show will walk through polling methodologies and results, and provide a researcher's context for at least one publicly available poll each week. No need to be a statistician or pollster - we’ll explain everything as we go along.
Latest episodes
Feb 12, 2024 • 1h 2min
2: Weights and Measures
In our second episode of Cross Tabs, Paul Soldera and Farrah Bostic answer listener questions about how questions are formed, why scales work (or don't work) the way they do, what weighting is, why you would want to "oversample" or use quotas in your sample, and what kinds of differences emerge when you're talking to people on the phone, answering a survey online, or letting someone in to check out what's under your sink.Don't forget to hit subscribe in whatever app this is!Here are all the ways to keep in touch:Subscribe to our newsletter on our website, CrossTabsPodcast.comFollow Farrah on instagram and threads at @farrahbosticOr follow Farrah for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/farrahbostic/No punditry. No predictions. Just the polls and how to make sense of them.
Jan 16, 2024 • 1h 1min
1: No Takes Given
In our inaugural episode released on Iowa's GOP Caucus day, January 15, 2024, host Farrah Bostic (In the Demo Podcast, The Difference Engine) and pal Paul Soldera (Equation Research), set the table for what Cross Tabs is all about: demystifying what polls are and how they work. Mentioned links:Jill Lepore's "Politics and the New Machine" [The New Yorker]Jill Lepore's "The Problems Inherent in Political Polling" [The New Yorker]What Was Nate Silver's Data Revolution? [The New Yorker] "Polls' Representative Samples Often Merit Skepticism" [Wall Street Journal] "How Public Polling Has Changed in the 21st Century" [Pew Research Center] All in with Chris Hayes, December 21, 2023 [MSNBC]NY Times/Siena College Poll, December 2023 [New York Times]"From Which River to Which Sea? College Students Don't Know, Yet They Agree With the Slogan" [Wall Street Journal]YouGov Poll Links(December 2023):https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/12/20/edc6d/1https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/12/20/edc6d/3https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/12/20/edc6d/2Suffolk University Iowa Poll (January 2024)"Ann Selzer Is The Best Pollster In Politics" [FiveThirtyEight]AAPOR Analysis of the 2016 Campaign [AAPOR]"Trump lost, but he won millions of new voters. Where did they come from?" [Washington Post]The Focus Group Podcast [The Bulwark]
