Interested in giving a Roper Roundtable? Email Roper Center
Roper Roundtable on April 14 at 2 pm EST
Journalists use public opinion data to ground stories in evidence, elevate public voices, and tell richer, more accurate stories—not just what happened, but how people feel about it—and why that matters.
During this Roper Roundtable, accomplished reporters Philip Bump and Nathaniel Rakich will share their experiences using polling data in journalism, vetting sources, and conducting analysis to make accurate statements about complicated social phenomena. The webinar will include a question-and-answer session to give participants an opportunity to engage directly with the presenters.
This event is co-sponsored by The Journalist's Resource at Harvard Kennedy School and Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics (LAIC) at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy.
Philip Bump is a former columnist for The Washington Post. Prior to that, he led politics coverage for The Atlantic Wire. In the past, he worked as a designer at Adobe Systems. As one of the paper's most read writers, he focused on the data behind polls and political rhetoric. He also wrote a weekly newsletter, "How To Read This Chart." He is currently a columnist for MS NOW and has appeared or been heard on most major media outlets. His book, The Aftermath, looks at the overlap of the end of the baby boom and the upheaval in American politics and the U.S. economy.
Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat's Managing Editor. He was previously a senior editor and senior elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight, where he oversaw editorial operations, managed interactive projects, and wrote data-driven analyses of politics and elections. He has also contributed to Inside Elections, the Almanac of American Politics, ABC News, The New Yorker, POLITICO, The Atlantic, and the Boston Globe. In past lives, he wrote about baseball and worked as an editor for Let's Go Travel Guides. He is a graduate of Harvard University.
Murray Edelman and Joe Lenski, the 2025 winners of the Warren J. Mitofsky Award for Excellence in Public Opinion Research, shared the current methods for exit poll results and projections and how they've evolved since 1967, along with their personal stories and challenges as the people who designed them.
Laron Williams, Frederick A. Middlebush Chair of Political Science at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, discussed the second release of the Most Important Problem Dataset (MIPD), a valuable resource for researchers analyzing public opinion on the nation's most pressing issues.
