![]() ![]() Most of them could have been used to correctly predict who would get second and third place too, Finnigan said as exit polls started to come in. With limited resources, Finnigan had to make sure that he placed his team in bellwether precincts-those that were chosen had been carried by the statewide primary winners in at least 19 of the 20 primaries held in the past 36 years. Making sure that they would be able to match the effectiveness of an AP operation with far more money and more people on the ground. New Hampshire’s small size made this an ideal state for the Decision Desk to try their hand at exit polling-and making calls independent of data from the AP.įinnigan and his team started planning "Project X" months ago. ![]() "If they get something wrong, you have Florida 2000." "If the Decision Desk gets something wrong, the worst thing is that I’ll get a lot of hate mail and angry tweets," Finnigan says. In that sense Finnigan and fellow Ace of Spades bloggers Joel Fagin and John Ekdahl, co-creators of the Decision Desk, see the project as providing a service not just to voters and news junkies, but to the AP and other established media organizations as well. But for that 0.1 percent, where it can really, really matter, isn’t it worth it to provide the public with another set of eyes?" And they should know what is reported is accurate. "The American people deserve to know who won the political contests they engaged in, that night, as often as possible. Every major outlet just uses the same damn information." They provide a service, they have a good record at it, they've done it for years," Finnigan says. As he discusses the Decision Desk’s mission, he constantly comes back to the Associated Press. The issue is not the quality of the information that news organizations provide, but simply that there is so little of it. ![]() And he has dramatically expanded the operation.įinnigan has no interest in the media-bashing that often consumes conservative lamentations about the state of the political press. He has since dropped the reference to the site, dubbing it Decision Desk HQ and creating an email newsletter and stand-alone website devoted to its election night data-mining. Originally an outgrowth of Ace of Spades HQ, a popular and acerbic blog focused on conservative politics, culture, and military issues, Finnigan’s project was initially branded as the Ace of Spades HQ Decision Desk. The Decision Desk has been around in some form since 2012. If we are going to try something, we are going to give it our fucking all, snow, servers, and doubts be damned." And it was doing this on a shoestring budget: no salary or compensation was offered beyond the satisfaction of having changed how election night news is reported. It was challenging the Associated Press and other established news organizations for primacy in the election returns and prediction market. Now they were on the ground, gathering that data themselves.Īs the dust settled in New Hampshire, it was clear that the Decision Desk was doing something remarkable. They had already made a name for themselves by beating news organizations to major election calls by diving deep into local election data. This was the Decision Desk’s first foray into exit polling, and Finnigan and his team were jubilant about it. They stood outside New Hampshire polling sites surveying voters as they exited. The other two thirds of the volunteers were engaged in something new for the group. About a third of them did what Finnigan’s team has been doing for a few years now: gathering returns from polling locations and plugging them into a constantly updating spreadsheet, which fed results posted online in real time. For the Decision Desk, its volunteers, and its founder-California-based truck dispatcher and Ace of Spades HQ blogger Brandon Finnigan-passion, pride, and sheer nerdiness were the driving factors.īy Tuesday night, the Decision Desk had nearly four dozen volunteers in the field. They all arrived in time to join the Decision Desk HQ, a fledgling political polling and data operation crafted by a trio of conservative bloggers.įor the news business, election predictions are just that: a business. Within two hours, though, all eight were on new flights to Boston and Manchester, N.H. They were flying in from around the country-from Baltimore to Seattle-to stand outside polling places in freezing temperatures and linger in hotel conference rooms watching New Hampshire presidential primary results trickle in. ![]()
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