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🗳️ this expert leads the team that projects elections at CNN
“CNN projects Joseph R. Biden Jr. is elected the 46th president of the United States.”
A lot of work went into those words before they were spoken by Wolf Blitzer on November 7, 2020.
The act of calling an election at CNN is marshalled by a team of statisticians and political experts. Jennifer Agiesta, the director of polling and election analytics, leads that team.
“In some races, our projections really just come down to basic arithmetic,” Agiesta told Inside CNN. “The question of ‘Are there enough votes left for candidate B to catch candidate A?’ is a thing that we spend a lot of time trying to answer. And that’s just subtraction!”
Other times, it requires the full force of her team to discern the outcome of a race.
“You have this full range of what the decision desk does — of using super-sophisticated modeling and understanding and political knowledge, and also just is A bigger than B,” said Agiesta.
Agiesta, seen here on Nov. 7, 2020, working to call the presidential race.
Election prep at CNN starts well before election night, with data rehearsals beginning by late summer for major elections.
“The decision team is … practicing trying to make projections, seeing how some different scenarios might play out, anticipating what we think the night will look like,” said Agiesta.
Agiesta says getting election results is a time-intensive and expensive process. For most major elections, including last night’s, she and her team work with the National Election Pool — a consortium of CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS — to collect results.
“Every single county in the US has their own way of collecting votes and counting them,” Agiesta said. “There is no central repository for election results. If there were, that would make life much, much easier.”
Once those results start coming in, Agiesta and her team get to work on projecting a winner.
“We make a projection when we have statistical confidence that the numbers are pointing to a correct outcome. That’s based on a number of different models and based on historical data that we’re looking at in particular places,” said Agiesta. “I then have to convince our DC bureau chief, Sam Feist, that he should be confident in that projection as well. And when Sam is confident and I am confident, and the decision team is confident, then we will pass that through. Sam is the one who talks to everyone in the control room and coordinates the words coming out of Wolf’s [or Jake Tapper’s] mouth, putting the whole wheels in motion of CNN’s operation.”
In addition to leading CNN’s decision team, Agiesta heads up polling at CNN. She says she knew she wanted to make news polling the centerpiece of her career in the early 2000s. She was 24 at the time, working as the Voter News Service’s manager of surveys. It came to her like an epiphany while acting as notetaker for a group of pollsters.
“I was sitting in a room with a pollster from ABC, a pollster from CBS, a pollster from Fox and a pollster from CNN, listening to them all collectively write poll questions,” recalled Agiesta. “It was just this wonderful experience to see how they all do their jobs and the different approaches they had and I was like, ‘I want to be that when I grow up.’ That kind of set me off on a path.”
With 2021 voting now over, Agiesta and her team have their sights set on 2022, which may prove more difficult to call, due to redistricting in the wake of the 2020 census. All 435 seats in the US House of Representatives and 34 in the US Senate will be up for reelection next year.
“All of the House districts are going to be new and different, so learning all of those new districts takes a lot of time,” said Agiesta.
Her team is already hard at work, gathering data on how those new district lines could affect election results.
Got questions about the upcoming midterm elections or other pressing issues facing Americans today? Tomorrow at 9 a.m. ET, join CNN’s Anderson Cooper and guests including Jimmy Kimmel, Dr. Vivek Murthy and Glenn Close at the annual Citizen by CNN virtual conference. You can submit live questions and engage with the speakers during the event. Register here to join the conversation.
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– Written and edited by Beryl Adcock, Tricia Escobedo, Melissa Mahtani and Jessica Sooknanan
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