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Live From the Battleground Districts: Polls of the Key Races for House Control

In a first, the Upshot and Siena College will publish polling results in real time.

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Go here for our latest polling results.


Over the next two months, The New York Times will talk to more voters than ever before. It starts tonight, when we’ll publish the first New York Times Upshot/Siena College polls of the most competitive battlegrounds in the fight for Congress.

But there’s a twist. None of these polls are finished. One hasn’t even begun.

We’re doing it live.

For the first time, we’ll publish our poll results and display them in real time, from start to finish, respondent by respondent. No media organization has ever tried something like this, and we hope to set a new standard of transparency. You’ll see the poll results at the same time we do. You’ll see our exact assumptions about who will turn out, where we’re calling and whether someone is picking up. You’ll see what the results might have been had we made different choices.

By the time we finish on Nov. 4, two days before the election, we expect to have conducted nearly 100 live polls of the races most likely to decide control of Congress. They include those in the once reliably Republican Orange County, Calif., and the Bluegrass region of central Kentucky, two districts where we begin tonight.

Besides asking which candidate they prefer, we’ll ask voters about their political views, including what they think of President Trump, the Mueller investigation and pivotal issues like immigration and taxes. But maximizing the opportunity to survey this year’s far-reaching and diverse battleground districts, we’re also asking questions that get at culture and life there, like whether voters know someone affected by the opioid crisis or whether they feel like a stranger in their own country.

Night after night, we’ll give readers an engaging way to learn about candidates and districts. It will be a window into the rest of our coverage from dozens of reporters covering races across the country.

In the process, we hope to give you a sense of what polling is really about: talking to real people, one by one, in every corner of a district.

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A map of where we’ve called voters so far in California’s 48th District.

In the past, The Upshot focused on synthesizing the flood of seemingly contradictory pre-election polls into a single probability of victory. This time, we want to demystify polling.

We expect to call at least one million Americans over the next two months, but as with most polls, the vast majority of people will decline to take the surveys. Most won’t pick up the phone at all. We’ll show you what pollsters do to try to overcome problems like these and the effects of what they do.

As the data arrives in real time, you’ll learn what the so-called margin of error means in a more visceral way than “+/- 4%” can ever convey. And yet, despite it all, we think you’ll come away impressed by how often the polls still seem to end up near the truth.

Polling has limits, of course. We know many felt misled by the polls in 2016, which showed Hillary Clinton with a modest lead in the critical battleground states. But they remain the best way to measure attitudes across an extremely diverse country, even if they will never be perfectly accurate tools for predicting an election. We might not have even known the election would be close if we were left to talk to our often like-minded friends, neighbors and relatives, whether on the left or the right.

We also think this is going to be fun, and we think that’s a good thing.

Many of our readers are deeply interested in who will win control of Congress, but they don’t know much about the candidates and districts that will determine the outcome. We think live polling can help close the gap between interest in the midterms and knowledge about it, by giving people a reason to learn more about the candidates and explore the rest of The Times’s coverage.

In a way, live polling could be a little like the Olympics. It happens every two years. You may not know half the events, and you certainly don’t know half the competitors. But maybe you care about how well your country fares, and you come away knowing a lot more about curling than you ever expected to, and you’ve learned names like Michael Phelps, Gabby Douglas or Lindsey Vonn, maybe even for the rest of your life.

We can’t predict whether the breakout star of this election will be Gina Ortiz Jones, Young Kim, Elissa Slotkin or someone else. But we think live polling could do the same thing in the race for Congress that the Olympics does for obscure sports and athletes, getting voters engaged in particular races, excited about the candidates, and immersed in our coverage.

Tonight, we begin with four races that highlight the diversity of the battlegrounds and the deep divisions in the country.

You may already have heard of two of them. On Tuesday we started polling in California’s 48th, an Orange County district where the Republican incumbent, Dana Rohrabacher, faces a tough re-election and accusations that he has uncomfortably close ties to Russia. Tonight, we start polling in Kentucky’s Sixth, where the Democratic challenger, Amy McGrath, has put a conservative district into play after raising millions on the strength of a biographical advertisement highlighting her service as the first female Marine to pilot an F/A-18 in combat. Private polls show a close race between Ms. McGrath and the incumbent, Andy Barr, in a conservative district.

We’re also polling two races that have received less attention: Illinois’s Sixth and 12th. They could be among the most competitive races in the country, and they exemplify two kinds of contests that will decide control of the House: a mostly white working-class district where a strong Democratic recruit will try to lure back voters who flipped from Barack Obama to Donald J. Trump; and an affluent, well-educated, traditionally Republican district where a longtime incumbent faces a political newcomer, and deep opposition to the president.

Tonight, we’ll report findings from the last two days of interviews with voters in California’s 48th and Illinois’s Sixth and 12th. And we’ll begin reporting our first findings from Kentucky’s Sixth. You can follow the live polling here, and you can learn more about the choices we made in designing the poll here.

Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot. He covers elections, polling and demographics. Before joining The Times in 2013, he worked as a staff writer for The New Republic. More about Nate Cohn

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