A note about a thing you don’t need to worry about and a technology you don’t need to use. — I recently stumbled upon an article in Axios about how the $15 minimum wage is unpopular with swing voters. …

Chuck Schumer has imaginary friends — This pictured text is from a profile from 2007 in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg. Let’s just quote the thing: Schumer says that he is accompanied everywhere he goes by two imaginary middle-class friends, who advise him on all manner of middle-class concerns. Their names, until recently, were…

The first in a limited series about what brand & communications strategists should do *before* they write a creative brief — Author’s note: Yesterday I wrote a series of tweets about this, but thought it might be useful to assemble them in one short article, and address some of the feedback I got, as well. Thanks to all who replied. A lot of emphasis is placed on the creative brief. The…

Measuring the effectiveness of protest movements — In the last 10 years, we’ve seen four significant protest movements emerge. In that time period, the first was the Tax Day Protests that birthed the Tea Party movement; the second was Occupy Wall Street in the aftermath of the financial crisis; the third was Black Lives Matter in the…

At a recent gathering of AAPOR (American Association of Public Opinion Researchers), researchers from Harvard, Tufts and U. Mass-Amherst presented their paper, published in January, titled “The Elusive Likely Voter: Improving Electoral Predictions with More Informed Vote Propensity Models” (link). You’re probably familiar with the phrase “likely voters”. Most political…